The words land with flat precision. Mercer spent months in captivity before Kane's team extracted him, and the recovery afterwards rewired everything he understood about control and vulnerability. He earned Delaney's trust by letting her see the damage, not by pretending it wasn't there. He knows this terrain.
"I'm aware," I say.
"Then stop trying to explain yourself and start showing up." He glances at me. "Every time you give her a reason, you're asking her to process your guilt for you. That's your job, not hers. She doesn't need reasons. She needs evidence."
The advice is good. It is also the kind that lands harder when you've already arrived at the same conclusion independently and haven't done a damn thing about it.
"Anything else?" I keep my pace steady, because this conversation has gone on long enough and Mercer knows it.
"No. That's it." He reads the dismissal accurately and lets it stand.
We reach the crest of the ridge and Mercer stops, hands on his knees, breathing controlled. The valley opens below us in the pale morning light, and Echo Base is invisible beneath the mountain's shoulder, buried in granite and purpose. From up here, the landscape looks empty and indifferent, Montana's particular brand of beauty that doesn't care whether you survive it or not.
"How's Khalid?" I ask.
"Reading everything Victoria gives him. Asking questions that are too good for his age." Mercer straightens. "She's good with him."
"She's good with everyone." The words come out before I've approved them, and Mercer's mouth twitches at the corner.
"You've got it bad, Frost."
"Noted. Move on."
Mercer turns back toward the base entrance, and I fall into step beside him. The run has done what I needed it to do, burned off the worst of the restlessness and left behind the kind of fatigue I chose instead of the kind that happens to me. My encrypted phone buzzes against my thigh as we descend the switchback toward the tree line, and the vibration pattern is one I recognize, a European contact I cultivated through Echo Ridge's network, an asset positioned close enough to Committee operations to track their movements across the continent.
I stop on the trail and pull the phone. The message is brief, encrypted, routed through a relay that bounces through proxy servers before it reaches my device.
The content drains the heat from my legs.
Volkov has received a new directive from Webb. The instruction goes beyond securing Committee assets and hardening operational security. Webb has tasked Volkov with locating the operational base of the team targeting his European infrastructure. Victoria's extraction from Prague was partially tracked, not far enough to identify Echo Base's location, but the charter flight's tail number was flagged by a compromised aviation contact at the airfield, and the flight plan's westward trajectory confirmed a connection to the American northwest. Volkov has surveillance teams assembling for a systematic search of the region.
Webb is not just retaliating. He is hunting us. "Problem?" Mercer reads my face the way he reads rooms, fast and accurate, without wasting a second glance.
"The kind that doesn't wait." I pocket the phone. "I need Kane."
Mercer nods once and does not ask for details. We move down the trail at a pace that is no longer a run but something closer to an approach, moving fast because intelligence has a shelf life and this one is already expiring.
Kane is in the operations center when I arrive, standing at the tactical display with a mug in his hand and the expression of a commander who has been awake since before dawn reviewing threat assessments. Sarah sits at her console, running signal analysis from the Vienna feed. Tommy hunches over his station with headphones around his neck. The room carries the low hum of systems running at operational tempo, the mountain's version of a heartbeat.
Vix is there. She sits at the workstation she has made her own since arriving, her laptop open, her attention on the Committee personnel data scrolling across her screen. She is wearing a dark sweater with the sleeves pushed to her elbows, her hair pulled back, the collar shifted just enough to show the fading bruise on her shoulder where my teeth found purchase the other night. She does not look up when I enter. The not-looking is deliberate, and I know it is deliberate because I know every variation of Vix's attention, including the kind she withholds as a weapon.
My gaze tracks the bruise for a beat longer than operational awareness requires. The mark is yellowing at the edges now, transitioning from claim to memory, and the urge to replace it with something fresh sits low and persistent beneath every professional thought I attempt to stack on top of it.
"Kane." I cross to the tactical display. "I've received intelligence from my European source. It's urgent."
Kane sets down his mug, clearing his hands for whatever comes next. "Go."
"Volkov has a new directive from Webb. He's been tasked with finding this facility." I let the words land before I continue. "Victoria's extraction from Prague was partially tracked. A compromised aviation contact flagged the charter's tail number, and the flight trajectory pointed them toward the American northwest. They don't have our location, but they've narrowed the search grid. Volkov is assembling surveillance teams."
The room goes still. Sarah's fingers pause on her keyboard. Tommy pulls his headphones off entirely. Kane's expression doesn't change, but the temperature behind his eyes drops by several degrees.
"How solid is your source?" Kane asks.
"He's been reliable for years. The intelligence is corroborated by the pattern Tommy flagged yesterday. Volkov's 'active threatassessment' wasn't just about protecting Committee assets. It was the beginning of a counter-operation."
"They're always hunting us." Kane's voice is flat, a tactical assessment rather than an emotional reaction. He turns to Sarah. "I want a full review of our signals profile. Every communication we've sent externally since the European operations began. If they're narrowing a search grid, they're using something to calibrate it."
"On it," Sarah says, already pulling up logs.
