Life had a strange sense of humor.
Vega shifted across from me, checking his weapon for the third time since we'd left. He was young—younger than Ghost, maybe twenty-two—with nervous eyes that kept darting to the canvas flap like he expected Cross's men to appear at any moment. Santos sat beside him, older and steadier, a hand on Vega's shoulder that saidcalm downwithout words.
Marco was praying. I could see his lips moving in the darkness, his fingers working over something in his pocket—rosary beads, maybe, or a good luck charm. Whatever got him through.
The truck turned off the main road onto a dirt track, and the ride turned rough. We bounced over ruts and rocks, the shocks groaning in protest, our bodies jostled against each other in the tight space. Through a gap in the canvas cover, I watched Blade's convoy disappear over a ridge, heading for the warehouse's front entrance.
They'd be the first to engage. The first to take fire. The distraction that might cost some of them their lives.
I thought of Blade's words to Tank last night.Watch your six in that drain.The gruff respect in his voice, the acknowledgment that we were all brothers now, regardless of what patches we wore or didn't wear.
The convoy vanished over the horizon. We were on our own now.
The drainage pipe was exactly where we'd marked it.
We parked the truck in a dry wash, hidden from view by a stand of mesquite and a natural depression in the landscape. The engine ticked as it cooled, the only sound in the vast desert silence. The sun was just starting to lighten the eastern horizon, painting the sky in shades of pink and orange that felt obscenely beautiful for what we were about to do.
We piled out of the truck in silence, each man checking his gear one final time. Weapons. Ammunition. Radios. The small things that meant the difference between life and death.
Axel led us across the sand, moving in a low crouch despite the empty landscape around us. We followed in single file, footsteps crunching softly on the desert floor. The air was cold, sharp with the smell of sage and dust, and my breath misted in front of my face.
The pipe entrance was half-buried in sand and scrub brush, a rusted grate that looked like it hadn't been touched in decades. If you didn't know exactly where to look, you'd walk right past it. Even knowing it was there, I had to squint to make it out in the growing light.
"Quiet," Axel breathed, producing a pry bar from his pack. "Sound carries underground."
We formed a perimeter while he worked, weapons ready, eyes scanning the empty desert. My heart was hammering against my ribs, adrenaline already flooding my system despite the fact that we hadn't even entered the pipe yet. Somewhere over that ridge, Blade's team was getting into position. Somewhere on the high ground, Hawk was setting up his rifle and whatever else he'd brought to make his signal.
The grate came free with a groan of tortured metal that made us all freeze. We waited, breath held, listening for any sign that we'd been heard.
Nothing. Just the wind whispering through the scrub brush and the distant call of a bird greeting the dawn.
Tank touched my shoulder. "You good?"
"Good." The word came out steadier than I felt. A lie we both needed to believe.
Axel went first, disappearing into the black mouth of the pipe like he was being swallowed whole. The darkness seemed to reach up and take him, and then he was gone—just the faint scuff of his boots on concrete marking his passage.
Declan followed, then Vega, then me. I lowered myself into the pipe and the world changed.
The darkness was absolute—not just dark, butblack, the complete absence of light that pressed against my eyes like a physical weight. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, couldn't see the man ahead of me or behind. The only sensory input was touch—the rough concrete beneath my palms, scraped raw within the first thirty feet; the cold metalof the pipe walls when I brushed against them; the occasional kick of Vega's boot against my fingers as I crawled too close.
And sound. Everything was sound in the darkness. The drip of water somewhere ahead, echoing in a way that made distance impossible to judge. The scrape of seven bodies moving through a space built for water, not men. The rasp of our breathing, amplified by the curved walls until it sounded like the pipe itself was alive. My own heartbeat, pounding in my ears like a drum.
The smell hit me next. Stagnant water—old and fetid, the smell of things left to rot in darkness. Rust, sharp and metallic. Something organic underneath, decomposing vegetation or dead animals or both. I breathed through my mouth and kept moving, trying not to think about what my hands were touching.
The pipe narrowed. One moment I was crawling on hands and knees, the next the ceiling dropped and I was on my belly, squeezing through a space barely wider than my shoulders. Panic fluttered in my chest—too tight, can't breathe, trapped—and I forced it down with the breathing exercises that had become second nature. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
Behind me, I heard Tank's grunt as he hit the same narrow section. He was bigger than me, broader across the shoulders. If he couldn't fit?—
The sound of fabric tearing, a muttered curse, the scrape of leather against rough concrete—and then his breathing resumed its steady rhythm behind me,his hand briefly touching my ankle in reassurance. He'd made it through.
We kept moving. Time lost meaning in the darkness. We could have been crawling for minutes or hours—my sense of it stretched and compressed like taffy, each second lasting an eternity while the minutes evaporated into nothing. My knees ached from the concrete. My shoulders burned from the awkward crawling motion. Sweat dripped down my face despite the underground chill, stinging my eyes.
And beneath it all, the fear. Not of the dark—darkness had never scared me, not even as a child. Not of the tight spaces, though they made my skin crawl. The fear was simpler than that, and worse: What if the pipe didn't lead anywhere?
We'd seen it on recon. We'd guessed it might run under the warehouse. But we didn'tknow. We were gambling everything—the assault, our lives, the lives of the brothers fighting at the front—on a hunch and a hand-drawn map. If this was a dead end, if it led somewhere useless, if we emerged in the middle of nowhere while Blade's team was slaughtered?—
Stop.I forced the thought away.One foot in front of the other. One hand after another. Move.
