The gray hour comes to Camp Ridge on schedule. The scout it is supposed to bring home does not. Jake Smith went out on the margins with the county's most patient assignment and found the first warm thread of the war, a line pointing at where the enemy stages what it has been building. The thread ran long. The turn-back point came up with the lead still live in front of him, and the return window closed at dark with the boy on the wrong side of it.

The camp he left behind is a camp already stretched thin over its own doubled watches, a camp that got counted out loud by a voice on a dead band and has been digging false works beside real ones ever since. Every man it sends past the wire now is arithmetic. And the timing doctrine that governs a missed window was written at the map table by Mark Smith himself, argued into law for everyone, with  ...