Most men could be dismissed when they grew quiet and stared too long at something soft and impossible. Most men could be folded back into the structure with mockery, a hit to the arm, a sharper order from someone above them in rank. Thane could not. When he said he saw something, he meant it literally, and that made the line from Sarge land in a way none of the others liked.
Voss noticed first.
He was not the loudest man in Snow Team, and he was not the one most likely to posture when instincts started scraping against hierarchy, but he had spent long enough inside this group to know the difference between ordinary possessiveness and the moment a thing turned dangerous.
Thane had not argued. He had not bristled. He had not made some reckless claim of his own. He had simply looked at Sarge with that distant, sharpened expression of his and gone still in a way that meant part of him was no longer fully in the present.
That was never good.
