I stared at the Alpha indicator light. It was still green. The channel was open. Nothing was coming through it.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Tyler's hand tightened on my arm.
Four. Five. Six.
I stopped breathing. My vision narrowed to the speaker grille and the green light beside it and the silence pouring out of both. My heart was beating too fast to count. The numbers were gone. The database was gone. Everything was gone except the green light and the silence and the seventeen seconds it took for my entire world to collapse into a single point of sound that wasn't there.
Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
"Dec," I whispered.
Eleven. Twelve.
Tyler's other hand found the Command channel switch. He was about to call Hawk. His face was pale in the dashboard light, the professional calm cracking at the edges.
Thirteen. Fourteen.
I couldn't feel my hands. The laptop had slid sideways on my thighs and I hadn't noticed. The cursor blinked in the search field. Waiting for input. There was no input. There was nothing.
Fifteen.
The speaker crackled.
Sixteen.
A cough. Ragged, wet, the sound of lungs clearing dust and smoke.
Seventeen.
"Alpha intact." Declan's voice. Strained, rough, scraped raw, but there. Present. Alive. "Secondary charge. They blew something in the office complex. Smoke and debris. We're clear. Moving to regroup at the east wall."
The air came back into my lungs in a rush that tasted like copper and electronics. My hands were wet. I looked down and realized I'd been gripping the laptop hard enough to leave sweat prints on the casing.
Tyler exhaled. Long, controlled. His hand released my arm. I could feel the marks his fingers had left.
"Both teams," I called into the comms. My voice came out wrong. Thin and cracked. I swallowed and tried again. "Both teams, status report."
"Bravo, dock bay secured." Irish. Breathing hard, but the voice was intact, the brightness still there underneath the strain. "Six hostiles down, one fled south. No Phoenix casualties. Blade's got a cut, nothing serious. Crates are intact. Nolan, there's hundreds of them in here."
"Alpha, warehouse floor secured." Declan. Still rough. "Catwalk and barricade positions neutralized. Office complex is on fire, secondary charge took out the upper floor. Two men down, non-critical. Shrapnel. Tank's patching them up."
Wounded but alive. The data filed itself automatically while my body continued to shake.
I wiped my face. My hand came away wet. I'd been crying. I hadn't noticed.
Tyler opened the glove compartment. Handed me a napkin without looking at me, his eyes on the speaker grille, his posture already shifting back to operational.
I cleaned my face. Breathed. And then the data came back. Not slowly, not in fragments. All at once, like a circuit reconnecting, the analytical engine that had stalled during seventeen seconds of silence roaring back to full power.
Because something was wrong with the ambush.
I replayed it. Declan's report: kill box, elevated positions, catwalk, office windows, barricade. Three prepared positions inside the warehouse. Irish's report: hostiles inside shipping containers at the docks. Both teams hit simultaneously.
