"Mom." The word lands in my throat wrong. I clear it. "Where's Lily?"
"Asleep." A pause—the sound of her moving through the house, slippers on the hardwood, the specific creak of the third stair from the landing. "She built a fort in the living room. Blanket and three dining chairs. She's been sleeping in it for two nights."
"Is Theodore with her?"
"Yes." The smile is right there in her voice. "She told me that if she didn't, the T-rex might get him in the night."
Something shifts behind my ribs. Pressure with edges. I put the phone against my shoulder. Press my free hand flat against the cold side of the supply truck. Hold it there until the edges recede enough to function.
"Is she …" My jaw works. "How is she?"
"She had a good day." Another pause. The kettle clicks on. "She asked when you were coming home."
It's hard to believe Lily finished her final infusion. Lily rang the bell when she finished. All the kids do. It's the moment everybody's been waiting for. I was supposed to be there, but Ghost called four hours before, and I headed to West Virginia for an extraction assist.
Hours later, my parents flew her home to Seattle.
"Colt. What's wrong?" Anxiety cracks through my mother's voice.
My forehead finds the cold metal of the truck. The loop runs without me for a moment—Lily, CHOP, ML-273—and I let it. My breath against the steel. The phone presses against my ear. My mother's breath hitches on the other end.
"Pack a bag. Essentials, her medications. I'll send directions."
"Her dinosaurs?"
"Yes."
She knows what that means.
I hang up. Stay at the truck a moment longer, forehead against steel. Then I push off and head back to the command tent to retrieve Stratton.
I choose the vehicle.
Ghost doesn't assign it—he nods to the map, says convoy configuration, standard protective formation. I walk to the second vehicle and get in. Whisper raises an eyebrow at me from across the parking area. I don't acknowledge it.
She comes out under Fuse's escort—hands free. Ghost's call.
I challenge it.
"Hands." The single word drops between us as she reaches the vehicle.
She stops outside the door. Doesn't argue. Just lifts her wrists. I run a fresh zip tie around them, pulling the plastic tight. She watches me do it with that same infuriating, mathematical calm. Her eyes go to the interior, take one sweep—entry, exit, seating arrangement, my position—then she gets in. Fuse closes the door. Takes position in the lead vehicle.
The door seals. The air in the vehicle changes—the specific compression of an enclosed space with someone in it that you haven't decided what to do with.
She sits across from me.
The armored seat configuration puts her back to the vehicle's direction of travel, facing me. She's looking at the space between us, then out the small, reinforced side window at the Nevada desert turning gray-gold in the early light.
She doesn't speak.
Neither do I.
The engine starts. The convoy moves.
Desert. The kind of flat that makes you understand why people who live in it don't miss other landscapes—nothing to interrupt the line of the horizon, nothing to obscure a threat coming from a distance. I've worked this terrain. I know it the way I know every terrain I've worked in. I know what it reveals and what it hides. I know it by the specific silence of a place with no vertical structure to trap sound.
The silence in this vehicle is not that.
