This was day thirty-four of what he thought of as the Big Silence. He did not like to use the nickname Doc Holliday hung on it—Days of Darkness. That made him too sad and too stressed.

It had been thirty-four days since Joe Ledger walked away from the slaughter on the small Croatian island. Thirty-four very long days.

His absence—and the events precipitating it—had spread a cloud of gloom over the entire organization. People spoke more quietly, sometimes in actual hushed voices. There was a pervasive sense of sadness. And of dread. Not specifically for the actual life of RTI’s legendary senior field team leader, but because if the war could damage Ledger that badly, then who was really safe? This was an extreme form of post-traumatic stress that now seemed inevitable for all of them. The effect was evident in the lack of laughter in the mess halls, the drop in combat range scores, the overall sense of hesitancy that hadn’t been there before. And it didn’t help any that Top and Bunny were away on some secret mission.

Only Church seemed unmoved, though Bug doubted the boss’s famous calm was genuine. Bug had been with Church longer than anyone in Rogue Team. Only Aunt Sallie knew him better, and she was retired, still going through extensive physical and occupational therapy at an ultra-high-end facility on Corfu, next to where Rudy Sanchez lived with his wife, Circe O’Tree, and their son.

There were plenty of people who loved Joe, too. Maybe not Circe, who still held him—and her father—responsible for the harm that had come to Rudy. Her husband had lost an eye and a knee because of his involvement with the old Department of Military Sciences. Injuries he would not have sustained had he not followed Joe into the group or let himself hook his star to Church’s never-ending war. It was sad and disturbing.

Joe had Junie, who had also been injured badly because of her association with him. An assassin’s bullet had destroyed her uterus during the Code Zero case, and she’d been impaled by flying debris when Rafael Santoro blew up the Ledger farmhouse. She still loved Joe with an intensity that often made Bug want to cry. He’d never been loved that much by a woman. Well, except his mom, but she was another casualty of the war—murdered by Sebastian Gault for the crime of being blood kin to a person working for Church.

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” he murmured.