Her phone lit up in her hand.
An ad. She'd seen it before—three, four times this week, dismissed without reading. Something about recruitment, offworld compensation, too good to be true.
This time she didn't dismiss it.
She read.
Recruitment Program. Female candidates, ages 25-40. Military experience required. Combat and firearms proficiency essential. Unmarried, no dependents. $10,000 compensationfor initial interview. Additional compensation based on qualification and participation.
The criteria read like a description of her life.
Female. Thirty-seven. Eight years USMC, Military Police, combat deployments to Iraq. Firearms expert. Unmarried. No children. No partner, no kids, no one financially dependent on her income.
No one would miss her. That was what the list meant. That was what qualified.
She should close it. She was a detective. She knew what recruitment scams looked like, what trafficking operations advertised, what desperation made people fall for. Ten thousand dollars for an interview was absurd. It was bait. It was exactly the kind of thing she'd warn anyone else to run from.
But she also knew the world had changed.
The news was full of it—had been for months now, years if you counted the early rumors. Contact with non-human civilizations. Treaties and trade agreements with species humanity had never imagined. People leaving Earth under arrangements that were legal, documented, and utterly beyond ordinary understanding.
She'd ignored it because it hadn't touched her life. Because she had cases to work and a sister to protect and no room for the impossible.
Now the impossible was the only door still open.
Ten thousand dollars for an interview. Just to show up and answer questions.
That wouldn't fix everything. But it was a start. A month of Angelo's medications. A chunk taken off the bill before collections started. Proof that she wasn't just sitting here waiting for the debt to bury them.
She clicked through.
The details were sparse but professional. Interview tomorrow. Los Angeles. An address in a commercial district she recognized—bland, forgettable, the kind of building that could house accountants or lawyers or something that didn't advertise.
Her thumb hovered over the application.
She thought about Aria, breathing through a machine while surgeons cut into her throat. About the debt already accumulating, every hour in that ICU adding thousands more. About Angelo, heart failing, offering to sell the last thing he owned. About her apartment, reduced to ash. About the loans she'd applied for last night, rejected one by one. About her sister waking up to a future already mortgaged by medical bills she'd never asked for.
She filled out the form. Name. Age. Service history. Contact information.
She submitted before she could talk herself out of it.
Confirmation appeared immediately. Interview scheduled. Address confirmed. Compensation guaranteed upon completion, regardless of outcome.
She pocketed the phone and sat there as the last light bled from the sky.
She didn't move for a long time.
CHAPTER 8
Serafina drove north on the 5 with both hands on the wheel and the sun behind her, burning through the coastal haze. The Outback hummed beneath her, steady and familiar, the only thing in her life that hadn't changed in the last forty-eight hours.
Aria was out of surgery. Alive. Stable. Dr. Rao had emerged at nine-thirty the night before, still in scrubs, and delivered the news with the careful precision of someone who'd done this a thousand times. The goitre was removed. The trachea was intact. The recurrent laryngeal nerves had been preserved—both of them, she'd said, which meant Aria's voice should recover fully. The parathyroids were intact too, all four of them, tucked safely back into place where they belonged. There was some swelling, some bruising, but early signs were good. They'd know more when Aria woke up.
Serafina had stood there and nodded and said the right things. Thank you. Yes. I understand. She'd watched Angelo's shoulders shake with relief, watched him press his hands to his face and breathe for what felt like the first time in hours.
She hadn't cried. She hadn't felt relief, exactly. Just a loosening of something that had been wound too tight for too long.
Aria was alive. Aria would speak again. Aria would be able to regulate her own calcium levels without pills for the rest of her life.
