A Study in Honor

by Claire O'Dell

  Dedication

  To my son, Matt—

  For your poetry and your persistence

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Interstitial

  7

  Interstitial

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Interstitial

  13

  14

  15

  Interstitial

  16

  17

  18

  Interstitial

  19

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for A Study in Honor

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  August 20. Almost home. Well, for some definition of almost and home. No thanks to the U.S. Army or Amtrak. We were already six hours behind schedule when we transferred from the military line in Pittsburgh. No sooner did we board the new train than Amtrak announced its own delay. Something about repairs to the switch. Why was I surprised? It was the same as when I shipped out, except the train heading west wasn’t nearly as crowded as this one. Thirty of us from Alton, Illinois, all medical discharges, not to mention the civilians we collected along the way. I’m not the only one missing pieces of myself. I sometimes think . . .

  The train rattled around a curve. My pen skipped over the journal page, leaving a blurry green trail. I muttered a curse, softer because of those same civilians, and was about to continue writing when the digital screen at the head of the car switched on and the loudspeaker crackled. “Union Station. Next stop, Union Station. Passengers bound for Raleigh and Charlotte, transfer here.”

  The woman next to me, a grandmother returning from a family visit in Baltimore, immediately gathered up her bags from the floor. Others—civilians as well—crowded toward the exit doors, even though we had at least fifteen minutes before the station. Mitchell, a sergeant ending his fourth tour of duty, offered me a wry grin. Civs. No discipline. I shrugged and occupied myself with finishing off my journal entry.

  we have five or six wounded coming home from our so-called War in Oklahoma for every one who’s whole and sound. Again, why the surprise? No one ever believed the rebellion would stay put in one state. And I wasn’t the only one who doubted we’d see peace within two years. Or four. These past twelve months, though

  I had to pause, to swallow the panic that boiled up whenever I thought about the war, especially anything to do with this past and most disastrous year. Stop whining, I told myself. I had volunteered all on my lonesome. I knew what I was getting into. Same as Mitchell over there. Or the hundreds of patients I had operated on. We all had different reasons, some of them honorable, some of them damned practical. Some of us had left because life left us few choices.

  Angela had said I only wanted the glory of war.

  My sister had stared at me in disbelieving silence when I told her I wanted to make a difference, in the only way I could.

  My parents had said nothing. Perhaps they understood they could not change my mind.

  Whatever our reasons, none of us had bargained for the shame called Alton, Illinois. I had not bargained that I would face the enemy myself. Stupid belief, really. As if a civil war would draw neat and permanent boundaries between our enemies and theirs. My hand still trembling with that remembered fear, I took up my pen and continued to write.

  . . . have been the worst. The ordinary citizen rants about our failed economy. (And you won’t get no argument from me about that.) Congress yammers how we should have conquered these rebels five, six years ago. Oh, yes, and those New Confederacy rebels are angrier than ever, their guns are bigger and badder and scarier than ever before.

  Another jolt sent my pen point stabbing through the paper.

  I gave up and shut my journal. I could finish that entry later, once I settled into my hotel. Once I had adjusted to the idea of coming home at last, if only for a few days.

  The train jumped onto another set of rails, then settled into a glide as we passed over Florida Avenue. The gas stations and cinder-block storefronts of Northeast DC, even older and more desolate than before, abruptly gave way to the high-rise office buildings of downtown. The last words on the digital sign slid past, to be replaced by a clock counting down the minutes and seconds to arrival.

  Three years ago, I had boarded a train much like this one. My possessions had included several intangibles as weighty as the duffel bag I carried: a medical degree from Howard University, three years’ residency at Georgetown University Hospital, the belief that I ought to serve my country. Now? Now my mother and father were dead, killed in a terrorist attack in the Atlanta airport. My sister had sold our family home in Suitland, Maryland, and used her half of the inheritance to move to the opposite side of the country. The woman I had loved had written to tell me of her engagement to someone else. The loss of my arm was simply the last and most visible manifestation of time’s passage.

  As if the thing could translate emotions as well as electrical impulses, my left arm twitched, sending a ripple along the metallic mesh that covered its mechanics. The prosthetic had been retrofitted from a more heavily muscled soldier, one of the many casualties in the latest assault, and its electronics were less than reliable.

  The edge of the platform flashed past my window. The digital sign clicked off. Almost there. My pulse gave an uncomfortable leap. Was there anything left here for me, other than old memories and a chance for the future?

  I told my pulse to behave itself and stowed my journal and pen in my duffel bag, then extracted myself from my seat to head after Mitchell, who was already stumping down the aisle with the other veterans. Mitchell had served in Syria and the second Iraq occupation, before the uprising inside our own borders forced President Sanches to withdraw our troops. He would have served a fifth tour on the Illinois front, except for the IED that had taken off his leg.

  “Captain Watson,” he said when we reached the exit doors. “Good luck.”

  “And to you, Sergeant,” I replied.

  A final salute, though we no longer merited one. Then we were each taking turns climbing down the metal steps to the concrete platform.

  The dense summer heat poured over me. I sucked down a breath filled with the reek of oil and the hot metallic smell from the tracks. August in DC. No wonder Congress went into recess. I swung my duffel bag over my shoulder, checked my grip on its strap, and let the flood tide of passengers carry me toward the station building. Once inside, I fought toward the nearest wall. I wanted a moment to catch my bearings.

  Before I could reach my goal, a blow struck me between my shoulders. I swore and spun around to grapple with my attacker—

  I froze. The stranger was a thickset white man in a drab blue suit. Not a rebel soldier, an ordinary citizen. He glared at me—a woman, and a black woman at that, who dared to lay hands on him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

  I thought you were the enemy, come with assault rifles and grenade launchers and knives.

  Before I could finish my sentence, the man had yanked his shirt free and plunged into the crowd. I gained the wall and a niche between two pillars, where I could recover my breath. I was trembling. I am not a soldier, I told myself. I never was. No matter if the war tried to make me one, I left that war behind.

  I dropped my duffel bag between my feet and rubbed my hand cautiously over my left arm, where metal and plastic joined flesh. In spite of the padded sock, the device chafed against my still-tender stump, and my arm ached from hours upon hours in t
he jolting train. When I flexed my fingers, I felt the ghost of my old hand, as though one overlaid the other, but imperfectly, with my new fingers trailing behind my old and absent ones.

  A surgeon needed two reliable hands. Not one of flesh and one of metal and false memories.

  I am a surgeon, I told myself. Or I would be again.

  The station had emptied out in the past few moments. Several drones passed overhead, very much like the drones that endlessly spied upon the border. Nearby an engine huffed and hissed. Through the grand archway I could see the train that had brought me from Pittsburgh to DC. Two men in canvas overalls lingered next to it, one passing a cigarette to the other. Workmen for the train, or perhaps more discharged soldiers, waiting to depart for home. Half a dozen guards patrolled the platform, with guns at their belts. These days any weapons the police carried would be low-wattage Tasers, but their presence was sobering.

  One of the guards glanced in my direction. He whispered into the microphone that looped around his jaw. I saw myself in his eyes—a black woman dressed in baggy trousers and a dusty, sweat-stained T-shirt. A suspicious character, clearly nervous and loitering without cause. I hoisted my duffel bag over my shoulder and headed toward the exit doors.

  * * *

  The lobby of the District Hotel reminded me of videos from a hundred years ago—the worn carpets, the rose-patterned wallpaper fading to an uncertain gray. I remembered how my parents had wanted to spend a weekend here to celebrate their anniversary. I remembered how they could never get a reservation.

  The clerk wanted a credit card or a cash deposit of eight hundred dollars before he would rent me a room. “It’s the rules,” he said with an uneasy glance at my left hand and how it twitched on the counter.

  “I understand.” I had expected the price to be high. I took out the pouch from underneath my T-shirt and laid out eight hundred dollars in twenties. The bills were damp and curling from my sweat. “How many nights does this buy me?”

  “Two,” the young man said. “I wish—”

  He was young and white and anxious not to offend.

  “It’s all right. Rules are rules.” I pressed my thumb against the biometric pad. The device was an older model, more for show than to actually verify my identity, I suspected. My guess was confirmed when the clerk presented me with a paper registration form and a ballpoint pen. I filled out the registration form with my full name and rank. For my home address, I gave my sister’s in San Diego. If the hotel bothered with a security check, I could count on Grace to give them all the right answers, even if she complained to me later.

  I signed my name and handed the pen back to the clerk. “May I have my key? I only need the one.”

  He slid the card key over the counter. His gaze flickered toward my arm again. Suppressing a sigh, I picked up the card with my ordinary hand and tucked the other one out of sight. There would be more days like today, I suspected. More stares. I would just have to get used to it.

  But getting used to it would take a while. As the antique elevator shuddered and squealed its way to the second floor, I fingered the card key in my pocket. My nerves, which had carried me through two long days of buses and trains and too many strangers, were shredding into invisible bits. It’s not a cage. I’m just tired. No matter what I told myself, my breath came short before the elevator reached the third floor. The doors jerked open at last and I hurried down the corridor.

  The old-fashioned card reader proved to be fickle. It took me four tries before my door clicked open. By then I had used up all my courage. I flung my duffel bag inside, and myself after it, and slammed the door shut. When I turned around, I tripped over my bag and onto the bed. My fingers dug into the thin bedspread and I breathed in its musty fragrance, counting slowly until my heartbeat steadied.

  Damn you, Martínez. Damn you for telling me this would be so easy.

  Saúl Martínez was the senior surgeon in the medical unit where I had served. He had operated on me himself, after the rescue unit brought me in. It was not his fault a bullet shattered my arm while he had escaped the conflict entirely. The surgeons reported weekly to headquarters on rotation. Thursday, April 17, Martínez had driven off in a jeep for Decatur. Friday, the eighteenth, the Oklahoma and Missouri forces had attacked, overrunning the Illinois border and leaving acres of dead and wounded behind.

  He had used any number of favors to locate a replacement arm, then to convince another medical unit to lend him their best technician to retrofit the device. He kept watch as I suffered through a day and night of dangerous fever.

  “You will live, Captain,” he insisted. When the fever broke, and I cursed and swore against the unremitting agony, against the loss of my arm, he repeated, “You will live. You can do this. You can do anything. Go home and demand a new device. They can’t refuse you.”

  Oh, but they could. We made a handy scapegoat, those of us, the living and dead, connected to Alton, Illinois. Ten thousand soldiers of the New Confederacy had overrun the Illinois border, in spite of the land mines, in spite of the armed drones. Ten thousand rebels had left a bloody trail of their own dead to take outpost after Federal outpost. Inexplicable, the intelligence reports said. The Shame of Alton is what the newsfeeds called it. The news squirts, those ever-shifting, underground operations in the dark net, had a ruder name. No matter what victories came later, we had failed our country.

  People want a name and face to blame, I told Saúl. Couldn’t argue with that. Much. Truth be told, I wanted a name and face to blame myself.

  And yet, I had worked too hard—and let’s be honest, I owed too much money—to throw away my career as a surgeon. So I had returned to DC, to the city where I had lived as a child and later as a student, to exact a more useful reward for my services to my country. I couldn’t hope for an entirely new device, not with the war and its needs outpacing the factories, but surely the VA might supply me with one better fitted to my body and my profession. If not . . .

  If not, I would need to relocate to the outlying regions of the country. Places like Vermont, New Hampshire, or the smaller towns in Michigan, where rent and groceries cost less. Wherever I landed, there were still jobs I could do with only one reliable hand and some training. GP, for one thing. Medical technician, if it came to that. I could save my money and buy a new device myself.

  And I had the example of my mother and father before me. They had laid out their lives in strict straight lines, saving dimes and dollars to leave that goddamned dirt farm in Georgia, moving their family to the outskirts of Washington, DC, and giving their daughters the education they never had. Surely I could do as much.

  I unlocked my fingers from the bedspread and levered myself upright. Thick curtains blocked the windows, and it took another moment for my eyes to adjust to the room’s half-light. An air conditioner hummed and rattled as it labored to cool the air, which smelled of ozone and my own sweat. I flicked my hand, but nothing happened. Either the automatic lights were broken, or their motion sensors were calibrated for paler skin.

  I felt my way to the wall and opened the curtains. Sunlight poured through the window, catching on a cloud of whirling dust specks. The paint on the window frames was peeling, and chicken wire stretched over the outside. Less than ten feet away, another hotel blocked the view. The room itself was tiny, with just enough space for the double bed, a chest of drawers, and a rickety bedside table with an alarm clock. Nothing I hadn’t known already from the website reviews, but still faintly depressing.

  The alarm clock read six p.m. My appointment with the VA caseworker was for eight thirty the next morning. Fourteen-plus hours to fill. Back in medical school, I might have taken the Metro around the city, stopped at a diner, then hopped over to a bar for a scotch or two, where I could argue with my fellow interns about hospital politics. After that, Angela and I would have flipped a coin to decide where we spent the night, her place or mine.

  That was the old Janet Watson. One day, that would be the new one, too.


  Except for Angela, I reminded myself.

  Luckily, I would not encounter Angela here. She and her beloved had taken jobs with a private practice in Toronto. Within a few days, I would be gone myself.

  I set the alarm for six thirty a.m., then started my preparations for the night.

  Dinner was an Italian sub and a can of Diet Coke, bought on the walk from Union Station. I set those items on my bedside table, along with a used paperback with a broken spine. Sustenance for the one-handed, both mental and physical. Then I switched on the overhead light and closed the curtains. I skinned out of my sweat-drenched clothes and changed into a clean loose T-shirt. I also laid out my clothing for the next day. Medical school had trained me to be methodical. War had reinforced those lessons.

  Already I felt exhausted.

  I’m just tired. I spent three days on buses and trains. I’m just . . .

  Afraid.

  I flicked open the tab on the soda can. Opened my paperback and laid it flat on the bed, cracking the spine even harder. A mystery, one by Nicola Griffith, guaranteed to unwind the hours with impeccable prose and complicated emotions, even if those emotions turned out to be uncomfortable. Or at least, that was my plan. Once again my momentum ground to a halt, and I found myself staring out the window at the brick wall opposite the hotel.

  I should make that phone call to Saúl. I promised.

  As if I had any choice. Saúl had come to Decatur that last morning, as I was about to board the bus. He had insisted I call him as soon as I got to my hotel room—even better, as soon as I got off the train. Perhaps he had predicted this bout of inertia. Or perhaps he just liked ordering people around. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  I dug out my cell phone from my duffel bag and swiped my thumb over the bio-reader lock. Before my brain could derail me, I scrolled to Saúl’s number on my contacts list and pressed Connect.

  A predictable pause followed, as my call cycled from the local system to the military lines. The phone clicked, rang once, then clicked again.