I leave him standing at his empty tactical display and walk into the corridors of a base that no longer needs to be a fortress.
I find Khalid in the workspace.
He's at the terminal Tommy set up for him months ago, running through an encryption exercise I assigned two days before the final operation.
Odin is curled at his feet, the Malinois's chin resting on Khalid's boot with the settled patience of a dog who chose his person and has no intention of reconsidering.
The exercise is complete. The solution is elegant.
"Your key rotation protocol is solid," I tell him, pulling a chair beside his station. "But your entropy generation is predictable. You're seeding from the system clock, which means anyone who knows when you generated the key can narrow the key space. Here."
I show him the adjustment. His eyes track my hands on the keyboard with the quiet intensity of someone who learned early that attention is survival and has been slowly learning that attention can also be education.
"Seed from environmental noise instead. Server temperature fluctuations, network traffic variation, anything with genuine randomness."
"Like that?" He runs the modified protocol.
"Like that."
The pride I feel is unexpected and specific. Tommy taught Khalid systems work. I'm teaching him offensive capability. Between us, this kid is going to be formidable.
Dylan passes me in the corridor outside the workspace. His rifle is absent for the first time since the crisis began, replaced by a coffee mug that looks absurdly domestic in a hand built for weapons.
He stops. Not a nod-and-keep-walking stop. A full stop, his body turning to face mine, his eyes carrying something I've never seen from him.
The grief is still there. It will always be there.
But Dylan made peace with it long before I arrived at this mountain, and what I see on his face now isn't a man finally starting to heal. It's a man who healed, who rebuilt, who chose love again with Reagan and purpose again with this team, and who is now watching the last open door close behind him.
"The people who killed Lisa and Maya," he says. His voice is level. Controlled. Not because it might crack, but because Dylan says everything that matters the same way. Measured. Final. "They're done."
"They're done," I confirm.
He holds my gaze for a beat longer than Dylan has ever held anyone's gaze who isn't a threat or a teammate he trusts with his life.
Then he walks past me, coffee mug in hand, boots steady on the stone floor. Not a man putting down a weight. A man who set it down years ago and is now watching the last reason he carried it disappear.
The communal area is loud with the particular chaos of a team celebrating by being aggressively, defiantly normal.
Stryker is cooking. Rachel stands beside him at the counter, one hand on his arm and the other holding Lucas, who is doinghis level best to grab a handful of whatever Stryker is putting on a plate.
Mercer and Delaney are on the couch. Delaney's feet are in Mercer's lap, her phone in her hand, reading something aloud that makes her laugh in a way that transforms her face from law enforcement sharp to something softer.
Mercer watches her laugh like the world just shifted three degrees and he has no interest in it shifting back.
Delaney looks up from her phone. "Dar. The chain of custody on the digital evidence you and Tommy extracted. Clean enough to hold in any jurisdiction I've ever worked."
"I've had practice making evidence stick."
"It shows." She goes back to her phone, but the acknowledgment lingers. Professional respect from a woman who built her career on the difference between evidence that convicts and evidence that gets thrown out.
Kane joins Willa at the table. Close, not touching. The kind of intimacy that doesn't require contact because the space between them is so thoroughly theirs that proximity is redundant.
Kane's face carries the quiet I saw in the operations center, the settling of a man who has earned the right to sit at his own table and not think about who isn't coming back.
Sarah and Micah are in the corner, navigating the terrain between professional distance and the intimacy they've earned.
His hand on the back of her chair with the tentative certainty of a man who is still learning that staying is harder than leaving and worth every difficult hour.
