The shot cracks through the space, and the man folds.
Another shape darts from behind a bank of tables, lower and faster. He looks up, high enough to know the threat might not be on the floor, but not high enough to find me before I fire again.
He drops hard beside a solar-system model that’s impressively still standing.
“Buck,” I say into the radio. “Two inside support shooters down.”
He comes back, breathless and rough. “Copy.”
But there’s no sense of relief, because neither of the targets looked like Kozlov, and two men down doesn’t end this. It just means Kozlov’s plan is collapsing, and men like him get more dangerous when the clean version fails.
Below me, I catch Buck moving through the smoke from the gym’s far side. He’s low, fast, and deliberate, using overturned tables and the edge of the bleachers for cover. Even from up here, I can read his lethal calm.
A second later, Weston bursts in from the maintenance side, coughing, soot-streaked, looking like he sprinted through hell and is more pissed off than damaged. He scans the room and the corners, splitting his focus between threat and rescue, because that’s how he’s built.
The three of us, same as always.
The same as before Elena, except more focused now. More dangerous, because the instincts we built for war finally have something better than orders to serve.
Suddenly, Buck pivots, tracking something I can’t see. Weston turns toward the same point in the smoke.
The exterior doors were mostly under control the last time I checked them. Now, the threshold is chaos again, not from evacuees, but from teachers and responders surging in the wrong direction. One teacher reaches out like she can stop whatever’s happening and gets shoved backward instead.
A child’s cry cuts through the gym as a man hauls a small body inward.
It’s Kozlov, one arm locked around the child’s chest, a gun in his other.
Buck starts left as Weston cuts right. I flatten harder against the steel and bring the rifle up.
Though I can’t see the child’s face from this angle, Elena’s scream confirms the sick feeling in my gut. “T.J.!”
Her voice comes from outside, but then she appears, face pale with panic, reaching desperately for T.J. as Kozlov, crouching low, jerks the boy further into the smoke.
Kozlov angles the gun toward her without loosening his grip on the boy, and she stops dead.
The man swivels, trying to watch all sides, and I finally see T.J.’s face. It’s white under soot streaks, and his eyes are both furious and terrified at the sametime. He doesn’t waste breath screaming. He’s too shocked for that, or too brave.
Weston continues right, trying to gain angle without forcing Kozlov’s hand.
Kozlov says something, and though the alarm and fire swallow half of it, I hear Tyler’s name clear as a knife.
Of course. This was always the point. Not just to kill, but to punish and desecrate. To make Tyler’s wife and child pay for a mission that should have ended with the dead.
My vision narrows, but not in the way that drags me backward. In the opposite way.
Everything extraneous falls away.
The fire, the smoke, the screaming, the memory of burning metal and screaming that lives in my skull. All of it’s gone.
There’s only the geometry of a shot and everything it has to carry.
Elena’s frozen just inside the doors, one hand pressed to her mouth like she can physically hold back the sound trying to tear out of her. Her eyes never leave T.J. Her weight pitches forward, one foot starting to move before fear and Buck’s voice lock her in place again.
“Don’t,” Buck snaps, not taking his eyes off Kozlov.
It isn’t a plea, it’s an order. A desperate one.
Kozlov smiles, small, ugly, and satisfied, like he’s been waiting for this. “Watch him die like his father,” he says.
