Genesis didn’t falter.
But the air felt wrong. Too much silence between them. The situation was so fucked, it was almost unthinkable.
It was too quiet. A quiet that held an emptiness where his voice should’ve been.
Sectors were cleared—Viper adjusted the comm as men called in the all clear.
His eyes narrowed on the smoke drifting east.
Now, roughly forty-five minutes since they’d landed, and still no trace.
Genesis had a rule that every twenty-four hours, they made some type of contact back to base.
Erebus, however, did not. They had no fucking rules except to turn in their IDs and personal phones to avoid their bodies tracking back to the company.
He pressed the comms. “Shift north. Double the grid.”
Acknowledgments rolled through, one after another—steady voices against the silence that wanted to swallow him whole.
The team moved like a machine, methodical, unrelenting. Every callout precise. Every movement drilled.
But beneath it, something in him kept counting seconds, breaths, distance. The kind of waiting that burned.
A gust rolled through, pushing the smoke east and carrying the faint metallic tang of blood.
Viper paused, scanning the horizon through the shimmer of heat.
Drones hummed overhead. Black’s voice crackled in his ear—coordinates, movement, maybe nothing.
He started toward it anyway.
A voice broke through the static. “Colonel, we’ve got something,” Rip said this time.
Viper stopped cold. “Go ahead.”
“Northwest quadrant, maybe fifty meters out. Looks like blood. Not old.”
His pulse kicked once—sharp, immediate. “Mark it. I’m on my way.”
He took off across the sand, boots pounding through heat and grit. Wind clawed at the edges of his jacket, dust stinging his face. Black and Winter shifted course to follow, their shadows cutting through the smoke.
He wasn’t imagining a capture.
He was imagining a body in the sand.
And that fear—he couldn’t outrun.
The closer he got, the more he saw—shell casings half-buried, boot prints overlapping. Someone had fought hard here. The sand was dark in places it shouldn’t have been.
He crouched low, fingers brushing the ground. The blood was tacky, fresh. Not enough for a kill shot—enough to say someone had moved after.
Rip came up beside him. Winter and Black held position, weapons ready.
“Could be him,” Law said quietly through comms.
Viper didn’t answer. Could be wasn’t good enough.
He rose, scanning the horizon again, tracking the pattern—the pull of every grain of sand, every broken line of prints leading east.
