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the ones taken yesterday. Everything looks good. Perfect really, except for your superficial injuries.” She paused. “Your previous medic didn’t note the swelling under your right eye or the bruises on your arms.”
    “She hit her head when she seized,” Rykus said. The bruises, he suspected, were his fault. He hadn’t been gentle when he’d deflected her attacks.
    “When was your last booster, Lieutenant?” Katie asked.
    Ash leaned back in her chair and settled her shackled hands in her lap. Something in her demeanor made Rykus uneasy. If Ash had snapped—or even if she hadn’t and was, instead, a traitor—Katie was standing too close. Ash could lash out with a kick strong and accurate enough to break a person’s neck.
    He took Katie’s arm and moved her out of striking range.
    Ash noticed, and the first sign of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
    She turned her attention back to Katie. “A week before my last assignment. So, around ten days, I guess.”
    Katie transferred her frown from him to Ash. “Your last assignment ended ten days ago.”
    Ash blinked a few times. After a long pause, she asked, “How long was I on the Anthem ?”
    “Eight days,” Rykus answered. “You don’t remember?”
    Commander Evers’s report said the Anthem had boarded Ash’s shuttle twelve hours after her team began their mission. The warship then rendezvoused with the Obsidian twenty-five hours ago, and Ash had been transferred here. If she’d injected the booster a week before her last mission, it had been almost twenty days since she’d had it.
    When Ash didn’t say anything else, Katie asked, “Are you having any headaches? Any blurred vision?”
    Ash still didn’t answer; she just sat there staring with an apathetic look on her face. It was the expression Rykus taught his cadets to adopt if they were captured and questioned by an enemy.
    “This isn’t an interrogation,” he told her. “She’s trying to help.”
    Another long blink, then Ash rolled her eyes toward him. “I know.”
    Katie pursed her lips. “I think it’s too soon for you to be experiencing withdrawal symptoms, but I’ll have a booster sent up.”
    Could that be what this was? The bimonthly injections curbed mental and physical fatigue. They made anomalies stronger and quicker than the average soldier. They made them heal faster. The Coalition would have fed the drugs to all its enlisted men and women, but normal humans couldn’t take them. They seized and, if they didn’t get immediate medical attention, they fell into comas. Anomalies were different though. Their bodies handled the chemicals, and though the injections didn’t make them superhuman, they certainly gave them an edge.
    They’d give Ash an edge over most of the Obsidian’s crew and over his soldiers. The latter would be assaulting a Saricean shipyard in less than three days.
    The ship’s gravity pressed down on his shoulders, and his chest felt tight. No matter how much watching Ash seize had bothered him, he had a duty to the men and women under his command. He had to do whatever it took to bring as many of them back alive as possible.
    “No,” Rykus said. “No booster.”
    Katie tapped something into her tablet. “You’re not in charge of her care, Commander.”
    “Thank God,” Ash muttered.
    He fought the temptation to turn a cold, hard glare on his cadet. Instead, he kept his gaze on Katie. “I’m in charge of her security. I won’t risk her escaping.”
    Katie glanced up from her tablet. “And I won’t risk her health.”
    “A few more days isn’t going to kill her.”
    “If she’s already experiencing withdrawal symptoms,” she said, her blue gaze unwavering, “it might.”
    It wouldn’t. Anomalies might be addicted to the drugs, but every one of them should be able to make it three or four weeks without serious complications. “I won’t approve it, Dr. Monick.”
    Katie’s chin jutted out slightly. Hell. She’d completely and