I close my eyes and let the road carry us west.
NINETEEN
“The Family”
CASSIE
The last eighteenhours blur together like watercolors bleeding into each other.
Wyoming becomes Idaho becomes Washington—an endless ribbon of highway unspooling beneath Thorne’s armored SUV. We rotate drivers every four hours. We stop for gas, bad coffee, and bathroom breaks that Diego times with military precision. Thorne doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s efficient. Practical. The communication style of a man who’s spent years working alone.
The landscape transforms through the passenger window. High desert gives way to farmland, gives way to mountains, gives way to the lush green of the Pacific Northwest. The air changes too—dry and dusty, becoming cool and damp, carrying the scent of pine and rain.
Somewhere in Idaho, we stop at a truck stop that smells like diesel and burned coffee. Thorne fills the tank while Diego does a perimeter check—habit, instinct, the thing that keeps men like him alive. I stretch my legs, walking circles around the SUV to work the stiffness out of my joints.
When Diego comes back, he’s carrying sandwiches wrapped in plastic and a bag of chips.
“Gourmet.” I take the package.
“Calories.” He hands me the food. “We’ve got eight more hours.”
Thorne gives a short nod. Clear. He takes a sandwich without comment and eats standing, back to the SUV, eyes never stopping their constant scan of the parking lot.
A family in a minivan pulls up to the next pump—mother, father, two kids in the backseat arguing over a tablet. Normal people living normal lives, completely unaware that the woman eating a gas station sandwich ten feet away is being hunted by an artificial intelligence with a fifty-billion-dollar war chest.
“Do you ever miss it?”
He follows my gaze to the family. “Miss, what?”
“Normal. The life where your biggest problem is traffic, or work deadlines, or what to have for dinner.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Chewing. Thinking.
“I never knew normal.” He leans against the SUV, watching the minivan. “I went from high school to the Navy to Special Operations to Cerberus. The closest I ever got to civilian life was a six-month leave after my second deployment, and I spent most of it drinking and picking fights in bars.”
“That doesn’t sound healthy.”
“It wasn’t.” He crumples the sandwich wrapper. “That’s when I met Sofia. She found me in a dive bar in San Antonio, bleeding from a split lip, trying to decide if I wanted to throw another punch or just let the other guy finish what he started. She walked up to me, looked at the blood on my face, and said, ‘You’re doing this wrong. If you want to self-destruct, at least do it somewhere with better music.’” A ghost of a smile crosses his face. “Then she bought me a drink and told me about her sister who died of an overdose. About how she’d spent yearsbeing angry at the world before realizing the anger was just grief wearing a mask.”
“She sounds wise.”
“She was. She was also stubborn and opinionated, and she couldn’t cook to save her life.” The smile fades. “She made me want to be better. For the first time since I enlisted, I thought maybe there was something worth building instead of just destroying.”
“And then the cartel killed her.”
“And then they killed her.” He starts toward the SUV. “I don’t miss normal. I don’t think I ever had it. But I miss believing it was possible.”
I reach for his hand. He takes it.
Thorne watches us from the driver’s door. Something flickers in his pale eyes—not judgment. Recognition, maybe. The look of a man who understands what it means to hold on to something fragile in a world that breaks things.
“We should move.” He checks the lot one last time.
Somewhere around Spokane, I fall asleep with my head against Diego’s shoulder.
Green text scrolls on black screens. Hallways stretch forever. A voice without a body speaks in probabilities and threat assessments.
*CASSANDRA BRENNAN. THREAT LEVEL: EXTINCTION.*
