“Confirmed,”Mitchell responds without hesitation.“Three high-value targets. No civilians.”
The explosion rocks the building differently than my calculations predicted. The wall doesn’t just breach—it collapses inward. Screams pierce through the dust. Not adult screams.
Children.
The dust clears like a curtain pulling back on hell. A classroom. Seventeen kids, maybe eight years old. Some still moving. Most not. Blood spreading across scattered homework papers written in Arabic.
“What the fuck, Mitchell?”My voice breaks over the comm.“You said it was clear!”
“Collateral damage happens, Jackson. Targets were priority.”
But there were no targets. Never were. Mitchell sold our position to the highest bidder and traded our coordinates to pad a Swiss account. The intel wasn’t just bad; it was a weapon aimed at us.
The ambush hit us forty seconds later.
Kowalski takes the first bullet—a high-velocity round punches through his throat. He drops mid-word, hand reaching for the wound that’s already pumping his life onto Syrian dirt. His eyes find mine, confused, betrayed. He mouths something I can’t hear over the gunfire.
Vega goes next. Three rounds center mass, ceramic armor useless against armor-piercing rounds they shouldn’t have. He falls forward, tries to crawl, leaves a red trail for six feet before going still. His wife was pregnant. Twin boys he’ll never meet.
I’m dragging Brennan behind rubble when the grenade rolls in. The explosion tears him from my grip, shrapnel turning his left side into hamburger. He bleeds out in my arms, trying to say his daughter’s name through bubbles of blood.“Tell Sarah …”But he never finishes. Just goes slack, eyes fixed on nothing.
Hendricks screams for his mother in Spanish while his intestines spill through his fingers. Nguyen takes a headshot so clean it looks like special effects until you see the wall behind him. Patel burns alive when the white phosphorus hits, and there’s nothing—nothing—I can do but listen.
Seven teammates dead in four minutes. Dead because I trusted the intel. Because I trusted Mitchell’s voice in my ear saying “building’s clear” while he counted his blood money.
The extraction team found me three hours later, still holding Brennan’s body, calculating over and over how different itcould’ve been if I’d verified the intel myself. If I’d trusted my instincts instead of Mitchell’s words.
“Fuse!” Brass’s voice cuts through the memory. “Assessment.”
I blink hard, forcing myself back to Seattle. To now. The training warehouse snaps into focus. No dead children. No dead teammates. Just a perfectly executed breach.
“Clean breach.” My voice remains steady despite the acid burning my throat. “Seven-point-two-second window. Sufficient for extraction.”
Brass’s eyes narrow slightly. He noticed the hesitation. Of course he did. But he doesn’t call it out. That’s the code among us—cover each other’s blind spots without advertising them.
Whisper drops from the catwalk, landing silently despite his size. The Axion contractors stare with barely concealed awe. Most civilians react that way to Cerberus operators.
We’re just built differently. Forged in places that break normal people.
Collins approaches the breached pillar, running his hand along the precise cut. “That’s—impressive. Not even a hairline fracture in the surrounding structure.”
“Precision matters,” I tell him. “In demolition, one degree of miscalculation compounds exponentially.”
But miscalculation doesn’t get people killed.
Misplaced trust does.
The contractors file out, still murmuring among themselves. Brass escorts them to the elevator, his bulk a casual reminder that Cerberus operates in a different league. Halo gives them a mock salute that somehow feels like a warning.
Ghost watches from the observation deck. Arms crossed. When the civilians are gone, he descends the metal stairs. Footsteps echoing.
“Good work. Debrief in twenty.”
The team disperses to clean gear. I stay behind, staring at the breach point. Seven centimeters from the optimal stress point. Exactly as calculated. My calculations are never wrong.
Only people lie. Especially the ones with “intel.”
Ghost finds me in the equipment room, setting detonators in their designated positions. Each one precisely aligned, because precision is all I can control.
