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to police the perimeter of #309, one of the gypsum stacks where 80 million tons of toxic sludge were stored. Its earthen walls soared twenty stories and its base covered three hundred acres. Today she was dispatched to check for settling, cracks in the surface of the berm, any sign of a sinkhole opening up or weakening in the structure, and to keep watch for eco-warriors trying to photograph one of the gypsum stacks or climb its banks to take air samples.
    Sasha was lean, white-skinned, with eyes the gray-blue of wood smoke. Muscles more solid than most men’s. In high school she’d tried out for the wrestling team, pinned every boy in her weight class and ten pounds above. The coach was fine with it, but some fathers protested and she was gone.
    Six months after graduating she married C.C. Olsen, eight years older, a science teacher at the high school. Biology, chemistry, physics, whatever needed to be covered, he could do it. Brilliant man, her hero. Wasting his talents in that hick school. But C.C. was dedicated to his hometown, the place that got him started on a life of learning.
    First year of marriage, Sasha got pregnant with Griffin. Money tight, they rented a one-bedroom house on Highway 60, dump trucks blasting by day and night, hauling phosphate rock up the road to Tampa to be processed into fertilizer. Sasha spent most of her daylight hours wiping up the gray dust that coated the furniture, the baby’s crib, the few plastic toys.
    When Griffin was six, heading off to first grade at Pine Tree School, Sasha snuck over to Sarasota and filled out the paperwork for the National Guard. Partly for the spare cash, but mostly to cover tuition to junior college. Study hospitality management, that was her dream. Nab a job in one of those plush beach hotels. She didn’t have the brains C.C. had, but hell, she could smile nice, check people in, check them out. She never thought she’d see war.
    But as Griffin was turning fifteen, a scrappy kid, and brilliant like his dad, and Sasha was one course shy of her hospitality degree, she got her call-up.
    Started out as an eighteen-month rotation, then those eighteen turned into a thirty-month tour. Florida National Guard, 143rd military police, trained to provide battlefield circulation control, area security, prisoner of war and civilian internee operations, and to maintain law and order on the battlefield. Iraq was a dismal place, a gray crumbling country, the devil’s sandpit. Savagery and valor. In the end Sasha lost the ability to tell the difference.
    She might still be doing an endless hitch, circulating through the western provinces and Baghdad neighborhoods, if C.C. hadn’t been struck with lung cancer. The man never smoked his first cigarette, but his disease was so virulent and swift, Sasha’s emergency leave barely got her home in time to hold her husband’s hand on his deathbed and give him a parting kiss.
    Within a week of her return, Logan Hardee, the editor of the Summerland Times , got wind of her service record and showed up at her house. He wanted to splash her across the front page: LOCAL WOMAN IS SECRET WAR HERO . He proposed a parade. Whole town could celebrate her heroism— floats, confetti, marching band, speech by the mayor. Put her medal on public display.
    Sasha listened in silence, standing on the front porch. When Logan was done, she told him no. She didn’t raise her voice. Just a flat no. Now, get off my porch. If I see my name in your paper, I’ll track you down and show you a few things I learned in that hellhole.
    That was that. Some people gossiped. Versions of her war story made the rounds, a mishmash of bullshit and lies. Didn’t matter to her. She had no urge to set the record straight.
    After she buried C.C., without any notion how she’d cover next month’s rent, out of nowhere the personnel boss at Bates International called and offered work on the security team. She’d be