“I already locked the portal,” James said. “But they have your full name now.”
I waited until he walked back to his desk before I opened the local library website on my secondary monitor. The library had six public terminals, and none of them required an ID to log on.
I pulled up my own personnel log and checked the system audit trail. The search request had targeted my 2008 deployment, specifically the three months I spent in a medical unit that did not exist on the public registry.
Someone was looking for a gap in the records.
The fluorescent lights of the supermarket buzzed in a high, flat pitch that made my head ache. I had a twelve-dollar grocery receipt in my hand and a single gallon of milk in my plastic basket.
“Claire, wait up,” a voice called from the end of the bread aisle.
My sister, Natalie, was walking toward me with a stack of orange flyers in her left hand. She was thirty-six, but her face looked thin and tired under the bright grocery store lights.
