What unsettled people wasn’t just her competence. It was her silence.
Soldiers at Blackridge were loud by nature. They shouted, joked, complained, argued—noise was part of the culture, part of the way they bonded under pressure. But Mira Larkin existed outside of that rhythm. She spoke only when necessary, her voice calm, measured, almost detached, and when she wasn’t speaking, she observed. Always observing.
Rumors spread quickly in environments like that.
Some said she was intelligence. Others insisted she was an embedded evaluator sent to assess the program. A few claimed she had connections high up the chain of command, the kind that made questions disappear before they were even asked.
Adrian Keller rejected all of those explanations.
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