The flashbacks always came at night.Not the cinematic kind — not sweat and gasping and sitting up in the dark. Ethan had trained that out of himself years ago, in the deliberate way he'd trained most inconvenient things out of himself, through repetition and a specific cognitive discipline that the program's psychiatrist had taught him and that he'd refined alone over time into something quieter and more useful.They came instead as fragments. Clear, brief, precise — like photographs from a file, surfacing in the last minutes before sleep without narrative or sequence. His mind's version of maintenance. Going through the archive and checking what was still there.Tonight the fragments were from month eleven.A airfield. Eastern European winter — the specific grey of it, the cold that came off the tarmac like a second layer of sky. He had been on a transport for nineteen hours and had slept for three of them and had used the remaining sixteen to read a file that told him everything ab