The man smiled, but there was no humor in it.

“Why… are… you… here?” he said again. He said it slowly this time, as if talking to a small child, or an imbecile.

Luke looked around at the men. This was group therapy for war veterans.

It was a fair question. Luke didn’t belong here. These guys were wrecked. Physically disabled. Traumatized.

A few of them didn’t seem like they were ever coming back. The guy named Chambers was probably the worst. He had lost an arm and both his legs. His face was disfigured. The left half was covered by bandages, a large metal plate protruding from under there, stabilizing what was left of the facial bones on that side. He had lost his left eye, and they hadn’t replaced it yet. At some point, after they finished rebuilding his orbital socket, they were going to give him a nice new fake eye.

Chambers had been riding in a Humvee that ran over an IED in Iraq. The device was a surprise innovation—a shaped charge that penetrated straight up through the undercarriage of the vehicle, and then straight through Chambers, taking him apart from the bottom up. The military was retrofitting the old Humvees with heavy underside armor, and redesigning the new ones, to guard against these sorts of attacks in the future. But that wasn’t going to help Chambers.

Luke didn’t like to look at Chambers.

“Why are you here?” the leader said yet again.

Luke shrugged. “I don’t know, Riggs. Why are you here?”

“I’m trying to help men get their lives back,” Riggs said. He said it without missing a beat. Either it was a canned answer he kept for when people confronted him, or he actually believed it. “How about you?”

Luke said nothing, but everyone was staring at him now. He rarely said anything in this group. He would just as soon not attend. He didn’t think it was helping him. Truth be told, he thought the whole thing was a waste of time.

“Are you afraid?” Riggs said. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Riggs, if you think that, then you don’t know me very well.”

“Ah,” Riggs said, and raised his meaty hands just a bit. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re a hardcase. We know that already. So do it. Step up. Tell us all about Sergeant First Class Luke Stone of the United States Army Special Forces. Delta, am I right? Neck deep in the shit, right? One of the guys who went on that botched mission to kill the Al Qaeda guy, the guy who supposedly did the USS Sarasota bombing?”

“Riggs, I wouldn’t know anything about any mission like that. A mission like that would be classified information, which would mean that if either of us knew anything about it, we wouldn’t be at liberty…”