Blake caught it anyway. “You think they’re walking into something bad?”
I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I pulled up the map on my tablet, zooming in on the valley, tracing routes with my finger, calculating distances and angles automatically, the way you do when you’ve done it a hundred times before.
“They’re not just walking into it,” I said finally. “They’re being led there.”
That was the moment things started to shift, even if no one else realized it yet.
The next morning, before the sun had fully risen, I found myself in the operations center, staring at the same map, running through the same scenarios, hoping—irrationally—that I had missed something. I hadn’t. When Colonel Evelyn Hart stepped in behind me, I knew she saw it too.
“You’ve been here a while,” she said.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I replied.
She didn’t comment on that. Instead, she joined me at the map, her silence stretching just long enough to feel intentional.
“You know this terrain,” she said eventually.
It wasn’t a question.
