Wet black strands landed in the dirt around her boots while two military policemen held her shoulders down and three hundred recruits stood in formation, silent enough to hear the flag snap above them.
Sergeant Raymond Knox smiled as if he had finally found the right punishment.
“Now she looks like what she is,” he said.
A nobody.
That was the word he liked.
He had started using it the first morning Evelyn arrived at Blackridge Training Command with a plain duffel bag, an old uniform, and a file so empty it looked like someone had erased a life.
No rank.
