"Indeed." Krait's lips curved, not quite a smile. "Innocence can be performed. Which is which, Chief Petty Officer? That's the question Komodo and I are tasked with answering." She stepped closer to Tex, close enough to smell the coffee on his breath, the honest sweat of a man who'd been running hard. "But I can't answer it while I'm chasing ghosts through the Sonoran Desert. While you're burning daylight for a reason we don’t know about."
She gestured toward the hydraulic lifts that housed workstations. Toward the server room hidden beneath the maintenance pit. Toward the tactical gear and weapons caches that transformed this rusted husk into a fortress. "Where is she?” Tex just stared at her. “Why are you protecting her when your mission is to help us capture her, and you’ve done nothing but conceal the knowledge?” Krait asked, and she didn't need the confirmation in Tex's eyes to know. "What is happening with this energy that’s driving us, won’t let me sleep, and hammers at every part of the vow I made?”
“Have you contacted Langley?”
“No. We don’t need them to know anything right now.” She shifted her shoulders as her own ghostly apparition slithered around her.She inhaled deliberately, theatrically. "Do we?"
Brawler and his feral-looking K9 had reached her periphery now, massive, his hand on his weapon. Krait didn't turn, but she let him feel the shift in her stance, the coiling readiness that made her more dangerous than her blade. The dog watched her every move.
"Step back, Reaver," Brawler growled. Beast growled low in his throat.
"Or?" The knife spun once, fast, a silver blur. She caught it by the handle, blade pointing down her forearm, ready for the upward cut that would open a man's throat before he could finish his next breath. "You'll shoot me? Sic your dog on me? After you've worked so hard to keep your little secrets?" She finally looked at him, letting the phantom overlay show in her eyes, the serpent's ghost coiled around her human frame, scales rippling with patient menace. "I don't think you will. If you were going to escalate, you'd have done it already. You're stalling, same as you've been stalling since before the briefing. I want to know why. Komodo and I are done with this charade. We’re forcing the issue."
Komodo emerged from the shadows near the bay door, silent as his namesake, his leather duster moving like liquid shadow. He'd been there all along, waiting, watching, calculating the angles. His dark eyes found hers, and she saw the minute nod.Proceed.
"Here's what happens now," Krait said, her voice dropping to conversational warmth that was somehow worse than her threat. "We stop the theater. You take us to her, or we stop pretending cooperation and begin active containment." She looked at each of them: Tex rigid with command, Bondo furious and trapped, Shark calculating exit strategies, Dagger burning hot at the edges, Brawler and Beast barely restrained violence. "I've been patient. I'm not patient by nature, Lieutenant. I'm efficient. And this—" She gestured at the empty hangar, the false leads, the exhausted men. "—this is inefficient."
"Lead us to her," Krait said. "Or tell us why you're protecting a woman accused of breaking our edicts. But decide now. Komodo's patience is thinner than mine, and we’re ready to do what’s necessary. We won’t leave your team intact."
The knife hung between them, silver catching the light, while the desert wind sang its endless, abrasive song. Krait held it by the blade, the edge kissing her palm, and watched the SEALs exchange glances, impressive microscopic negotiations of loyalty and mission that she tracked without seeming to. The silence stretched, taut as a tripwire. She didn’t want to take on this dangerous, tactical threat.
Then Komodo moved closer, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her. The proximity was deliberate. They'd hunted together long enough that she read the tension in his frame, the way his nostrils flared slightly, scenting something beyond the physical.
"I have a bead on her," Komodo said, his voice low and precise. "The energy surge...it opened something. I can track her signature now, across thresholds. She’s in the wilds of Peru."
Tex's jaw tightened. The flint in his eyes softened to resignation. The gig was up, and they all knew it.
"She has proof," Tex said, gesturing toward the server bank against the far wall. "She gave me the codes to her systems. You might want to take a look.”
Krait's grip on the blade shifted. She'd been skeptical from the start. The profile didn't align. Lechuza had been a ghost, precise, controlled, never sloppy enough to leave the evidence trail that had led to her sanction. It had crossed her mind that someone had wanted her hunted, and someone had manufactured the proof. Anger surged that a woman she loved like a sister had been cut from their protection, forced into fugitive status, and hunted by her own.
"Show me," she said.
Tex moved to the terminal, fingers flying across the interface. Screens lit up with a stream of data from a dedicated woman who'd been running down her own doppelgänger while the world accused her of murder. The pattern assembled itself in Krait's mind. Lechuza hadn't gone rogue. She'd been chasing the hand that was wearing her face.
“Date stamps, geolocation data, travel logs. She was here, in Arizona, during three of the supposed assassination hits. Lisbon, Istanbul, and Sana’a, all while she was tracking leads on her framer in this facility."
"She was hunting the impersonator," Krait said. Then her breath got trapped. She couldn’t believe her eyes. “Komodo…”
He moved closer. "Eva?" His mouth thinned. “That’s impossible.”
“Why?” Tex asked.
“She’s dead…I killed her myself. She gave me no choice.” Krait looked at Komodo. The Shadowguard secrets were theirs to keep. But she couldn’t shake the thought that these SEALsand her order were now connected by some cosmic force, one and the same.
The words hit like stones. Krait's eyes found Tex's shoulder, where the ethereal mantle of what could only be this strange Veil-sight showed the ghost of a stallion, mane tossing, hooves striking sparks against air that shouldn't hold weight. She was getting used to it. Her acceptance made it fade somewhat.
"That diaphanous horse," she said, her voice dry. "It has nothing to do with you being a cowboy, does it?"
Tex's mouth quirked, almost a smile. "Stallion. Apparently my Veil form. Shadowguard manifestation. The whole team's...changed."
Krait turned. Her gaze swept the hangar, seeing them now with Veil-sight fully engaged. Brawler stood massive with Beast beside him, alert, and the thread of gold between man and dog wasn't affection but something deeper, a bond that transcended species. She couldn’t unsee the formless, massive white wolf coiled around their legs, invisible to mundane eyes.
"What's happening with you and your dog?" she said. "I don't think I want to know."
She moved to Shark, where the air itself seemed to shimmer with pressure, the otherworldly suggestion of something massive and finned cutting through atmosphere like water. "Jaws," she deadpanned.
Then Dagger, radiating heat she could feel from three meters away, the phoenix coiled in his chest like a second heartbeat. Bondo, armored and immovable, the rhino's horn ghosting from his forehead. The Veil forms hummed through the hangar like a power grid coming online. Komodo’s lizard ghost and her snake manifestation told her this went beyond anything that would make sense.
