Page 4 of Beds and Blades

Across the table, Professor Hendricks set his pen down in the specific way that meant he had an objection forming. Dr. Reyes had done the slow exhale through the nose—the academic equivalent of clearing a weapon.

I pulled my attention back to the slide.

“Scipio did not do this by being stronger than Hannibal. He did it by making the strategic situation untenable. He made it more dangerous for Hannibal to stay in Italy than to leave. And then, when they finally met at Zama, Scipio neutralized the one weapon that had made Hannibal invincible for two decades—the war elephants—by ordering his troops to simply step aside and let them run through.”

I had spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time in love with this image. The elephants charging the Roman line, the line parting, the elephants running harmlessly through the gaps while the battle continued around them. The simplest possible solution to a problem that had broken armies for generations. Open a lane. Let the threat exhaust itself.

Scipio had looked at a problem everyone thought was insurmountable and asked: What if we simply moved?

My notes slipped slightly in my hands.

This was the fifth time in the last ten minutes. My hands were not quite as cooperative as they normally were, which I was attributing mostly to the heroic quantity of caffeine currently rioting through my bloodstream.

The other contributing factor was that James Calloway had leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and appeared genuinely engaged with the elephant passage.

His forearms rested on his thighs. Sleeves rolled up. His forearms were thick and corded, a faint map of veins against the skin. I had a brief, vivid, involuntary thought about how they would look braced beside my head. How the muscle would shift and bunch as he held himself over me. Whether a man with hands that size would be as thorough as I had, on multiple detailed occasions, imagined him to be.

I swallowed.

Focus, Meghan Callahan.

I reached into my bag without breaking the flow of the presentation and retrieved the third can of NeuroXCore 8000. I cracked it open. Dr. Harmon glanced up. I kept talking.

“What distinguishes Scipio from his contemporaries is not that he was fearless. The historical record doesn’t support that. What the record supports is that he acted despite fear without the hedging or delay that characterized even gifted commanders like Fabius.”

Harmon’s pen moved. I took a long gulp from the can.

The guarana hit thirty seconds later. The room tilted by a degree.

My notes were still in my hands.

I was still talking.

“The lesson of Scipio Africanus is not that genius wins wars,” I said, and my voice was still steady, still exactly the voice I had been deploying for three years in rooms that were not always listening. “The lesson is that intelligence plus decisive action wins wars. Every time. He never waited for perfect conditions. He created conditions, and then he moved.”

The room tilted. More pronounced this time.

Hmm.

I looked down at my notes. The words were there. Forty-three pages, printed at eleven p.m., meticulous, everything I needed. They had stopped making sense.

Then the pain arrived.

Pressure. It was like a fist was closing around my sternum from the inside, squeezing. It radiated outward. Left arm. Jaw.

The sweat came fast and cold.

My pulse hammered. Uneven, stuttering, missing beats.

I couldn’t get a full breath. This was mechanical. Something that was supposed to be working had stopped.

The room erupted. Chairs scraping, multiple voices at once, someone calling my name. Something fell. A water glass, a laptop bag—I couldn’t tell. Footsteps, fast. Calloway was moving toward me.

I was falling.

The floor came up hard. My head hit with a thud.

Blue light flooded my vision.