The detonator comes free next. The charge lifts out after it, dense and compact, and I set it in the evidence container with the care that comes from handling something built to kill people I'm responsible for keeping alive.
The bay goes quiet, and the device is inert, and I'm already running the next problem before the last one has cooled. Someone got into my shop and modified my training equipment. Whoever it was knew our drill schedule well enough to plant a charge that would detonate during a routine exercise, and that means they've been watching us long enough to learn when we train, what we train with, and where we stand when we do it.
I call Rowe back inside and we sweep the rest of the bay. We pull and check every rack, every locker, every component in the cage, working through the full inventory with the systematic focus that keeps bomb techs breathing. The count takes over an hour. Nothing else has been modified, but only one device being tampered with doesn't ease anything. It means the bomber was precise, targeted, and disciplined enough to touch only what was needed. That's worse than sloppy, because sloppy makes mistakes you can find.
Rivera's team arrives after we've cleared the building. They photograph the evidence container, take my statement, and collect the rendered device for forensic analysis. The construction shares the same methodology as the B&B device, the same Eglin-curriculum wire routing and solder technique, but the sophistication is higher in both concealment and lethality. Whoever built this learned from the first one or was holding back the first time and isn't anymore.
Rivera is thorough, methodical, and maddeningly calm for a woman standing in an EOD facility where someone planted a live explosive device inside the training equipment. I get it. She's building a case, not fighting a war. But the difference between her timeline and mine is that she's working in weeks and I'm working in heartbeats, and every hour Garrick spends walking free on this base is an hour he can spend building something else.
I walk her through every detail of the device construction, the forensic comparison to the B&B device, and the inventory discrepancies that show components had been pulled from my supply chain over time. Rivera had called Nox from the comm building the moment we reported the device, and she'd spent the hours since cross-referencing Garrick's contractor access logs against the EOD bay's maintenance schedule, feeding the results to Rivera in real time. Garrick's credentials gave him access tothis building. The maintenance records show a logged visit to the bay within the past few days for an HVAC inspection that Facilities has no record of ordering.
The picture tightens. Garrick had the means, the access, and a window.
By the time Rivera leaves, the light through the bay's high windows has gone amber. I've been professional and controlled and cooperative for hours, and every minute of it has cost something I'll be paying for later. The anger doesn't leave when the evidence does. It just goes underground, settling behind my ribs where it can sit and wait.
The drive back to the loft is the wrong kind of silent. My hands sit steady on the wheel and my jaw is set and the fury has gone quiet and dense and patient. Garrick walked into my shop. He touched my equipment. He built a device designed to kill my techs during a routine drill, and right now he's somewhere on this base or off it, eating dinner, watching television, living his life while I drive home knowing Rowe almost connected a live charge to a test circuit this afternoon.
If I'd been ten minutes later. If I'd skipped the count.
The thought has been running since I opened that casing, and repetition hasn't dulled it.
The loft door opens to the smell of something cooking.
Nox is at the stove. She's barefoot on the kitchen tile in leggings and a sweater with the sleeves shoved past her elbows, her glasses pushed up on top of her head. Nox Bradshaw does not cook. She drinks tea and eats shortbread and whatever I put in front of her, and she has never once touched my stove in the time she's been here. Her standing at it now, stirring something, hits me somewhere I don't have armor for.
A pot of soup is simmering on the back burner, and there's bread on the cutting board that she didn't bake, which means she went out and bought it, which means she left the loft,which means we're going to have a conversation about security protocols that I'm too tired to start right now.
"Rivera called me," she says without turning around, answering the question I hadn't asked yet. "Before you say anything about the bread, Thatcher escorted me to the bakery on the corner and back. I wasn't alone. Don't start."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Your jaw is doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you clench it because you want to lecture me but you know I'll win the argument, so you're deciding whether it's worth the energy."
She's not wrong. I drop my keys on the counter and lean against it, watching her stir the soup with the same focused precision she brings to a line of code. My eyes trace the shape of her shoulder blades through the sweater, the line of her neck where her hair is cut short above it, the way her bare feet grip the tile when she reaches for a spice. I catalog all of it, because that's what I do now, apparently. I inventory Lennox Bradshaw the way I inventory ordnance, and both feel equally essential.
"How bad was it?" she asks, still facing the stove.
"Bad enough."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I've got right now."
She turns and looks at me, and whatever she sees in my face changes her approach. The sharpness softens by a fraction, not into pity, because Nox doesn't do pity, but into something more careful. She pulls two bowls from the cabinet, ladles the soup, and cuts thick slices from the bread, setting it all on the counter without a word.
We eat at the island in a silence that she doesn't try to fill. The soup is good, simple and hot, and I eat the whole bowl without saying so because giving Nox positive reinforcement for feedingme would create a pattern I can see her exploiting for the rest of however long this arrangement lasts.
"There's more," she says.
"I know."
"That wasn't an offer. That was an instruction."
I look at her over the empty bowl. The woman who has not once touched my stove since she moved in just ordered me to eat a second serving of soup she made because she heard someone tried to kill my team, and the command in her voice is doing something to my chest that would be inconvenient if I cared about convenient. "Yes, ma'am."
