as if he had been hit somewhere no medic could reach.

Was it really you?

There was no swagger left in him.

Just confusion and something rawer.

Yes, I said.

He glanced at my wrist.

I remember a hand.

That’s all.

A voice telling me to breathe.

I never saw your face.

You weren’t supposed to.

He opened his mouth, shut it, then said, Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Because the mission had involved assets the Navy would never explain in public.

Because my team existed inside a compartment small enough to fit in a locked drawer.

Because one of us had died getting him and the asset off that dock, and I had no intention of turning that night into currency in a crowded tent.

Because silence is sometimes the price of survival.

I gave him the shortest answer.

Because the file that kept you alive wasn’t the file you got to read.

He stood there with that and nothing else.

We launch in forty minutes, I said.

If you want to help, be useful in reserve.

Then I walked away.

Seven years earlier, I had been twenty-six and attached to a compartmented maritime recovery element that officially did not exist.

My paper title said systems technician.

In practice I handled jamming, drone relays, door control, and the trauma kit because our cell was small and the ocean doesn’t care whose job description ends where.

That night off the Somalia coast, Raven Squad had been part of the front entry for an extraction at a dockside warehouse.

My team was supposed to stay support-side on a secondary vessel and keep the digital picture clean.

Plans love paper.

Reality loves fire.

Our overhead feed went black first.

Then one of the shoreline relays died.

Then the dock lit up with return fire from a container stack nobody believed was occupied.

I was on the comms bench with a headset pressed so tight into my hair it hurt when the call came through.

Man down.

Possible chest.

Need route.

Need route now.

Then another voice, ragged and furious.

Briggs is hit.

I cut the failing uplink, pushed a fresh route through the spare channel, and watched the map go useless anyway when the jammer onshore flooded the band.

When the picture disappears and people are still out there, technical titles stop meaning much.

I grabbed the med bag and went with the recovery pair.

The dock was slick with fuel sheen and seawater.

Light strobed off the warehouse roof.

Somebody had burned through a line of crates, and bits of cardboard ash were floating down like black snow.

I found Briggs behind a broken concrete barrier near the waterline.

His vest had been cut.

Blood was working through his shirt in fast dark pulses.

He was conscious, which was both good and terrible, because he knew enough to be afraid.

He tried to push himself up when I dropped beside him.

Don’t, I told him.

He fought for air and said something that sounded like, Who the hell-

Save it, I said, because I needed him breathing, not curious.

There was an opening under his plate edge and his breath had gone shallow on one side.

I sealed the wound, decompressed his chest, and kept a forearm across him while rounds