His body had been?—
She’d dropped beside him, her hands hovering, not knowing where to touch that wouldn’t hurt worse. Blood seeped everywhere, and his breathing was shallow and labored.
His eyes rolled to the side and found hers, still trusting, still loving her even as he died.
“I sent him in,” Maddox whispered, tears starting. “I gave the command.”
“What are you noticing?” Carla’s voice came from somewhere outside the memory.
"It's my fault." The guilt was crushing and familiar. "I killed him."
"Go with that. Notice what comes."
The tappers kept buzzing left, right, left, right.
And then, something shifted.
A thought surfaced:Protocol required K-9 entry first.
She'd followed training, the same way she'd done on every other mission.
Another thought:Any handler would've made the same call.
The tappers continued.
The IED was already there. You couldn't have known.
But she'd sent him in. That was true.
Yes. And he was trained for it. He knew the risks.
The memory was still there—Titan dying in her arms, his blood on her hands—but something about it was expanding, showing context she'd never let herself see before.
She'd followed protocol. The IED had been placed deliberately and would've triggered whether she sent Titan or went herself. He'd died doing his job, protecting her, the job he'd been trained for, had chosen—as much as a dog could choose.
"What are you noticing now?" Carla asked.
"I followed protocol," Maddox said slowly. "I did what I was trained to do."
"And?"
The tappers buzzed steadily in her hands.
"It wasn't my fault."
The words felt strange in her mouth, foreign but not wrong.
"How true does that feel for you?"
Maddox checked internally, surprised by the answer. "Six? Maybe seven?"
From zero to seven in one session, after one hour of holding plastic tappers and letting her brain do whatever the hell this was.
"When you think about Titan now," Carla said, "what's your distress level?"
Maddox brought up the memory again. She was still sad, it was still painful, but it wasn’t as suffocating. "Five. Maybe four."
The crushing guilt had loosened. It wasn’t gone, but the weight of believing she'd murdered him had lifted enough to breathe through the grief.
