Page 83 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

Andrea walks out. She crosses the dock to Lily and puts the compass in her hand. Lily's fist closes over it. Then they hold each other, and cry.

Hutch's voice comes through the fallback frequency, patched from Langley. The debrief is clipped, loaded with the fury of a commander who learned his encrypted comms were compromised from day one.

"The USB data from the compass is intact on Cipher's tablet. We're transmitting it to the financial crimes task force now. The routing numbers, client lists, and transit coordinates will dismantle the Consortium's Southeast Asian network within seventy-two hours."

"The woman in the SUV." I'm standing at the edge of the loading dock, watching the medics work. "She had six girls."

A pause. The kind of pause that tells me Hutch already knows more than he's saying.

"We're tracking the vehicle. Satellite lost the signal at the border." Another pause. "I'll handle it."

The line goes dead.

The morning stretches across the jungle in long, golden shafts of light. The diesel haze clears. The jungle comes back to life. The birds resume their chorus.

The war is over, and the silence that remains is not the silence of Kandahar—not the silence of failure, not the silence of empty magazines and dead channels.

It's the sound of survival, and the fragile space between what was lost and what was saved.

I stand on the loading dock and breathe.

Lily steps up beside me. The SIG hangs at her side. One round spent. Eight remaining. She didn't waste them.

Her fingers lace through mine and grip with the ferocity of a woman who fought her way out of a burning building, and stood barefoot between armed men and fifteen victims.

I close my hand around hers. The blood on my knuckles stains her skin.

But neither of us lets go.

20

The Accounting

LILY

I sit on the tailgate of a dirty flatbed truck.

My feet dangle four inches above the mud. A crinkling silver space blanket rests across my shoulders, trapping the scent of gunpowder against my skin. Beside my hip, a paper cup of instant coffee has gone cold, skinned over with a thin film of oil. I haven't touched it. Dax's SIG Sauer rests on the rusted steel where I set it down. Two swollen rings mark my wrists where plastic zip-ties bit into the flesh.

My right hand hasn't opened since Andrea pressed my father's compass into my palm.

Two medics work down the line of women under the concrete overhang. Two Marshals in navy windbreakers handle the dead. One sprays a white stencil number onto the concrete beside each body while the other snaps flash photographs. Heavy black vinyl bags zip shut after that.

Operators return up the loading ramp carrying Pelican cases stuffed with hard drives, ledgers, and encrypted servers. A man with silver in his short beard sits cross-legged on the concrete, a satellite terminal open on his knees, barking grid coordinates into a headset.

Fourteen women line the wall under the overhang with emergency blankets pulled tight around their shoulders. This morning they dropped onto the concrete because I told them to.

Across the dock, a medic holds Dax by the jaw, tilting his head to swab a jagged cut along his cheekbone. Dax stays still. His eyes sweep the perimeter, tracking the dark tree line behind the floodlights.

"Ms. Masters." A woman hauls herself up onto the tailgate beside me, letting her combat boots hang over the edge. Forties. Dark hair pulled back tight in a duty bun. Mud caked to her knees, a rugged tablet tucked under one arm.

"Marisa Okafor. Deputy Marshal." She looks at my bare feet, then at the blood dried on my shoulder. "Have you let a medic look at that?"

"It's a scratch."

"Everybody says that." She looks out at the dock. "The women told us what you did in that room."

I have no answer for that.