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“She’s not my type.” Felicia grinned. “Now find me a dirt-pounding Marine gal, and we’ll talk.”

“I don’t have time to be your wingman,” I grunted.

Felicia shook her head. “You’d make a crap one. All the gals we meet think you’re a Harvest hick.”

“What, and you aren’t?” I was a little bit annoyed by the barb.

“I’m an Utgard girl, city born and bred. It’s in the blood. The other city girls can sniff it. Plus, you have no sense of style.”

“Oh, screw you! Now you’re just trying to piss me off.”

“Yeah, guilty. I wouldn’t do it if you weren’t so damn touchy about it.” Felicia pressed her drink in my hand. “Hey. Keep an eye on this, I need to visit the girls’ room.”

I followed her part of the way to stand in the hallway with a drink in each hand as hordes of people shoved past me.

When Felicia came back out I handed her her drink, and we turned back to leave the hallway.

That’s when the Insurrectionist bomb exploded. A concussive wave of heat, light, and pressure threw me back down the hallway.

For a moment, I lay on the carpet, staring blurrily at the ceiling, and then a second explosion brought the entire building down on top of us, trapping me in the debris.

ODSTS DUG us out.

Most of the civilians out dancing, however, had died. Allison was found with a piece of rebar through her skull. Eric was in a coma and getting ferried out to Reach for better medical care.

Felicia and I both had been packed with biofoam, and then moved to a field hospital set up on the edge of the debris.

We were too doped up on painkillers to do much more than lie in bed for the first half day while medics kept an eye on us. I had a concussion, broken ribs, burns, a skull fracture, and ached in places I didn’t know I had.

Felicia reported, from two beds over, the same.

“Standing in that hallway saved your lives,” an ODST medic said. “You’re damn lucky.”

I didn’t feel lucky.

Particularly when the ONI agents showed up.

They questioned us about what we were doing at the club: how we got there, whether we had contacts with Insurrectionists.

There were a lot of questions about where our allegiances lay. Many of them asked over and over again.

In the end, they eventually let us be, but not before telling us that the club had been singled out because it was a favored spot for CMA Marines during weekend leave.

I had a lot of time to think, lying there on the bed healing.

“They’re saying they’re going to be shutting down the CMA’s involvement with TREBUCHET,” I told Felicia, sitting on the edge of her bed once I’d healed enough to walk. “There are rumors that the CMA will be shut down completely. Or at least that the UNSC is fighting to get the CMA disbanded.”

“No surprise.”

“And then what comes next?” I asked. “Even if it lives, the CMA is a dead end. What kind of career will I have if I stay with them? I think I’m going to leave for the UNSC.”

“Career? Why the hell would you want a career?” Felicia snorted. “You’ll never see Harvest again if you switch to the UNSC. No telling where they’d send you. You have a chance to go home now.”

“I could care less about ever seeing Harvest again,” I said.

“It’s where you came from. Where your dad has land.”

“It’s just dirt, Felicia. Dirt. It doesn’t mean anything. Why the hell do you care? Are you going back to Utgard?”

“Yes.” She surprised me there. I hadn’t known that. I’d thought her just as interested as me in wanting to get away. “I didn’t choose to enlist, remember.”

“I’d always thought your story about the governor’s daughter was just that . . . a story. Did you really have to join to skip jail in Harvest?”

“No. No, that was bullshit. My dad forced me to join,” she said. “After I stole an MLX and went out joyriding. After the governor incident. Told me it was time to grow up.”

“So you’d go back to Utgard?”

“In a moment, if they discharged me. They might even rotate us back, if they’re no longer going to use us here.” She pulled her knees up under her chin. “What’s the bug up your ass about leaving the CMA?”

I rubbed my forehead. “I have bits of human bone embedded in me,