The Blackhawk was already hovering at eight thousand feet over the Hindu Kush when her harness was cut. No warning. No shout. No hesitation. Just the cold glint of a crew chief’s knife flashing in the green haze of night-vision goggles as the last strap holding Staff Sergeant Alexandra Morgan to the helicopter floor snapped free.
Three seconds. That was all she had to understand what had happened.
Three seconds before two sets of gloved hands shoved her into the Afghan night, into a void where no American soldier was meant to return from alive.
The five Delta Force operators in the cabin didn’t speak. They didn’t flinch. They simply watched her disappear into the darkness, as if ridding themselves of her was no different than dropping a spent shell casing.
They believed she was already dead.
They believed no one could survive a fall like that.
They believed wrong.
Because Alexandra Morgan was not the soldier the official U.S. Army files described. Her personnel file — the sanitized version approved for internal circulation — listed her as a highly competent Ranger with specialized training in high-altitude operations and mountain warfare. But the classified file, the one her own unit couldn’t access without Pentagon authorization, had been locked for seven years, buried under clearance codes normally reserved for Cold War intelligence relics.
And halfway across the world, inside the Pentagon itself, the man who knew exactly what that file contained felt his secure phone vibrate against his desk.
Colonel James Harrington, a weathered officer whose steel-gray hair and lined face made him look carved from old American history itself, glanced at the flashing code.
“Phoenix Down.”
His heart froze.
That designation hadn’t been used in decades. It was an emergency signal for deep-cover operators — a Cold War contingency so old most modern officers believed it was a myth.
If Alexandra Morgan was involved… something catastrophic had happened. Something that threatened not just a mission, but the fabric of U.S. military integrity.
He pushed away stacks of classified reports, rose from his chair, and locked his office door.
Across the ocean, the Blackhawk continued its flight path through the thin high-altitude air, oblivious to the storm it had just unleashed.

Inside the cabin, Master Sergeant Blake Harmon finally exhaled, his jaw tightening beneath his tactical mask.
“Mission update,” he said, though his team already knew the line by heart. “The package has been delivered.”
Delivered.
That was the word they used. Not killed. Not eliminated. Delivered.
As if she were a shipment.
Only Specialist Thomas Miller — the youngest operator on the team — reacted. Not with words, but with a small tightening of his grip on his rifle, a flicker of something like doubt in his eyes.
But the others? Professional masks. Blank.
The type of men who had seen enough war to forget what conscience was for.

Eight thousand feet below them, Alexandra Morgan fell.
Wind tore at her uniform and ripped past her ears with a howl that swallowed every other sound. Most people would scream. Most would beg whatever god they believed in. Most would reach for a parachute that wasn’t there.
But Alex Morgan wasn’t “most people.”
Her training didn’t allow panic. Her mind did what it always did when confronted with the impossible: it calculated.
Terminal velocity. Wind drag. Body position. Terrain. Impact angles.
Her thoughts were clinical, razor focused, detached from the raw terror of plummeting toward the earth at a speed that could liquefy bone.
She shifted her arms, adjusting her silhouette.
And she remembered.

Ten years earlier, at Fort Benning, Georgia, she had stood at rigid attention in front of a legend.
Master Sergeant William “Wild Bill” Westmorland — 61 years old, three decades of deployments, a survivor of conflicts most Americans had forgotten or never knew.
He walked around her the way a seasoned wolf circles a younger one. Testing. Measuring. Judging.
“So,” he growled, “you think you’re ready for HALO training?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Eight Rangers started this course last month. Three finished. What makes you think you can do what they couldn’t?”
“I don’t quit, Sergeant.”
He stopped directly in front of her, his shadow long across the Georgia dirt.
“That’s what they all say. But when your chute fails at twenty-five thousand feet… when your reserve fouls… when you have three seconds before you’re nothing more than a dark stain on the map — that’s when we find out who’s a Ranger, and who just wears the tab.”
Alex hadn’t looked away. Not then. Not ever.
Because she’d been falling her entire life.

Her father — Master Sergeant Jason Morgan — had died in Panama during Operation Just Cause.
Her mother, unable to withstand the grief, followed him two years later.
Alex grew up under the stern but steady hand of her uncle, a retired Army sergeant who believed discipline was the only antidote to loss.
Westmorland had read her file, of course.
“Former competitive wingsuit flyer. National champion,” he’d said, curious. “Why’d you give that up?”
She’d answered without hesitation.
“My father was a Ranger. He used to say ‘Rangers lead the way.’ I intend to honor that.”
What she didn’t say was that flying had been the only place she ever felt free.
And falling — true falling — never frightened her.
She understood the sky the way some soldiers understood rifles.
It was in her blood.

Westmorland must have sensed the truth behind her answer, because that was the day he decided to train her himself.
Not the easy way.
The old way.
The way the U.S. Army had trained operators when the Russians still lurked in every shadow, when missions depended on instinct instead of GPS, when survival meant outthinking death rather than outrunning it.
He taught her the tricks that weren’t in the manuals.
He taught her how to control descent by feel alone.
How to shift direction with nothing more than muscle memory and raw will.
How to survive without equipment, without backup, without hope.
Because in the field, equipment failed.
Technology failed.
Comrades failed.
Only the mind — and the heart — remained.

Which was why, as she fell through the cold Afghan night, Alex didn’t freeze.
She didn’t scream.
She adjusted her angle. She breathed once, deeply.
And she remembered the words Westmorland had told her the night she earned her wings:
“It’s not the speed that kills you, Morgan. It’s the direction of impact. Control that, and you live.”

Her tactical jacket — modified with subtle extensions Westmorland had insisted on — caught the air like a crude wingsuit.
She angled toward a dense patch of forest.
Branches could break bones.
But they could also break speed.

Behind her, the Blackhawk kept flying.
Ahead of her, the mountains waited.
And below her, the night opened like a grave.

But Alexandra Morgan did not die.
And her survival would ignite a chain reaction that would soon ripple through courts, bases, embassies, and newsrooms across the United States.

The first branch struck her shoulder with a force that felt like a hammer blow, snapping her collarbone instantly. The second branch tore across her ribs, ripping fabric, bruising bone, but slowing her just enough to prevent the third branch from shattering her spine. She plunged through the canopy like a stone bouncing between slats, guided not by luck but by instinct honed through years of grueling training few soldiers in America had ever endured. The final impact came not as a crash but a slide—a brutal, grinding descent down a snow-coated slope that chewed the remaining speed from her fall and spat her out into a drift at the base of a jagged outcropping. Silence followed. For nearly a minute, Alexandra Morgan did not move. Snowflakes settled onto her unmoving form. The mountains swallowed the echoes of her fall. The forest exhaled. Most people would have died a dozen different ways on the way down. But Alex Morgan wasn’t most people. When she finally drew breath, it was shallow, ragged, and edged with pain—but it was breath. She took inventory the way Westmorland had drilled into her: clinically, one system at a time. Broken collarbone. Several ribs likely fractured. Right knee compromised. Lacerations across arms and legs. Concussion symptoms. Alive. She’d take alive. She pushed up onto her elbow, biting down on a cry as pain shot through her chest like lightning. Her night-vision goggles had been ripped away somewhere in the canopy. Her rifle was gone. But her vest—her modified Cold War–era hybrid vest—remained. And more importantly, inside its left interior pocket, protected by a reinforced sleeve Rivera had secretly sewn in for her… the recording device was still there. Every word Blake Harmon had said on that helicopter. Every damning admission. Every betrayal. Still intact. Still proof. Still a loaded gun aimed at the heart of a conspiracy that reached from Afghanistan all the way back to the continental United States. Proof only mattered if she survived long enough to deliver it. And she had no illusions: if Harmon realized she might still be alive, he would not rest until he finished the job.

She forced her body upright and staggered to her feet, using a tree trunk for balance. The cold bit at her exposed skin, a cruel reminder that the weather here killed unprepared soldiers faster than bullets. She had to move. She had to disappear. She had to get ahead of the hunter who believed he had already won. Step by step, she pushed herself forward through the snow, leaning heavily on branches and rocks as she descended deeper into the valley. The pain was constant, but she wore it the way she wore every hardship: as fuel. Somewhere behind her, the faint thump of rotor blades rolled across the mountains. The Blackhawk was circling back. They were coming to confirm her death. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She slipped beneath a stone overhang just as the helicopter’s searchlight swept across the slope, flooding the terrain in harsh white light. She pressed herself against the frozen rock, slowed her breathing, and covered herself with branches and snow to distort her heat signature. Become the ground, Westmorland’s voice echoed in her skull. When the enemy owns the sky, the earth becomes your camouflage. The light passed over her hiding place twice, pausing briefly on a patch of broken branches before moving on. Moments later, the rotor noise diminished as the helicopter drifted westward. She didn’t wait for silence. She crawled out, dropped into a shallow gully, and followed it northeast—toward the only place she knew she might find help. A village seven miles away. A village she had cultivated an alliance with through respect, language, and shared dangers. They would not betray her. Not like her own had. As she pushed through the frozen underbrush, she thought of Specialist Thomas Miller—the only man on that helicopter whose eyes had shown hesitation. Doubt. Humanity. Would that matter? Or would he follow Harmon off a cliff if ordered? She couldn’t count on him. Couldn’t count on anyone except the man who had turned her into a soldier forged from fire and gravity. The man who had taught her every trick that now kept her alive. Wild Bill Westmorland. If anyone could reach her, he would. If anyone could tear open the Pentagon’s darkest corners to expose a conspiracy, it was him. But even he could not help her if she didn’t live to see sunrise.

At sunrise, she reached the outskirts of the village. The sun turned the snowy mountains pink and gold, but the beauty was wasted on her pain-clouded vision. She limped to Kareem’s home—a small stone house with a blue door and a prayer cloth pinned above the entrance. She knocked once. Then again. The door opened an inch. Kareem stared at her as if he were seeing a ghost. “Allah…” he whispered. “They searched for your body.” “They didn’t find it,” she rasped. He pulled her inside quickly, closing the door behind her. His wife gasped and hurried to fetch bandages, water, and boiled herbs. As they worked, she relayed only the essentials—betrayal, attempted murder, a criminal network stretching across borders and ranks. Kareem nodded gravely. “You helped us. We help you.” While Fatima cleaned her wounds, Kareem retrieved an old radio—dusty, heavy, American-made, a relic from when CIA officers had filled these mountains with covert tools and whispered promises. “This one,” he said, “still talks to ghosts.” She tuned it with shaking fingers. Static. Then— Harrington’s voice. “Phoenix, this is Checkmate Actual. Authentication confirmed. We hear you.” Relief crashed over her. “Checkmate… I’m alive. Injured. Hostile forces in area. Recording intact.” “Rescue package inbound,” Harrington replied. “Twelve hours.” Twelve hours. She could hold for twelve hours. She had to. This wasn’t just about her survival anymore. This was about the United States military being ripped open from the inside by the men sworn to protect it. It was about a general selling American security for personal power. It was about American soldiers dying while their leaders profited. It was about justice. And justice would not be denied.

Hours later, the thump of helicopter rotors returned—not American rescue forces but Harmon’s team. They were hunting again. She hid beneath the floorboards, breathing shallowly while searchlights washed across the village. But the villagers protected her with silence. When the danger passed, Kareem’s son Tariq slipped into the room, out of breath. “They search the eastern ridge now. The leader… he struck one of his men. They argue.” Good. Division meant weakness. Weakness meant time.

Night fell. Extraction was estimated at three hours. She prepared to move with Westmorland’s team as soon as they arrived, every muscle trembling, every breath sharp with pain. Then—gunfire cracked against the southern ridge. Kareem peeked through the curtain. “Someone attacks the Americans.” A diversion? A lucky break? Or something darker? Before she could ask, the radio crackled. “Phoenix, this is Checkmate Bishop. Package arrival accelerated. Thirty minutes.” Thirty minutes. She was going home. Or so she believed.

Westmorland arrived like a storm contained within an aging body. His face, carved by years of battle and loss, softened only when he saw her upright. “You look like hell,” he muttered. “You taught me how,” she shot back. “Damn right I did.” They moved—slowly for her, efficiently for his men—toward the extraction LZ. The air was icy, the ground treacherous, but Alex pushed through, leaning on him only when absolutely necessary. Then the firefight erupted. Harmon’s team had found them. Shots cracked through the darkness, muzzle flashes lighting the ridge like lightning. “Disable, don’t kill,” Westmorland ordered. “They’re still Americans.” But Americans had shot her. Americans had thrown her from a helicopter. Americans had conspired to silence her to protect their smuggling pipeline. Still, she obeyed. Because professionalism mattered. Because Harrington would want their justice clean, not stained by unnecessary death. Then a shadow lunged at her. Nazir Khan. The smuggler she had disrupted for years. Knife flashing. Hatred boiling. They fought—brutal, close, savage. Pain tore through her broken ribs, but she refused to fall. Westmorland dropped Khan with a rifle butt strike to the skull. “Old acquaintance?” she gasped. “Long story,” he grunted. The Chinook descended through the storm of bullets. She staggered toward it. Ten feet. Five feet. A shot rang out. She felt the impact slam her forward—but her vest caught it. She collapsed inside the aircraft as Harmon stared at her from the treeline, disbelief in his eyes. She had beaten him. She had survived the impossible. She had defied death. And he knew their war was not over.

When she awoke days later in a U.S. military hospital in Germany, the world had shifted. Harrington and Westmorland stood beside her, faces grim. Crawford’s people were already scrambling. The conspiracy was alert. The evidence needed securing. She—officially dead—had to vanish again. Then the call came: the evidence had been seized. Everything they had risked. Gone. Crawford was attempting to erase every trace of her survival. She sat up despite the pain. “Then we make new evidence.” Westmorland’s eyes gleamed. “A trap.” Yes. Using herself as bait. Not because she wanted to. Because she had to. America needed the truth. Even if she had to drag it into the light bleeding.

The cabin in the woods had once belonged to a Prohibition bootlegger. Tonight, it belonged to her. She sat in the dim light, bandaged but unbroken. Waiting. Listening. Breathing like a predator caged by necessity. At 22:17, the proximity sensor pinged. Harmon approached alone. Of course he did. He wanted the kill. Wanted the closure. Wanted the confirmation that the woman who had survived the impossible was finally finished. He entered. Weapon raised. Calm. Collected. Confident. “You should be dead,” he said. “Sorry to disappoint,” she answered. They spoke—a dance of words, confessions, egos, and decay. Foster entered next, the snake behind the serpent. And then—betrayal. Not of her. Of Harmon. Crawford had decided both were liabilities. Guns were raised. Shots fired. Chaos erupted. And Alex moved. The trapdoor swallowed her as bullets shredded the walls above. She crawled through the tunnel, emerged into the night, and collapsed into Harrington’s waiting arms. “We got it,” she gasped. “All of it.” The recordings had transmitted off-site. Foster had confessed. Harmon had confessed. They had implicated Crawford completely. It was over. Or so she thought.

Three weeks later, she stood before the Secretary of Defense. Crawford arrested. Seventeen officers detained. Conspiracy dismantled. She should have felt vindicated. But she only felt tired. Until Harrington handed her a folder. A new unit. A new mission. A new oath. The Phoenix Program. A unit designed to hunt threats from within. To keep the Constitution safe from those sworn to defend it. “Why me?” she asked. Harrington smiled faintly. “Because you fell eight thousand feet,” he said, “and stood back up.” Westmorland placed a hand on her shoulder. “Welcome home, Morgan.” As she stepped out of the Pentagon into the bright American sunlight, she understood something with absolute clarity: She hadn’t survived for herself. She had survived for the country that had nearly lost her. And now? She would protect it—from enemies foreign, domestic, and everything in between. The phoenix had risen. And her fire was just beginning.

The moment Alexandra Morgan accepted the Phoenix Program badge, something in her shifted—subtle but profound. The badge wasn’t ceremonial. It wasn’t symbolic. It was a warning. A promise. A burden. The metallic weight of it in her palm felt heavier than any weapon she’d ever carried. Not because of what it allowed her to do, but because of what it asked of her.

As she walked through the Pentagon’s marble atrium, sunlight glinting off polished floors, she caught glimpses of officers and aides whispering into phones, shuffling classified folders, rushing between briefings. The machinery of the United States military, vast and relentless, churned on without hesitation. But beneath the surface—behind the flags, the medals, the patriotic posters—were cracks only a few could see. Cracks she had fallen through. Cracks she had climbed out of. Cracks she was now being asked to seal.

Westmorland walked beside her, hands clasped behind his back, his steps measured and steady. Harrington followed with the stride of a man who had carried secrets longer than most wars lasted.

“You understand,” Harrington said quietly, “that Phoenix isn’t a task force. It isn’t a battalion. It isn’t even a black ops unit.”

“Then what is it?” Alex asked.

“A failsafe,” Westmorland answered.

“For what?”

“For when America needs to be protected from the people wearing its uniform.”

She stopped.

“And that’s legal?”

Westmorland didn’t hesitate. “It’s necessary.”

She considered it for a long moment before nodding. Necessary. That was a word soldiers learned early. They carried it into battles. Into moral compromises. Into graves. Necessary didn’t mean clean. But it meant right, in the context of survival.

Her first briefing took place in a sealed, windowless room beneath the Pentagon—deeper than the Situation Room, deeper than the National Military Command Center. The walls were lined with integrated screens and hardened ceramic plating, designed to survive almost anything short of the apocalypse.

A digital map of the U.S. lit up across the main screen—dots scattered like constellations, blinking red.

“What am I looking at?” Alex asked.

Harrington stepped forward.

“Leak points,” he said. “Nodes of compromised command—officers who were indirectly influenced by Crawford’s operation. Shell companies. Intelligence bottlenecks. Communications anomalies. Some intentional. Some accidental. But all dangerous.”

Alex studied the blinking network.

“You’re saying this wasn’t just one conspiracy.”

Harrington sighed.

“It never is.”

Westmorland pointed to a cluster near the eastern seaboard.

“We traced a logistics trail. Someone in Crawford’s circle funneled money into off-book operations. Slush funds. Procurement anomalies. Night training exercises that didn’t match any declared schedules.”

“Whose signature?” she asked.

Harrington zoomed in.

“Brigadier General Howard Keenan.”

Alex didn’t react—not outwardly. But she knew the name. Everyone did. Keenan was a decorated war hero, known for tactical brilliance and charismatic leadership. Soldiers idolized him. The media loved him. Politicians praised him.

And that made him dangerous.

“What’s the play?” she asked.

Harrington gave her a long, assessing look.

“You get close. You get proof. And then we cut the infection out.”

“And if he’s innocent?”

Westmorland answered immediately.

“Then we find whoever is guilty. And we protect the man who still believes in the system.”

Alex nodded. That was enough.

General Howard Keenan’s headquarters was located in Fort Hamilton—an aging installation in New York with a history stretching back to the Civil War. It was a strange place for a modern general to operate from, but Keenan had always cultivated an image of bridging Old America with New America.

When Alex arrived at the base, her presence didn’t go unnoticed. Soldiers whispered. Officers exchanged looks. A few recognized her from rumors—Ranger, survivor, ghost-woman who fell eight thousand feet and walked away.

She kept her head down and wore a low-profile cover story: reassigned recovery officer analyzing force readiness.

Her first encounter with Keenan felt like stepping into a room with gravity of its own.

He was taller than she expected—broad-shouldered, sharp-jawed, eyes like polished steel. The kind of man who could walk onto any battlefield and soldiers would follow him without hesitation.

“Staff Sergeant Morgan,” he said warmly. “Welcome to Fort Hamilton.”

She saluted. “Thank you, sir.”

“I’ve heard… interesting things about you.”

“I try not to encourage rumors, sir.”

He smiled. “Good. Rumors are rarely accurate, and the truth is usually far more compelling.”

As his gaze lingered on her, she couldn’t shake the sense that he already knew who she really was. Or at least suspected. Men like Keenan didn’t rise to power by being blind.

He gestured for her to walk with him.

“I’ve read your file,” he said. “The sanitized version and the one I wasn’t supposed to see.”

Alex kept her face still.

“And?”

“And I think you’re wasted doing desk work. A soldier with your capabilities should be in the field. Leading. Fighting. Making an impact.”

She chose her next words carefully.

“With respect, sir, my last assignment ended with me being thrown out of a helicopter.”

Keenan stopped. Turned. His expression chilled.

“And the men who did that?”

She met his eyes.

“Dealt with.”

“Good.” He began walking again. “Because I despise traitors.”

The way he said it—calm, sincere, unwavering—sent unease crawling beneath her skin. Not because he sounded guilty. But because he didn’t.

Her instincts weren’t screaming danger.

Not yet.

But they whispered: Watch everything.

Over the next two weeks, she played the role Harrington had crafted for her. She analyzed chains of command. Observed training exercises. Sat in briefings. Tracked funding flows. Monitored communication logs.

Keenan interacted with her often—far too often for a general who supposedly had no reason to notice her. Each time, his attention felt deliberate. Precise. As if he were testing her.

She also noticed something else.

Keenan was clean.

Too clean.

No questionable transactions. No unusual orders. No discrepancies in his operations. His public actions matched his private ones.

Either he was innocent—

—or he was so good that even Phoenix couldn’t detect a flaw.

On the fifteenth day, she received a coded message.

PHOENIX ASSET: TARGET SIGNALS INCREASED ACTIVITY. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Increased activity? But she’d seen nothing.

Unless…

Unless the activity wasn’t happening on paper.

Unless it was happening in shadows.

That night, as rain lashed the windows of the old officer’s quarters she’d been assigned, her door buzzed.

She opened it to find Keenan standing there, wet from the storm.

“Staff Sergeant,” he said. “A word.”

“Of course, sir.”

He stepped into her quarters and closed the door behind him.

For the first time since she arrived, his façade cracked—not with guilt, but with something like exhaustion.

“You’re not who you say you are,” he said.

Silence filled the room.

Alex didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

Keenan continued.

“You’re not here to evaluate readiness. You’re not here to observe training. You’re watching me.”

Her muscles coiled, ready.

He raised a hand. “If I had anything to hide, you wouldn’t be alive right now.”

She didn’t relax.

“Then what do you think I’m doing here?”

Keenan stepped closer.

“I think someone sent you to determine whether I’m a traitor,” he said simply. “And I think they neglected to tell you that someone is framing me.”

Her pulse quickened.

“Framing you for what?”

“For something I didn’t do,” he said. “But I know who did.”

Before she could ask, the power in the building cut out.

The lights died.

The generator failed to kick in.

And in the darkness, somewhere beyond the base walls—

gunfire erupted.

Keenan’s jaw tightened.

“They’re here.”

“Who?” she demanded.

He turned toward the window as shadows moved across the storm-lashed courtyard.

“The people who want you dead,” he said. “And the people who want me erased.”

She drew her sidearm.

“Who sent them?”

Keenan looked at her—eyes sharp, unwavering, battle-ready.

“The same people who threw you out of that helicopter.”

Her breath caught.

“No,” she whispered. “Crawford’s network is gone. We dismantled it.”

Keenan shook his head.

“You dismantled one arm,” he said. “Not the body.”

Lightning flashed, illuminating a dozen armed silhouettes moving toward the building.

Alex felt something cold settle inside her.

“Keenan,” she said slowly, “how long have you known?”

He chambered a round in his rifle.

“Since the day Crawford died with a smile on his face.”

She froze.

“Crawford didn’t smile.”

Keenan looked at her.

“Yes,” he said. “He did.”

Lightning flashed again.

Gunfire erupted.

And the shadow war Alex thought she had finished—

had only just begun.

Gunfire shattered the night like a jagged tear through reality, the kind of gunfire that didn’t ask questions—it just found bodies. Alex pressed her back against the wall as the first volley struck the exterior of the building, sending plaster dust raining from the ceiling. Keenan moved with the precision of a man who’d survived more firefights than meetings, his silhouette calm, almost unnervingly steady in the flicker of distant lightning.

“They’re breaching the south side,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because they always breach the south side.”

That wasn’t an answer, but they didn’t have time for explanations. An explosion rocked the hallway, heat washing through the cramped space like a furnace blast. The shockwave threw Alex sideways. She caught herself on the metal frame of her bunk, breath ripped from her chest, ribs screaming in protest.

Keenan grabbed her arm and pulled her upright.

“We move,” he ordered.

They sprinted into the hallway, boots slamming across the polished tile, smoke already beginning to seep through the ventilation system. The emergency strobes hadn’t activated—which meant the saboteurs had cut not just the power, but the backups. Whoever coordinated this attack knew the base infrastructure intimately.

Someone on the inside.

She followed Keenan down the corridor, ducking as stray shots punched through plaster and shredded lockers. He led her through a stairwell, down two flights, and out a maintenance door that opened into the motor pool.

The rain hammered the asphalt in sheets, turning the world into a silver blur. But even through the downpour, she saw them—silhouettes moving in coordinated formation, suppressors glinting under flashes of lightning.

These weren’t mercenaries.

They weren’t criminals.

They were trained.

American-trained.

Keenan shoved her behind a Humvee as a hail of suppressed rounds tore through the vehicle’s windows. Glass sprayed across her arm. She ignored the sting and returned fire—short, controlled bursts.

Three shadows fell.

Five more advanced.

“What do they want?” she shouted.

Keenan fired a precise headshot. “You.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the only one who can prove what Crawford started.”

“And you?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“I’m the only one who can finish it.”

A rocket whistled across the motor pool.

“MOVE!” Keenan yelled.

They dove in opposite directions as the explosion ripped a Humvee in half. Flames shot upward, painting the rain in shades of hellish orange. Metal debris clattered across the asphalt. Smoke turned the air thick, choking.

Alex crawled beneath a second Humvee, breath shallow, vision blurred from the concussion. She wiped her eyes and scanned the field—

Keenan was gone.

For a split second, panic flared in her chest.

Then a hand grabbed her ankle.

She twisted, ready to strike, but it was Keenan—soaked, dirty, bleeding from a cut above his brow.

“This way,” he said.

They crawled to the fence line, staying low as rounds skipped across the concrete inches above them. Keenan produced bolt cutters from a utility box, snapping through the chain links with brutal efficiency. They slipped into the tree line just as another explosion tore through the motor pool.

The forest swallowed them.

Only when they had reached a thick patch of undergrowth did Keenan finally slow, bracing a hand against a tree. Alex steadied herself on a fallen branch, her lungs burning.

“Talk,” she demanded.

Keenan didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

“You think Crawford was the mastermind,” he said. “He wasn’t. He was a front. A public villain. The kind of man who dies conveniently so the real architects can keep building.”

“And who are the architects?”

Lightning cracked overhead.

Thunder followed like an ancient drum.

“People who believe America needs to fall before it can be rebuilt,” Keenan said. “People who think service members are expendable assets in their grand strategy. People who want to dismantle the chain of command from the top down and replace it with a shadow network.”

“And you were… what? Part of it?”

His expression hardened—not angry, but offended.

“I’ve spent thirty years keeping this country together,” he said. “If I wanted to tear it apart, I wouldn’t waste time with conspiracies.”

“Then why frame you?”

“Because I refused to join them.”

Another explosion rocked the base behind them, brighter and louder than the previous ones.

Alex held his gaze.

“Start at the beginning, General.”

Keenan wiped blood from his brow.

“Three years ago, Crawford approached me about reallocating resources. Off-book. Nothing unusual at first. Every general sees proposals like that. But his numbers didn’t add up. Too many third-party contractors. Too many logistics routes that weren’t tied to any declared operation.”

“You suspected.”

“I confirmed,” he said. “When I dug deeper, I found signals intelligence routed through dormant Cold War channels. Funding being siphoned into covert training camps nowhere on American soil. And worst of all—personnel lists of dead soldiers being used for active operations.”

Alex exhaled slowly.

“Ghost units.”

“Exactly. Units that don’t exist on paper but operate in the field. Units that answer to no command but theirs.”

“And Crawford ran these?”

Keenan shook his head.

“Crawford was a middleman. A very well-connected, very corrupt middleman. But not the architect.”

“Then who?”

Keenan hesitated.

Before he could answer, the forest to their right erupted in gunfire.

Alex shoved him down as bullets shredded branches above their heads.

“We’re not alone,” she hissed.

“No,” Keenan said. “We’re being herded.”

“Toward what?”

He looked around—and swore.

Before she could process why, a blinding spotlight ignited through the trees.

A Blackhawk descended.

Not U.S. Army markings.

Private.

Gray.

Unregistered.

Keenan stood slowly, hands raised.

“Don’t,” Alex warned.

He gave her a grim half-smile. “They won’t kill me.”

Before she could ask why, a voice boomed over the helicopter loudspeaker.

“Brigadier General Howard Keenan,” it said. “Stand by for retrieval.”

Not arrest.

Retrieval.

Alex’s stomach dropped.

“You’re one of them,” she whispered.

He turned to her sharply.

“No. But they think I am. And they need me alive.”

“And me?”

The spotlight shifted to her.

“You?” the voice said. “You’re a loose end.”

Keenan lunged to pull her out of the blast radius—

Too late.

A concussion round detonated beside her, throwing her across the forest floor. Her ears rang violently. Her vision spiraled. Shapes blurred into streaks of color.

She tried to stand—her body refused.

Through the haze, she saw Keenan being pulled into the helicopter by masked operators. Not fighting. Not resisting. A soldier resigned to a larger battle.

Then the Blackhawk lifted.

Rain pounded her face.

Her vision darkened.

The last thing she heard before losing consciousness—

“We have Phoenix. Prepare the next phase.”

Phoenix.

Not her.

Keenan.

They weren’t hunting her.

They were hunting him.

And she had walked straight into the center of their operation.

She woke to the slow, mechanical beeping of a monitor and the antiseptic smell she was starting to resent on instinct. For a second, her brain tried to place it as the German hospital again, but the ceiling above her was wrong—plain, low, industrial tiles instead of clean white panels. The lighting was dimmer. The air was colder. There was the faint hum of old air-conditioning, not the polished silence of a modern military facility. Underground, she thought. Or close enough. Someone had moved her. Again.

“Welcome back, Morgan,” a familiar voice said.

She turned her head. Pain flickered across her skull, but not like last time—no deep concussion vertigo, just a lingering ache. She could live with aches.

Harrington sat in a metal folding chair beside her cot, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled, tie loosened. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days and wasn’t planning to start now.

“Sir,” she managed, her throat dry. “Either I’m very lucky, or you and Westmorland have lousy timing.”

A corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re alive. I’m calling that a win.”

She forced herself upright, ignoring the alarm the monitor gave when her heart rate spiked. “How long was I out?”

“Eighteen hours.”

“Where?”

“Undisclosed facility in Virginia,” he said. “Never officially existed. Old Cold War shelter the Pentagon pretends it sealed decades ago.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “Westmorland had a key.”

“He had a memory,” Harrington corrected. “Some of us still remember what the country looked like before we trusted everything to digital systems.”

She slid her legs off the cot and grimaced as her bare feet hit cold concrete. Someone had wrapped her ribs again, adjusted her shoulder brace, taped a fresh line of butterfly bandages along her temple where the concussion round had grazed her.

“You pulled me out of the woods,” she said.

“Not personally,” Harrington replied. “But yes. We were monitoring your beacon. When the base went dark and then lit up like the Fourth of July, we moved. Found you eight miles outside the perimeter. No sign of the team that hit the place. No Blackhawk.”

“Of course not,” she muttered. “They’re professionals.”

Harrington’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You saw them?”

“Not clearly,” she admitted. “Suppressors, no markings. But the helo wasn’t Army. Civilian frame, military hardware. That’s not the kind of bird you rent from a sightseeing company.”

“And Keenan?” Harrington asked quietly.

She exhaled. The image burned into her memory: Keenan being pulled into the chopper, not fighting, not panicking—just going, like a man who had long ago accepted that this end was coming.

“They took him,” she said. “Called him Phoenix.”

Harrington didn’t move, but something in the room tightened.

“Phoenix,” he repeated.

“Yeah,” she said. “I thought that was my cursed nickname.”

“That’s your call sign,” he said. “In their system, it’s something else.”

“Explain,” she said.

He leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight.

“Years before you were born,” he began, “there was a black project on U.S. soil. No public record. Barely any internal record. It was designed to create what they called ‘continuity actors’—people who could step in if elected leadership was compromised, if the chain of command shattered. Not politicians. Not generals. Quiet men. Shadow operators with access to funding, assets, paramilitary capabilities outside the normal command structure.”

“Illegal,” Alex said flatly.

“Blatantly,” Harrington agreed. “It was shut down. On paper. We thought it died with the last of the old Cold War cowboys. We were wrong. Someone kept it on life support. Someone repurposed it. Someone decided to use that skeleton to build something new.”

“And they called that Phoenix,” she said.

He nodded once.

“And Keenan?”

“Was one of the candidates once upon a time,” Harrington said. “Groomed for it. Then he saw what it really meant and walked. Quietly. No whistleblowing, no martyr act. He just refused to sign, refused to play. The people behind it don’t forgive that kind of defiance.”

“So they framed him,” she said. “They make him look dirty. Keep him isolated. Then, when it’s convenient…”

“They retrieve him,” Harrington finished. “Reprogram him. Or kill him and use his name as a ghost signature.”

The concrete room felt smaller suddenly.

“You suspected all this,” she said slowly. “Before you sent me in.”

“I suspected pieces,” he said. “Not the entire picture. You’ve filled in some of the blanks.”

“I didn’t fill in anything,” she shot back. “I walked into an ambush. Again.”

Harrington didn’t flinch.

“That was always a risk.”

“Is that what I am?” she asked. “A reusable risk?”

“No,” he said calmly. “You’re a weapon I trust to aim herself.”

That shut her up more effectively than any order.

He stood, stretching his back.

“Westmorland will be here in twenty,” he said. “He’s scraping every scrap of signal from that base assault—satellite bleed, stray RF, anything. We’re going to find that helicopter.”

“And when we do?” she asked.

“Then,” Harrington said, “Phoenix stops being a codeword and starts being a reckoning.”

He left her alone.

She sat in the quiet with the soft beep of the monitor and the hum of dead men’s secrets in the walls.

For a few long minutes, she let herself feel it. The anger. The frustration. The grim weight of realizing that Crawford had just been Chapter One. That behind him stood architects who thought in decades and continents and didn’t care who had to die along the way.

Her father had believed in a simple America—flawed but fixable, the kind of country where a Ranger’s oath meant something.

Her America was different.

But it was still hers.

And she wasn’t going to let a shadow network of self-appointed saviors burn it down in the name of “rebuilding.”

She swung her legs fully to the floor, stood up, and walked—slowly, stiffly—away from the cot. Pain flared, but pain reminded her she was still in the fight. She found a metal sink, splashed cold water on her face, and stared at her reflection.

The woman in the mirror looked older than her thirty-two years. New scars. New lines at the corners of her eyes. But the fire was still there.

“Alright,” she told herself. “Let’s hunt.”

The door opened again five minutes later. Westmorland walked in without ceremony, carrying a battered laptop under one arm and an old aluminum case under the other. He looked like he’d just come off a ruck march instead of a long intelligence shift.

“On your feet already,” he observed. “Of course you are.”

“Missed you too,” she said.

He set the laptop on a metal table, popped it open, and tapped a few keys. The screen lit up with static and grainy images.

“What’ve you got?” she asked, stepping closer.

“Not much,” he admitted. “Couple of weather satellites caught ghost reflections, enough to confirm the route. Your uninvited friends didn’t use transponders and flew nap-of-the-earth whenever they could. But they still threw shadows.”

He zoomed in on a blur that slowly resolved into a familiar shape—rotors, fuselage, the grey unmarked skin of the Blackhawk that had stolen Keenan.

“Tracked them southeast,” Westmorland said. “They stayed low, stayed dirty, cut through civilian air corridors to hide in the noise. Then they went dark over the Atlantic seaboard.”

“Offshore?” Alex asked.

“Unclear,” he said. “They could’ve landed at one of three facilities along the coast that we know exist but aren’t exactly advertised on recruiting posters.”

“Official bases?” she asked.

“Official enough to have fences,” he said. “Unofficial enough to not show up on any tour.”

He clicked again. Three red markers pulsed on a digital map of the East Coast.

“Rhode Island,” he said. “Old naval installation turned ‘joint training complex.’ The Carolinas—private contractor airfield with impressive legal shields. And Florida—because of course it’s Florida. Retired testing site. All three have the right specs. Isolated. Controlled airspace. Infrastructure to service rotary aircraft.”

“We can’t hit all three,” Alex said. “Not at once.”

“No,” Westmorland said. “But we don’t have to. Your friends left us a breadcrumb.”

He opened the aluminum case. Inside were neatly coiled cables and an ugly, heavy piece of equipment that looked like a radio built by someone who didn’t trust anything manufactured after 1985.

“This,” he said, patting it almost affectionately, “is a wideband passive receiver tied into some software my comms guy built before the internet knew what ‘encryption’ meant. You remember the frequency Rivera baked into your gear?”

“The Cold War ghost band,” she said. “Yeah.”

“The people who took Keenan used a variant,” he said. “We caught one burst—just one—but it was enough to know they pinged a receiving station somewhere within a fifty-mile radius of this.”

He tapped the map again.

One of the three markers brightened.

“Carolinas,” Alex said.

“Carolinas,” he confirmed. “Private contractor strip. Officially used for equipment testing and ‘security solutions development.’ Unofficially? Perfect staging ground for something you don’t want the American people to know about.”

“Who owns it?” she asked.

He gave her a look.

“You already know the answer.”

Of course she did.

A shell company. Tied to another shell company. Tied to a defense contractor that donated to the right campaigns and never seemed to lose a bid.

“Alright,” she said. “So we go to the Carolinas.”

Harrington reappeared in the doorway as if he’d been waiting for his cue.

“You go,” he said. “We don’t.”

Alex frowned. “We?”

“Phoenix Program has three operatives,” he said. “You. Westmorland. Me. If we all move, we leave Washington blind. We need someone watching the chessboard while the rest of you knock over pieces.”

“Sir—”

“Decision made,” he said, not unkindly. “Your cover is already shredded thanks to what happened at Fort Hamilton. The people behind this know you’re alive, they know you’re hunting, and they’re going to be planning for you. Good. Let them. They still don’t know how you think.”

He slid a slim folder onto the table.

“New identity. Civilian consultant attached to a congressional oversight subcommittee auditing contractor compliance. Boring enough that no one will want to read further. Dangerous enough that the right people will get nervous.”

Alex opened the folder. A new name. A new background. Fake degrees, fake employment history, all meticulously crafted to withstand casual scrutiny and most professional vetting.

“You’ve been busy,” she said.

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” Harrington replied dryly. “And we’ve seen enough of his work.”

She closed the folder.

“When do we leave?” she asked.

“Wheels up in two hours,” Westmorland said. “Old bird, no transponder, filed as a weather research flight. Three souls on board—one pilot who owes me a favor, one grumpy retiree, and one extremely stubborn woman who refuses to stay dead.”

She smirked despite herself.

“We get eyes on the strip,” she said. “We confirm Keenan. Then what?”

“Then,” Harrington said quietly, “you make a decision.”

She looked up.

“What kind of decision?”

“The kind this program was built around,” he said. “If Keenan’s compromised beyond recovery, you take him off the board. If he isn’t, you get him out. No one else will know enough to tell the difference but you.”

For a heartbeat, she thought he was joking.

He wasn’t.

“You’re asking me,” she said slowly, “to play judge, jury, and firing squad.”

“I’m asking you,” Harrington said, “to decide whether a man is a victim or a weapon aimed at the United States. And then act accordingly.”

The room seemed to tilt for a second. Not from concussion—those days were past. From the weight of what he was really saying.

This wasn’t about one general anymore.

This was about the soul of the institution her father had died serving.

She met Harrington’s eyes.

“And who judges me?” she asked.

He held her gaze.

“We all do,” he said. “Every day. That’s what being Phoenix means. There’s no glory in this. No medals. No parades. You live with what you do. Or you don’t. That’s the job.”

Westmorland closed the aluminum case with a sharp click.

“Pack light,” he told her. “Dress like someone who’d complain about per diem rates in a congressional hearing. Bring a gun you can hide under a blazer. We take off in one hour and fifty-two minutes.”

He left.

Harrington lingered.

“Alex,” he said softly. “If you find him and he’s still himself—really himself—he’s an asset we can’t afford to lose. If he’s not…”

“I know,” she said.

He nodded once and walked out, leaving her alone with the folder, the old scars, and the new ones waiting to be written.

She looked down at the fake life in her hands, then at the small Phoenix emblem on the badge lying beside it.

There are worse ghosts to be, she thought.

Two hours later, an unremarkable twin-engine plane clawed its way into the overcast Virginia sky, turning south toward a stretch of Carolina coastline most Americans only knew from vacation brochures.

Alex sat by the small window, blazer draped over her shoulder, hair pulled back into an efficient knot. She could have passed for any number of Washington professionals—analysts, lawyers, auditors. People who made decisions with pen strokes instead of bullets.

Across from her, Westmorland dozed with the easy stillness of a man who could fall asleep on a pile of rocks in a hurricane. She knew he wasn’t really asleep. His breathing had the wrong rhythm. His fingers tapped once, twice, then stopped whenever the aircraft jolted in turbulence.

He opened one eye.

“You’re overthinking,” he said.

“Always,” she replied.

“You can’t solve this in your head before we land,” he said. “You’ll just wear yourself out trying.”

“I like a plan,” she said. “Plans are comforting.”

“Until first contact,” he replied. “Then they’re just paper.”

She couldn’t argue.

He looked at her for a long moment, then asked a question she didn’t expect.

“You ever think about walking away?”

She blinked.

“From what?”

“From all of it,” he said. “From the Rangers, from Phoenix, from the mess behind the curtain. Cash out your retirement, buy some land in the middle of nowhere, raise chickens, learn to forget.”

“Chickens hate me,” she said automatically.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“So am I,” she replied. “I did a survival course in rural Georgia. Chickens are demons in feathers.”

He didn’t smile.

“Alex.”

She sighed.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I’ve thought about it. You’d have to be insane not to. Every time I wake up in a hospital attached to something that beeps, I think about it. Every time I watch someone I trusted turn into a headline, I think about it.”

“And?”

“And then I remember my father in uniform,” she said. “And my mother staring at the flag they handed her. And the kids in Kareem’s village looking at me like I was some kind of guardian angel when really I was just a woman with a rifle and orders she didn’t fully understand.”

She looked back out the window at the clouds sliding past.

“And I remember that if people like me walk away, the people who don’t give a damn about any of that get to write the rules.”

Westmorland nodded slowly.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“You?”

He chuckled once, a low, rusty sound.

“I retired, didn’t I?” he said. “Bought a house. Grew some tomatoes. Tried to go fishing on weekends like a normal person. You know how long that lasted?”

“Two weeks,” she guessed.

“Three days,” he corrected. “Tomatoes were boring. Fish didn’t shoot back. I found myself checking tree lines for snipers in the middle of a goddamn supermarket. Some of us aren’t built for quiet.”

“Maybe we’re broken,” she said.

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Or maybe we’re just what shows up when quiet needs protecting.”

The plane banked gently, beginning its descent. The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom, announcing some bland lie about their destination and purpose.

Alex tightened her seatbelt and adjusted the holster beneath her blazer, feeling the familiar weight of the compact pistol against her ribs.

“Showtime,” she said.

Westmorland’s eyes sharpened.

“Remember,” he said, “you’re here to scare them first. Make them nervous. Nervous men make mistakes.”

“And if they don’t?” she asked.

He gave her a look older than either of their careers.

“Then,” he said, “you do what you always do when someone cuts your harness and pushes you out the door.”

She smiled thinly.

“I control the fall.”

The runway emerged from the fog like a secret someone had tried very hard to forget. Fenced, guarded, ringed with cameras disguised as light fixtures and birdhouses. A small terminal building squatted at the far end—nondescript, beige, the kind of architecture designed not to be remembered.

As the plane rolled to a stop, Alex straightened her blazer, tucked the badge into an inside pocket, and reached for the folder with her new identity.

Washington consultant.

Contract compliance.

Bureaucratic shark.

Not the kind of predator these men were used to dealing with.

Two security personnel waited at the base of the stairs—uniforms clean, boots polished, eyes obscured by mirrored sunglasses despite the overcast sky. Their weapons were holstered but their hands hovered just close enough to send a clear message.

This was not a friendly tour.

“Ms. Langford?” one of them asked, using her alias.

She nodded. “That’s me.”

“Welcome to Atlantic Systems Field,” the man said. “We were told to expect your… inspection.”

He made the last word sound like a minor infection.

“‘Audit,’” she corrected mildly. “Inspections are for things that might pass. Audits are for things that usually don’t.”

The other guard’s jaw tightened.

Westmorland stood slightly behind her, hands in the pockets of a worn windbreaker, playing the role of middle-aged assistant whose job was to carry things and be ignored.

“Is there a problem with us doing our jobs?” she asked pleasantly.

“Of course not,” the first guard said quickly. “Congressional oversight is very important.”

It was almost impressive how he managed to make each word sound like an insult.

“Good,” she said. “Then let’s not waste each other’s time.”

As they walked toward the terminal, she felt the subtle tug of eyes on her from at least three different angles. Roof. Hangar door. A fuel truck that seemed a little out of place.

They were being watched.

Good.

Let them look.

Let them underestimate.

Bureaucrat.

Consultant.

Mouth with a badge.

Not a threat.

Not a Ranger who’d fallen out of the sky and lived.

Inside the terminal, the air smelled like coffee, copier toner, and money. Not cash—the heavier scent of contracts, invoices, billable hours, and plausible deniability.

A man in an expensive suit waited for them near the reception desk.

“Ms. Langford,” he said with a smile that never reached his eyes. “I’m Daniel Hales. Facility director. Always happy to cooperate with our partners in Washington.”

Partners.

Not overseers.

The language mattered.

“All I need from you, Mr. Hales,” she said, shaking his hand, “is access. The more you cooperate, the faster I get out of your hair and back to reading boring spreadsheets in D.C.”

He laughed on cue.

“You’ll find everything in order,” he said. “We pride ourselves on transparency.”

Liar, she thought.

But that was fine.

She didn’t come here for honesty.

She came here for cracks in the story.

While Hales guided her through the public-facing parts of the facility—briefing rooms, a small training center, offices filled with monitors streaming benign feeds—Westmorland drifted just out of their orbit, noting door placements, badge scanners, camera blind spots.

Twice, Alex caught him glancing at what looked like a simple maintenance hallway near the rear of the main building. Both times, a uniformed guard just happened to be walking by it at the same time.

Too much attention for a hallway that supposedly led to mop sinks and spare light bulbs.

Eventually, Hales pivoted to his prepared defense.

“As you can see,” he said, gesturing broadly, “our operations are entirely above board. All our flight logs are cross-filed with FAA records. Our training exercises are documented. We even had a Christmas charity toy drop last year.”

“How festive,” she said blandly.

She let him talk. Let him fill the silence with rehearsed lines about compliance and patriotism and job creation. Let him build his own noose out of words.

Then she picked her moment.

“Mr. Hales,” she said, pausing near a window that overlooked one of the hangars, “I have a minor concern.”

His smile stiffened.

“Oh?”

“It’s about an undocumented rotary flight three nights ago,” she said. “Low-altitude from the northeast. No filed transponder. No stated manifest. Landed here at approximately 0300.”

He didn’t blink.

That, more than anything, told her she’d hit something.

“I’m not aware of any such flight,” he said smoothly. “Our records—”

“Your records don’t show it,” she agreed. “Which is the problem. Because NORAD’s border radar caught a rotor silhouette that vanished right about… there.”

She pointed toward the far end of the runway.

“And because a retired colonel I trust has a satellite scrap that suggests the same helicopter left with one additional passenger.”

He kept smiling, but his eyes had gone colder.

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,” Hales said. “We have contractors moving equipment at all hours—”

“Equipment doesn’t have a pulse,” she said. “The man they took did.”

He studied her for a long moment.

“You’re not just oversight,” he said finally.

“Neither are you,” she replied.

He exhaled once, a small, humorless sound.

“Ms. Langford,” he said, “I think we’ve reached the point where the tour ends and the lawyers begin.”

Behind her, Westmorland shifted ever so slightly—weight adjusting, stance changing, eyes narrowing on the subtle movement of four guards drifting into a closer perimeter.

“You can bring in as many lawyers as you like,” Alex said calmly. “But sooner or later, someone is going to have to open that maintenance hallway at the back and show me what you’re so eager to hide.”

Hales’s smile finally cracked.

For the first time, she saw the man underneath the polished surface.

Not a host.

Not a manager.

A handler.

He glanced toward the hallway, then back at her.

“I don’t think you understand the situation you’re in, Ms. Langford,” he said quietly.

“Oh, I do,” she said. “I’m standing in a privately operated facility on United States soil, asking about an unregistered helicopter that may have abducted a U.S. general. I understand it perfectly.”

He shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “You’re a very small problem standing in the lobby of something much bigger than you.”

He gave a barely perceptible nod.

The four guards straightened.

Hands moved toward weapons.

Westmorland’s voice came in low, almost conversational from behind her.

“Alex.”

“Yeah?”

“Remember what Harrington said about plans.”

“They don’t survive first contact.”

“Right,” he said. “We’re at second contact.”

The air in the room tightened, stretched—

And somewhere, deep inside the facility, beneath their feet, a metallic door clanged shut like the lid of a coffin.

Whatever was in that maintenance corridor—

they’d just been locked out of it.

Or locked in with it.

Either way, this was about to stop being an audit—

and start being a war.