I can feel it.
That hunger in the silence.
My mouth is dry. My tongue tastes like ash and all I can think is Butterfly. Her hands shaking as she pressed gauze to my side. Her voice breaking when she whispered, “You’ll leave again.”
The desert tilts around me. Sunlight turns white, blinding.
One breath.
One heartbeat.
One mistake.
And then—Click.
It’s so small. So fucking small I almost convince myself I imagined it but my stomach knows before my head does. The world’s already falling apart.
Click.
Then silence.
Too much silence.
The kind that swallows sound instead of carrying it. The kind you only get in the half-second before the universe decides you’re done.
My lungs seize.
My body knows.
Every cell screaming—move but the ground moves first.
BOOM.
The blast tears the world wide open. Sand erupts, a screaming wave of heat and metal swallowing the convoy whole. My ears implode—no sound, just a ringing so sharp it feels like knives in my skull.
Light—white, blinding.
Heat—searing, crawling under my skin.
Force—slamming into me so hard my bones rattle like dice in God’s hand.
I hit the ground chest-first, breath knocked clean out. Dust fills my mouth, my eyes, my veins. My rifle’s gone. My helmet’s half off. All I can hear is ringing. Ringing and the faint echo of voices that might be men, might be ghosts.
I push up—arms shaking, body refusing. The sand’s slick. Not just sand. Blood.
Fuck.
Harris is down, a smear of red where his leg should be. Reese is screaming, clutching his side, eyes blown wide in terror. Leo’s gone—no, not gone, just a shadow on the far side of the crater, limp, unmoving.
I stumble toward him, half-blind, half-deaf, dragging air into my lungs like it’s made of fire. The world is chaos. Shrapnel sings through the air like angry bees.
Another boom in the distance—secondary charge—someone yells but I can’t hear the words.
All I hear is her voice.“At least if I die here, I’ll die fighting for something.”
My knees buckle. I slam my palm against the sand, force myself upright.
Not yet.
