Page 66 of Dozer

Kenzi looks at me. I look back. "We're not done."

Her fingers find mine again before she answers. "No," she says. "We're really not."

And just like that, we step toward the extraction vehicle carrying less evidence than we started with, fewer resources than we need, and exactly one advantage our enemies haven't managed to take from us yet. Each other.

Kenzi

Extraction drops us at a secondary Spartan Elite location two hours later. It’s not a safe house this time, something smaller, more temporary, the kind of place Hunter's people apparently keep in reserve for exactly the situation we've landed in. Four walls, a working shower, heat that actually works, and enough quiet for the first time in days to think instead of just react. Under normal circumstances, I'd call it depressing. Right now, it feels like a five-star resort.

I let Dozer take the shower first. Partly because he needs it more than I do and partly because watching him walk away with a fresh bandage still visible beneath his shirt does something inconvenient to my concentration that I'm not interested in examining yet.

I sit at the small kitchen table instead, the evidence case in front of me, and pull out a phone. Not the burner Hunter's contact set up. A different one. One bought with cash at a truck stop, back when the ambush was still fresh enough that I'd started running my own contingency math separate from whatever Spartan Elite's official channels were doing. I'd learned a long time ago in a job that requires trusting chains of custody I can never fully verify, that the smartest thing anyone can do with something irreplaceable is make sure it exists in more than one place. I kept this from Dozer, which ate at me, but I couldn’t tell him that there was a time I didn’t trust him and had hidden something from him. I think he’d understand but every time I thought about bringing it up… well, it’s not like things had gone smoothly.

I turn it on. Wait. Nothing. For three seconds, I almost let myself believe it failed. Then one bar appears.

I exhale. "Come on," I whisper, tapping the screen. "Don't make me regret spending twenty-seven dollars on you."

The phone searches, connects, and sits there innocently in my hand, looking like the least important object in the room. Which is exactly how I like it. I send the text and wait for a response.

Dozer comes out of the shower before I've finished, hair still damp, T-shirt clinging slightly to his shoulders, moving with the particular stillness of a man who's spent the last few hours quietly carrying a failure he didn't earn and isn't ready to set down yet.

"You should eat something," he says.

I almost smile. Except right now I have something heavier to hand him than gratitude for looking out for me.

"Before I do," I say, setting the phone facedown on the table, "there's something I need to tell you. And I need you to hear the whole thing before you react."

He goes still. Then he sits across from me instead of continuing whatever else he was about to do, forearms resting on his thighs, attention narrowing entirely onto me.

"Okay."

The single word lands harder than a demand would have.

"The night we secured the body," I say, "before the convoy split into what went to federal custody and what stayed with us, I didn't just document the samples I handed over. I pulled a second set. Full duplicates. Tissue and fluid both, preserved properly, logged under a chain of custody nobody officially knows exists."

His expression doesn't change. That's almost worse. I keep going because stopping now would be worse than finishing.

"I hid them. Not with the case you've been watching me carry this whole time. That case has real evidence in it, real samples, but it's not the full picture, and it was never supposed to be. I mailed the actual duplicates to a contact I trust more than I trust most official channels, days before the ambush even happened. The truck stop we stopped at, the one with the showers, also had a fully functioning UPS counter."

His eyes stay on mine. "Why?"

"Because some part of me clocked how exposed this whole operation was from the beginning and decided I wasn't going to let one single point of failure be the only thing standing between this truth and the people who need to see it."

"You didn't tell anyone."

"No."

"Not Hunter."

"No."

"Not me."

"No."

His jaw tightens once. I make myself hold his gaze because this needs to land honestly or not at all.

"I didn't tell you because I didn't know you yet. Not really. Not in a way that meant I trusted you with something that important. And by the time I did trust you, telling you felt like it would put the knowledge somewhere that could be extracted from you if things went badly enough." I sigh. "I know how that sounds."