The lift doors slid open onto Level 1 and light spilled in—too bright, too normal for what we’d just done. The hallway we’d entered through earlier now buzzed with life: boots pounding, shouted commands, the sharp bark of Aaron’s voice.
“Jensen! Marlow!”
I barely had a second to brace before Aaron closed the distance, his gaze skimming over us in one hard sweep. Boone and Logan were behind him, weapons up, covering angles out of habit even though the main threat was alreadydead six stories below.
“You two in one piece?” Aaron demanded.
Hawk answered, because my throat had gone tight. “We’re here.”
Miles jogged up from behind, tablet clutched to his chest, face flushed. “We lost comms halfway down. Systems went dark. All I could see was a cascading shutdown. I thought—”
He cut himself off when his eyes met mine.
“Hey,” I managed. “We’re hard to get rid of.”
Boone gave a low whistle. “Whole facility went offline like someone pulled the plug on God.”
“That’s basically what happened,” Miles muttered.
Aaron’s gaze sharpened. “Status on Echo?”
“Terminated,” Hawk said. “Reese used himself as the architecture. We used him as the kill switch.”
Aaron let out a long breath, some of the tension in his shoulders bleeding away. “And Veridian?”
“Dead with him,” Miles said. “I’m seeing cascaded failures through every node it touched. It’ll take weeks to comb through the mess, but Echo’s gone. No more automated war god pulling strings.”
Boone clapped Hawk’s shoulder. “Nice work.”
Hawk didn’t answer. His thumb was rubbing slow circles over the back of my hand, like he needed to keep confirming I was still there.
Aaron’s gaze flicked to our joined hands. Something unreadable passed through his eyes, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he jerked his chin toward the exit corridor.
“Med checks, both of you,” he ordered. “Then debrief. Jensen—Joint Command’s already frothing. They want you in D.C. as soon as you can stand up straight.”
My stomach dipped.
“D.C.?” I repeated.
Hawk’s jaw flexed. “They can wait.”
“No,” Aaron said quietly. “They can’t. This wasn’t just a field op, Hawk. You shut down a rogue AI that infiltrated federal infrastructure. There are questions. They’ll want your statement, your read, your recommendations for what comes next.”
Recommendations. That meant committees. That meant closed-door meetings with men in suits who never smelled cordite in their lives.
It meant distance.
“How long?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Aaron hesitated. “A couple of days at least. Maybe a week. Depends on how ugly they want to get.”
A week.
After everything we’d just done, the idea of Hawk being anywhere I wasn’t felt wrong in my bones.
Hawk squeezed my hand. “First things first,” he said. “You need to get that bruise looked at.”
I scowled. “What bruise?”
