Page 94 of Lethal Game

“You don’t look at the world like most people, do you?”

“No. Most people see the world through one pair or another of rose-colored glasses. I threw mine away when I was eleven years old.”

He stared at her, his mouth a white line. What was his face saying? Not anger or sadness, more like he was dissatisfied with something. He turned away and spoke into his radio, his words indistinct.

She went back to her microscope to look at the blood smears. Cell morphology she understood. Men, not so much.

She glanced out into the dark, the voices of the dying an unneeded reminder of what she was here for.

“I hate war,” she said.

Con sighed. “It doesn’t make much sense.”

“It doesn’t makeanysense,” she countered. “Can you imagine the things we could accomplish if we took our aggression toward each other and redirected it toward the exploration of space or medicine or renewable energy?” She huffed. “Human beings are really,reallystupid sometimes.”

That made him chuckle, but it didn’t last long. “I’ll go talk to Blairmore.” He glanced at her sidearm. “Keep watch.”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“And drink something. Eat a granola bar,” he called back to her.

“Yes, sir,” she called after him, and followed the words with actions. After drinking most of the bottle of water and eating a granola bar, she did feel better.

Con came back at a jog only a couple of minutes later. “We’ve got a problem. Blairmore says no more samples.”

Well, how the hell was she going to figure this out without samples? “All of them?”

“The local elders are kicking up a stink, especially about samples from the dead.”

“Why?”

Con shrugged. “Blairmore didn’t give any details.” He tilted his head to one side. “Maybe we should ask the locals ourselves.”

Chapter Twenty

The rising sound ofvoices in the hospital tent caught Con’s attention. Motion followed the noise, indistinct and generalized before breaking apart into individuals, all headed toward Sophia’s small lab tent.

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