“What’s…” My voice cracked, a sound so broken it shamed me. I cleared my throat, forcing the Commander back into the driver’s seat. “What’s your name?”
The girl stared at me. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but her face was a map of tragedies no child should ever know. Hollow cheeks. Skin pulled too tight over fragile bones. She looked like a ghost haunting her own body.
“Lily,” she whispered.
The sound of that name hit me like a sniper round to the chest plate. Lily.
No. Impossible.
My Lily was dead. My Lily died four years ago in a compound in Syria. I knew this. I knew it like I knew the weight of my sidearm. I had signed the papers. I had held my wife, Sarah, while she bled out, her life leaking onto my hands, begging me to find our baby. I had torn through burning rubble until my team dragged me away, screaming. I had buried an empty casket.
“Lily,” I repeated, the word tasting like ash. “That’s… that’s a pretty name.”
My hands started to shake. Not a tremor, but a violent seizure of the nerves. I shoved them into the pockets of my Type III working uniform, praying she wouldn’t see.
The girl didn’t answer. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her gaze had dropped to Titan. Her hand—small, filthy, with fingernails bitten to the quick—reached out slowly. It was the movement of someone who expected to be hit.
Titan whined. A sound so high and desperate it tore through me. He leaned into her touch, pressing his massive head against her scrawny chest.
