“All over the news.”

“I try to avoid the news,” she says.

Aaron just shakes his head. “Some days, Rosie, you need to look around and not just at your feet.”

“Aaron?”

“Yes?” he replies, hand still on the door.

“You called me Rosie two years ago. Don’t do it again.”

He pauses, and says, “The senator put pressure on the secretary of defense, the DoD put pressure on the Army, and as you know, crap rolls downhill. We couldn’t expand our drone ops at Nellis. The honorable senator was making too much fuss. And like the Marines, the Army overcame and adapted. Come on in.”

He opens the door and she follows him in, and they’re both standing on a narrow but wide terrace with handrailings, looking down at what seems to be a curved auditorium. There are rows of comfortable-looking chairs and overhead video screens, and Rosaria breathes in deeply as she takes it all in.

This is a control center for drone attacks, and in the video feeds coming in, Rosaria knows that she’s gaining overhead views of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other troubled places.

Aaron whispers, “So here we are.”

The rows of chairs are all filled with men and women, wearing headsets, holding joysticks. Some have bottled water at their elbows. A number of signs hang from the padded, dark ceiling. The near one says, YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU’LL ONLY DIE TIRED.

Rosaria whispers back, “What was Captain Cornwall doing here?”

“One of those touchy-feely programs that some idiot at the Pentagon comes up with when he or she is bored,” Aaron quietly explains. “Bringing in intelligence officers in an exchange program so they can see what their work can lead to in the field.”

“And Captain Cornwall was here?”

“She was.”

“What happened, then? What was the foul-up?”

Aaron seems to grip the railing tighter. “We still off-the-record, Rosaria?”

“At the moment.”

He shuffles over like he doesn’t want to be overheard by anyone in the pit below. “I didn’t see it, but I heard about it later…When the intelligence officers came in, they were paired with an experienced drone driver. Eventually, they would take over the flying if they had the feel for it, which Captain Cornwall did. Then, one day, she and her partner, they were tracking a target in southern Afghanistan.”

“What kind of target?”

Aaron lowers his voice even more, so Rosaria has to lean in to make out the words. “A white SUV, on some desert road north of Khost, with six Taliban soldiers inside, supposedly on their way to attack a camp operated by Doctors Without Borders. So it was a high-value, very significant target. Captain Cornwall and her Air National Guard partner were tracking it with a Predator drone. The word came down from above. Smoke it.”

Then it came to Rosaria, looking down into this cool, comfortable building, with malls and Burger Kings and Walmarts nearby, that the men and women in here were killing targets thousands of miles away, all the while sitting in a comfortable chair with a cold drink at their side.