By the time the hospital windows started to shake, Eva Weston still had someone else’s blood drying on her gloves.

It streaked across the blue nitrile like rust, a faint reminder that thirty minutes ago she’d had her hands inside a man who carried more stars on his shoulders than most people saw in their lifetime. Now those same hands were clenched at her sides in the director’s office, as if sheer will alone could keep this from unraveling.

Riverside Union Medical Center, Southern California. A Tuesday that had started like any other – commuters on I-215, morning show chatter, a clear American sky. Inside the hospital, everything felt fluorescent and air-conditioned and safe.

Except Eva knew better.

“You’re done here.” Director Hill’s voice was razor sharp, his Boston accent flattened by years in administration. The blinds behind him cut the California sun into thin, judgmental stripes across his desk. “No authorization. No protocol. You crossed the line.”

Eva didn’t sit. Couldn’t. Her pulse still hadn’t settled from the trauma bay. “He wasn’t crashing,” she said quietly. “He was poisoned. And none of you saw it.”

Hill’s jaw flexed. “Turn in your badge before I call security.”

She slid her hospital ID from her scrub pocket. For a second she just held it, thumb resting on her photo – a woman with steady eyes and a tired smile who’d pretended for five years that she was just a nurse in a civilian hospital. Then she placed the badge on his desk.

“You’ll need to document the incident with Risk Management,” she said, voice calm, almost disturbingly so. “The general will have questions.”

“If he survives,” Hill snapped. “Which he almost didn’t because of you.”

Eva’s mouth twitched, something between a flinch and a laugh. If only he understood how backward that was.

She turned and walked out.

The hallway outside the director’s office was a river of scrubs and clattering carts. Conversations clipped themselves short when she passed. One resident stared down at his tablet as if it had suddenly become fascinating. A nurse she’d trained with refused to meet her eyes.

“She’s a nurse, not a doctor,” someone muttered behind her. “Always thought she was more than she is.”

It should have hurt more than it did. But the only thing Eva could feel was the echo of that moment in the trauma bay, the way the world had narrowed until it was just her, the general, and the color leeching out of his face like someone turning down a dimmer switch.

The memory hit with the clarity of a photograph.

The trauma bay doors had burst open just after 9:00 a.m., slamming back so hard the walls shuddered. A paramedic shouted for a crash cart. Techs rushed forward. For a second, the entire ER froze – and then everyone moved at once.

“Male, mid-60s,” one of the paramedics barked as they rolled in the stretcher. “Collapsed in transport. Heart rate unstable. GCS dropping.”

The man on the gurney wore a dark navy blazer with ribbons and pins glinting along the chest – not dress blues, but close. Service pin near the lapel. American flag cufflinks. His face had the toughened look of someone who’d seen things most people never imagined. But right now, death was winning.

He should have looked like every other cardiac case she’d ever seen. But he didn’t.

Eva saw the gray along his jaw, yes. The sweat on his forehead, yes. But it was his hands that stopped her cold. The fingers were curled in tight, unnatural hooks, like the nerves didn’t trust the muscles anymore. A tremor danced under his skin, wrong in a way no standard arrhythmia could explain.

“Move,” Dr. Meyers snapped, pushing past her to the head of the bed. The cardio attending, silver hair, expensive watch, a man who ran rounds like military briefings. “He’s going into cardiac failure. Get me Epi, crash cart on standby.”

“No,” Eva whispered.

No one heard her. Or maybe they did and decided it didn’t matter what the trauma nurse thought. Either way, she moved with the crowd, her training overriding everything else. Oxygen mask. Monitor leads. Blood pressure cuff. Orders ricocheting off the walls.

She slid to the side of the bed and lifted his eyelid with her thumb, shining her penlight. His pupil slammed down tight against the beam, so fast it made her stomach drop.

Too fast. Too strong.

Not cardiac.

Neurotoxic.

The word rang in her skull like a bell.

Eva’s breath shortened. The room buzzed with clicks and beeps and shouted numbers, but it all went muffled. Her gaze flicked down – faint purple shadowing around his fingernails, the tightness in his jaw, the pattern of his breathing that didn’t match his heart at all.

No. No, it can’t be.

She had seen this before. Just not in any American hospital.

“Step back, Weston,” Meyers ordered, elbowing her aside. “Let us handle this. We need Epi, now.”

“He doesn’t need Epi,” she said, voice low but steady. “He needs an antidote.”

The word sliced through the noise.

Meyers paused, annoyed. The attending at his side shot Eva a look that said she’d just committed a crime. “What did you say?”

But Eva was already moving. She crossed to the emergency tox tray, fingers flying over labels that most staff barely glanced at during shifts. Standard antidotes. Naloxone. Flumazenil. Pralidoxime. Her hand froze on a vial almost no one in this building had ever used.

Her pulse hammered. Memory flashed – a blast of heat in the Middle East, shrieking radios, bodies twisting as invisible poison climbed their nerves. An American flag patch covered in dust.

“Weston!” Meyers roared. “You are out of line!”

She didn’t hear him anymore.

She was on a battlefield again.

Eva loaded the antidote and stepped back to the bed.

“Don’t you dare—” someone shouted.

She pushed the needle into the general’s IV line and injected.

The room erupted.

“You could kill him!”

“She’s not authorized!”

“Security!”

Eva didn’t move. She watched the monitor, her lips moving silently. Counting. One. Two. Three. Four.

For a terrifying second, the heart monitor flatlined. A dead horizontal line that felt like it reached out and touched everyone in the room.

Then a spike.

Another.

A rhythm.

Gasps rippled through the trauma bay.

The general’s chest hitched. His fingers twitched toward Eva’s hand. His eyes snapped open, glassy but focused, locking on her like he’d been looking for her in every nightmare.

She stepped back automatically.

“Ava,” he rasped, voice raw.

It wasn’t the way he said her name that chilled her. It was the recognition in it. Like a man dragging a memory up from beneath rubble.

“You weren’t supposed to survive,” he whispered.

The world tilted. For a heartbeat, the beeping monitors, the yelling, the oxygen hiss—all of it dropped out. There was only sand in her head and distant thunder and his words looping like a broken broadcast.

You weren’t supposed to survive.

“Sir, you need to stay still,” she managed. “We’re stabilizing you.”

“Your team,” he coughed. “Echo Team. They said… they said you died in that blast.”

Her throat clenched. Images she’d spent years shoving into the darkest corners of her mind clawed their way back – a remote outpost, radio chatter spiraling into chaos, a shockwave turning the sky into fire. Echo Team’s screams crushed under collapsing steel.

“Weston.”

The voice that cut through the trauma bay now wasn’t the general’s. It was Director Hill’s, colder than the air conditioning.

He stood in the doorway, jaw locked, eyes hard.

“Office. Now.”

She wanted to argue. Wanted to scream. Instead she stepped away from the bed, stripped off her bloodstained gloves, and followed.

Now, in the hallway outside his office, the ground shivered under her feet.

At first, she thought it was just her legs giving out from adrenaline. But the tremor grew. The windows along the wall hummed in their frames. A low vibration rolled through the floor like distant thunder.

People looked up.

“Is that…?”

“I think it’s a helicopter.”

“That can’t be life flight. Wrong direction.”

Someone shouted from the far end of the corridor, “Rooftop! They’re landing on the roof!”

Security guards jogged toward the stairwell door that led up to the helipad. Residents followed, white coats flapping. Even Hill stepped out of his office, frowning toward the ceiling as the building began to vibrate with the heavy chop of rotors.

Through the glass, Eva caught a glimpse of it – dark gray body, Navy markings, dropping onto the hospital roof like it had no interest in clearance or protocol.

The United States Navy did not land helicopters on civilian hospitals in Riverside, California, on a random Tuesday for no reason.

A paramedic hurried down the hall, a clipboard clutched in his hand, eyes wide. “They’re asking for someone,” he called, a little breathless. “Somebody named…” He squinted at the paper. “Eva Weston.”

The hallway went silent.

Every doctor who’d looked away. Every nurse who’d muttered. Every administrator who’d decided she was disposable.

All of them stared now.

For a second, Eva couldn’t move. Her blood went cold, like her body recognized this feeling – the moment right before an explosion.

Boots thundered down the stairwell. A Navy officer in dark fatigues burst into the lobby, scanning faces with a predatory efficiency that made it clear he hadn’t started his career behind a desk.

His gaze landed on her instantly.

“You. Eva Weston?”

She didn’t answer. Just met his eyes.

“That’s her,” Hill cut in, stepping forward. “But she’s been terminated. She’s no longer permitted to interact with—”

“With respect, sir,” the officer said, closing the distance in three strides. “I’m not here to ask.”

Hill bristled. “You can’t override hospital protocol—”

“When a decorated Delta Force general wakes up from a suspected attack in the United States and demands a specific medic by name,” the officer said, voice flat and lethal, “protocol is not your concern. His survival is.”

Color drained from Hill’s face.

The officer turned back to Eva. “Ma’am, we need you on the roof. Now.”

Her brain flickered between two realities – the fired nurse with no badge, and the combat medic Echo Team used to tease for being incapable of walking away from a casualty.

“I’m not—” she started.

“You’re the only one who’s treated this toxin and lived to tell anyone about it,” he said quietly. “The general says you recognize it. That makes you the most valuable person in this building.”

The building vibrated again, rotors chopping the Southern California sky overhead. Somewhere above them, uniforms were fanning out across the helipad, scanning the hospital perimeter like they expected trouble.

Or like they knew it was already here.

Eva inhaled slowly.

“Then let’s go,” she said.

The stairwell felt narrower than usual, the air hotter. Every step up to the roof sounded like gunfire in her ears. Old muscle memory woke up in her body – how to move quickly without wasting energy, how to keep her breathing even, how to listen for sounds that didn’t belong.

The rooftop door swung open and the California morning hit her – bright blue sky, sun just climbing over the low sprawl of Riverside, the hum of traffic somewhere far below.

And the helicopter.

It squatted in the middle of the helipad like a metal beast, rotors slowing but still throwing gusts of hot wind across the concrete. Navy personnel moved in tight formation around it, scanning the hospital roofline, nearby buildings, the stairwell they’d just emerged from.

“Bring her!” someone shouted.

Eva stepped into the wind.

The general lay on a stretcher within the open belly of the helicopter, strapped down, an oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth. His skin still had that grayish cast, but his vitals, displayed on a portable monitor at his side, were holding. The lines in his face looked older now, carved by more than just age – years of command, years of orders that cut both ways.

The Navy commander who’d brought her up leaned over the general, adjusting a loose line. “Sir, she’s here.”

The general’s head turned, slow but deliberate.

His eyes found Eva’s like a magnet.

“It wasn’t an accident,” he forced out through the mask.

The wind dropped for a moment. The city, the hospital, the helicopter – all of it just… muted.

“What wasn’t?” she asked.

“The toxin.” His voice rasped, harsh from oxygen and shock. His hand lifted, trembling, and pointed past her, toward the hospital’s bulk rising from the rooftop. “Same compound as your outpost. Whoever hit us… they’re inside. They’re finishing what they started.”

The words slid into place like rounds chambering in a weapon.

Her outpost.

Echo Team.

The day they’d been told was a tragic accident.

The commander stepped closer to her, voice low. “He told us you’re the only medic who’s seen this before and walked away. You understand what we’re dealing with.”

“Alive,” she said softly. The word tasted strange. “You mean I’m the only medic still alive.”

The general’s fingers tightened on the edge of the stretcher. “Don’t let them die like your team did,” he whispered.

A familiar pressure wrapped around her ribs, the ghost of a weight she’d once thought would crush her. The smell of burning wire. The taste of dust. A radio screaming her name.

The commander didn’t give her time to sink into it. “We’ve got another victim,” he said, voice brisk again. “Communications officer assigned to escort the general. Collapsed in the ICU. Same symptoms. We suspect the poisoner’s still active.”

“I’m fired,” Eva said, because somehow that still seemed relevant.

“Right now,” the commander said, “you’re not a hospital employee. You’re the only person in this zip code who might stop a mass casualty event on American soil. I’ll deal with the paperwork later.”

The rotors spun, louder again, as if impatient.

Eva closed her eyes for a heartbeat.

The woman who’d crawled out from under twisted steel in a foreign desert had promised herself she’d never put on a uniform again. Never answer to command. Never be used.

But this wasn’t about them.

This was about the kid in pediatrics with a cartoon blanket. The elderly woman in the cardiac ward waiting on test results. The night-shift nurse finishing a cup of coffee before her commute home. People who thought “attack” was something that happened overseas, not in a hospital in the United States.

Her eyes opened.

“Take me to the ICU,” she said.

The elevator ride back down felt shorter than it ever had. Maybe because every ding of passing floors sounded like a countdown.

“The second victim collapsed right inside ICU,” the commander briefed as they moved. “He was standing next to the general’s escort team. No one saw anything.”

“That’s not sloppy,” Eva murmured. “That’s a message.”

The ICU corridor shimmered under fluorescent lights, every surface bleached and clean. Nurses clustered behind the desk, wide-eyed, whispering like the walls were listening. A pair of security guards stood outside a room door, hands hovering near their holsters, unsure what exactly they were supposed to be ready for.

“He’s in fourteen,” one guard said as they approached. “Still unresponsive.”

Eva stepped inside.

The comms officer on the bed was pale, his skin already taking on that faint purplish hue she’d seen once too often in another life. Sweat beaded along his forehead. His lips were just beginning to tint blue at the edges.

She scanned the monitors automatically. Heart rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure. Readings that, to an untrained eye, might suggest a cardiac problem.

To her, they screamed something else.

Her gaze slid to the IV bag.

Clear fluid. Standard label. Nothing unusual.

But the line between bag and vein held her attention. She followed it down with her eyes, every muscle in her body going tense.

“What’s wrong?” the commander asked.

“Who hung this?” she asked.

A nurse near the wall shifted. “I—I think it was Rachel from night shift.”

“Rachel doesn’t work days,” Eva said.

The room went still.

It was a tiny thing, easy to miss – a drop of clear fluid on the floor under the IV pole, catching the overhead light with a faint oily sheen, almost invisible if you didn’t know what to look for.

Eva crouched, her chest tightening. The angle of the droplet’s splash pattern. The faint residue at its edge. It all looked wrong.

“The poisoner used the ICU,” she said quietly.

The commander swore under his breath and turned to the guards. “Lock down this wing. No one in or out without clearance.”

But Eva’s attention was already elsewhere. She followed a nearly invisible trail of droplets along the tile, small dots leading toward the hall like breadcrumbs. They curved toward the east wing, thinning out, then stopped at a utility closet.

She pressed her fingers near the handle. A gritty, chemical residue caught the light. Recognition punched through her like a fist.

Same compound as the outpost. Same signature. Same invisible hand reaching out from her past.

“This isn’t just an attack,” she said, standing. “This is a purge.”

The commander frowned. “A purge of what?”

“Anyone who touched the original files,” she said. “Anyone who knew what Echo Team found before they blew us off the map.”

Before he could respond, an alarm split the air. A harsh, repetitive siren that made her skin crawl.

“Code Red,” a voice blared over the intercom. “Unauthorized breach in pharmacology. Repeat, Code Red.”

They looked at each other once.

Then they ran.

The pharmacology wing sat behind reinforced doors and badge scanners, the kind of place that made insurance companies sleep better at night. Now the door to the controlled substances room yawned open, lights flickering inside.

Trays overturned. Vials smashed on the floor in glittering shards. Liquid streaked across the tiles like spilled ghosts.

Above the door, a small monitor showed the security feed.

“Freeze it,” the commander snapped.

The guard at the panel jabbed a button.

The grainy black-and-white footage showed a figure in scrubs, face masked, moving with uncanny efficiency. No hesitation. No fumbling. Whoever they were, they knew exactly where everything was.

“Is that… one of yours?” the commander asked, brows furrowing.

Eva stepped closer to the screen, her heart hammering in her throat.

She watched the way the figure moved. The slight tilt of the head before entering the room. The smooth pivot of the lead foot. The relaxed shoulders even under pressure.

Her whole body went cold.

“I know that walk,” she whispered. “I know that stance.”

The guard rewound the footage. The figure slipped into the room again, ghostlike. Same tilt. Same pivot.

Eva’s knees threatened to buckle.

No.

“They died,” she said, suddenly breathless. “They all died. I saw…”

She saw his helmet. She saw his dog tags. She saw—

The figure turned just enough for the camera to catch the angle of the jaw beneath the surgical mask.

The truth slammed into her like a blast wave.

Reed Dalton.

Second in command of Echo Team. Her mentor. Her friend. The man who had dragged her behind cover more times than she could remember. The man whose body she’d believed burned with the rest of them.

The man on the screen.

The commander’s hand landed on her shoulder, steady but firm. “You recognize him.”

“I watched him die,” she said hoarsely.

“Clearly,” the commander replied, “you didn’t.”

Before she could answer, the intercom crackled again.

“All units, report to pediatrics,” a voice cried, high with panic. “Suspected intruder heading east wing. Masked individual in scrubs.”

Eva’s heart seized.

“Pediatrics?” she breathed. “No. That’s not his target. That’s his corridor.”

She didn’t wait for permission.

She ran.

The hallway to pediatrics narrowed, lined with bright murals and cartoon characters meant to make children forget tubes and needles. Nurses huddled behind the station desk, whispering frantically.

“He went that way,” one said, pointing to the isolation rooms. “Mask on, blue scrubs—”

“Did he touch anything?” Eva asked.

“I—I don’t know. He just moved. Like he knew where he was going.”

Of course he did.

Reed always knew his exits.

They moved down the row of isolation rooms. First door – closed, empty. Second – lights off, no sign of disturbance. Third – the door stood open a fraction of an inch, just enough for someone to slip inside without drawing attention.

The commander raised a hand for his guards to stack up.

Eva shook her head.

“He’ll expect a tactical breach,” she whispered. “He trained half of what you’re about to do. If he sees uniforms, he’ll disappear.”

“And you going in alone is somehow better?” the commander hissed.

“If he sees me,” she said, swallowing hard, “he’ll stay.”

The commander stared at her for a beat, then nodded once, almost reluctantly. He gestured the guards back and keyed his radio for silence.

Eva pushed the door with her fingertips.

The room was dim, blinds drawn, soft hum of an air purifier in the corner. A crib sat against one wall, empty. Thank God.

But she wasn’t alone.

A shadow shifted behind the privacy curtain.

Her breath stuttered.

“Reed,” she said softly, her voice more sand than sound. “I know it’s you.”

For a moment, there was nothing. Then a single step. Slow. Deliberate.

The curtain slid aside.

He stood there in hospital scrubs and mask, gloves flexing around his fingers. But his eyes – those sharp gray eyes – were exactly as she remembered. The same eyes that used to slice through battlefield chaos and find the one thing that would keep them alive.

Now they pinned her to the floor like a target.

“Ava,” he said, voice muffled by the mask but unmistakable. The nickname sounded wrong in this room. It belonged in radio static and smoky barracks.

“You’re alive,” she managed.

He tilted his head. “And you weren’t supposed to be.”

The words echoed the general’s, but coming from Reed they sharpened into something more personal. More venomous.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why hit the general? Why this hospital?”

“You know why,” he said calmly. “You saw the files they tried to burn. You saw what we dug up at that outpost. They erased us to keep it quiet. But you—” his eyes hardened—“you refused to stay erased.”

“You survived,” she said. “You could have—”

“I survived because I chose the winning side,” he cut in. “You chose to bury yourself in scrubs in California and pretend that the world wasn’t built on lies.”

Her chest hurt. “You helped them,” she said, the words tasting like ash. “You betrayed us.”

“They offered me a way out,” he said flatly. “You? You were supposed to die in that blast.”

His hand lifted.

A small glass vial glinted between his fingers, filled with clear liquid that might as well have been a loaded gun.

“You take one more step,” he said, almost gently, “and I flood this entire wing. Children, nurses, parents holding their babies. You know exactly what this compound does in a closed system.”

Her earpiece crackled softly. “Eva, status,” the commander whispered. “Do you need backup?”

She couldn’t answer. One wrong word would set Reed off.

“Whatever they did to you,” she said instead, eyes fixed on the vial, “whatever they twisted, it doesn’t have to end like this.”

“What happened to me?” he repeated, a bitter laugh slipping out. “They turned me into the only thing that survives in the shadows. And you…” His gaze sharpened. “You keep insisting on being a hero. Heroes get buried.”

A faint scuff from the hallway broke the tension.

The commander and his guards, creeping closer.

Reed’s head snapped toward the door.

His grip tightened.

The vial left his fingers.

Time split.

Eva moved before she could think, body reacting on old training. She lunged, fingers grazing the glass midair, just enough to deflect its path. It smashed against the wall instead of the floor, shattering with a high, crystalline crack.

A mist burst outward, a shimmering cloud of death.

Eva grabbed the closest thing she could reach – the privacy curtain – and snapped it off its rail, throwing it toward the vapor. Fabric billowed, swallowing the cloud, trapping it against the wall. The air purifier roared louder, sucking stray wisps away from the vent.

Reed didn’t wait to see if anyone lived.

He bolted through the adjoining door, the emergency exit slamming hard behind him. The slam jolted the guards into motion.

“Eva!” the commander shouted, bursting into the room. “Are you—”

“He’s heading for the lower levels,” she gasped, adrenaline burning through her lungs. “Ventilation control.”

The commander went still. “If he gets into the ventilation system with that toxin…”

“That’ll kill half the hospital,” Eva said.

She pushed past him, already running.

“That will kill everyone.”

The basement corridor felt like another world. Cooler, heavier air. Concrete walls and exposed pipes humming with the heartbeat of the building. Fluorescent lights flickered in a long row that made everything look more dangerous than it already was.

At the far end of the hall, Reed stood in front of a steel door.

Restricted Access – Ventilation Control.

One hand hovered over the keypad. The other held a metal canister bigger than anything she’d seen him use yet. Industrial-grade. Enough to turn the entire hospital into an invisible battlefield in under two minutes.

“Reed,” she called, her voice echoing down the corridor. “Don’t.”

He didn’t turn right away. When he did, the look in his eyes wasn’t madness. It was worse.

It was conviction.

“You keep saying that like any of this was ever really our choice,” he said. “Like we weren’t raised on the lie that we were protecting something noble while we field-tested things that never should have left a lab.”

“What did they do to you?” she asked.

He laughed, low and humorless. “They told me the truth. Echo Team blew the whistle on a covert program no one wants to admit exists. Do you remember that part? Of course you don’t. They wiped the files clean. They wiped us clean. Our deaths were convenient.”

A memory hit her like a punch – papers burning in a metal barrel, drives smashed with rifle butts, Reed shouting into a radio that suddenly had no one on the other end.

“You think this fixes it?” she asked. “Killing everyone in this building? Killing civilians on American soil?”

“To the people who signed those orders, they’re not civilians,” he snapped. “They’re witnesses. The general, his escort, the doctors who saw the symptoms, the nurse who recognized the toxin. You.” He lifted the canister slightly. “You’re the biggest threat of all.”

“You were my family,” she said quietly.

The words landed.

His hand trembled around the canister, just for a heartbeat. A flicker of the man who used to steal her protein bars and complain about the sand in his boots.

Then it was gone.

“Family doesn’t survive in the shadows,” he said. “Only killers do.”

Eva stepped closer. Every instinct screamed at her to stay back, but she held his gaze and walked anyway.

“Then kill me,” she said. “But don’t touch them.”

His eyes narrowed. “You don’t get to make demands.”

“Sure I do,” she said. “It’s the only thing I’ve done since that day that makes any sense. If you want to finish your mission, fine. Make it personal. Make it about Echo Team. Just don’t turn this hospital into another graveyard.”

He hesitated.

That sliver of doubt was all she needed.

She lunged.

He swung the canister, catching her shoulder and slamming her into the wall hard enough to send sparks of pain down her arm. She used the momentum, dropping low and twisting, grabbing his wrist the way he’d taught her years ago.

He snarled, driving a knee into her side, shoving her back toward the steel door. Her head cracked against it and stars burst behind her eyes.

“You always were the fighter,” he growled.

“So were you,” she gritted out, shoving her knee into his ribs.

The canister slipped from his grasp, clattering across the floor. They both dove for it. Her fingers brushed cold metal. He kicked her away, boot slamming into her ribs.

Pain roared up her side, but she rolled, refusing to stay down.

The commander and his guards burst into the corridor at that exact moment.

“Don’t shoot!” Eva shouted as Reed spun.

He threw something small and cylindrical.

Training screamed the word in her head before it went off.

Flash.

The world exploded into white.

Sound dulled to a roar.

Everyone reeled.

Everyone but Eva.

Her body remembered this. Darkness and sudden light. Chaos and the need to move anyway.

She launched herself at the fuzzy outline that was Reed, slamming her shoulder into his torso. They crashed to the floor, sliding on concrete. His hands scrabbled for the canister valve; hers locked around his wrist, twisting until something cracked.

He screamed.

The canister rolled, hissing softly as it bumped to a stop.

Eva pounced, tearing the valve housing off with every ounce of strength left in her. Metal bent. The seal broke in the wrong way, the safe way. A brief hiss, then silence. The mechanism was ruined, the dispersal system useless.

“You think you saved them,” Reed panted, staring up at her, sweat beading on his forehead. Rage slipped into something emptier. “All you did was sign your own death sentence.”

He reached for a scalpel he’d hidden in his sleeve.

She’d taught half the hospital how to disarm someone holding a blade without getting carved open. But the person who’d taught her that move was him.

She used it now.

Her hand snapped to his forearm, twisting, slamming his wrist into the floor. The scalpel skittered away across the concrete, harmless.

“For Echo Team,” he whispered, breath shuddering.

She tightened her grip. “Echo Team died trying to save people,” she said. “Not kill them.”

For the first time since she’d seen him on that grainy security feed, his eyes softened. A shadow of the man who’d once wrapped a bandage around her leg and called her “rookie” with a crooked grin.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s why we lost.”

“No,” she said quietly. “That’s why we mattered.”

The commander’s voice finally cut through the ringing in her ears. “Move in!”

Guards swarmed them, hauling Reed’s arms behind his back, locking cuffs around his wrists. He didn’t fight anymore. Something in him had already surrendered.

Eva lurched to her feet, every breath a knife in her side. Her whole body shook, the adrenaline finally fraying at the edges.

It was over.

For the first time since the general rolled into her trauma bay, it might actually be over.

They brought her back to the ICU because someone decided she needed to see the aftermath. Or maybe because the general refused to discuss anything with anyone else until he laid eyes on her again.

The comms officer slept, his vitals steady. The antipode dose had held. The toxin hadn’t reached ventilation. The hospital air was just air again.

Families waited in waiting rooms, checking their phones, sipping bad coffee, blissfully unaware that their lives had hung on the edge of a glass vial.

When Eva stepped into the general’s room, he looked smaller than he had in the trauma bay. Less like a force of nature and more like a man who’d spent his life carrying secrets heavy enough to break his back.

“You stopped him,” he said, voice rough but stronger.

She swallowed. “No,” she said. “I stopped myself from becoming him.”

The general’s eyes glistened with something that might have been respect. “Echo Team would be proud.”

Her throat tightened, a sharp, unexpected ache. She wasn’t sure they would be. But she wanted to believe it.

The Navy commander stepped in beside her. “Ma’am, the Pentagon wants to debrief you,” he said. “Your original file has been reopened.”

Of course it had.

That file contained more redacted lines than readable ones. It also contained the truth about what Echo Team had stumbled on in a foreign desert and how the United States government liked its loose ends tied up.

The part of her that had built a quiet life in Riverside wanted to run.

To go home, shower off the day, walk her dog, pretend she hadn’t just wrestled with a ghost from an operation the Department of Defense would rather pretend never happened.

But another part – the part that used her body as a shield when vials exploded and that reached for antidotes no one else recognized – knew better.

If she didn’t sit in that debriefing room, someone else would. Someone who might decide Reed had the right idea.

“Tell them I’ll come,” she said.

The commander nodded. “We lift off in ten.”

She left the ICU.

The corridors felt different now. Nurses looked up when she passed, their eyes full of something she didn’t want to name. Admiration. Awe. Fear. Doctors straightened their coats, suddenly aware that the woman they’d dismissed as “just a nurse” had just saved their entire hospital.

Director Hill stood near the nurses’ station, tie askew, face chalky. His gaze snagged on hers and his mouth opened like he wanted to say something—sorry, maybe, or thank you—but no words came out.

She didn’t slow.

The elevator carried her back to the roof, doors sliding open on a California sky painted in the soft gold of late morning. The helicopter waited, rotors idling, the American flag on its tail snapping in the breeze.

For the first time in years, her world felt… quiet.

Not because there was no danger. There was more than ever. But because the path in front of her was clear.

She could walk away.

She could stay fired, lawyer up, disappear into some small town in another state and never answer another call from anyone with a badge.

Or she could step back into the shadows she’d escaped, not as their weapon this time, but as the one person in the room willing to say no.

The wind tugged at her hair.

Her shoulder throbbed. Her ribs ached. Her heart hurt in a way that had nothing to do with physiology.

Eva took a breath.

Then she walked toward the helicopter.