Author: CuongG Mr

PART 2 The name landed on the field like ordnance with a delay fuse. From my post at the south rope, I heard Captain Hargrove’s voice crackle through the speakers, steady and ceremonial, and the words reached me a half-second after they reached the front rows. “The President of the United States takes pride in…

PART 2 The room held its breath. I could feel every pair of eyes on me — the agents standing rigid, the old veteran’s trembling hand still gripping the shelf, the woman in the blazer frozen mid-sneer. The envelope in my hand weighed nothing, but the question hanging in the air was heavier than any…

PART 2 I crouched beside her, the weight of her words still settling into my bones. *My name isn’t Evelyn Vale.* The locked-down doors at the cafeteria entrance rattled again—heavy, rhythmic impacts that vibrated through the floor. Cerberus was already moving, placing himself squarely between the sound and the woman in the wheelchair, his growl…

PART 2 The lean man with the hawk’s eyes—Ryan, I would later know him as—turned back from the fence line and locked his gaze on me. His chest was still heaving from the sprint, but his voice came out steady and cold, the kind of steady that only comes from years of training in situations…

PART 2 I sat in my car in the Riverbend Regional Hospital parking lot with my phone still warm against my ear. The engine was off. The Georgia morning was doing what it always did—light slanting through the windshield, air already thick with the promise of heat, a distant lawn mower growling somewhere beyond the…

PART 2 I drove away from my grandfather’s ranch with the taste of dust and unshed tears in the back of my throat. The Montana night stretched black and endless around my truck, the headlights cutting a narrow tunnel through the dark. Jack Donovan’s warning repeated in my head like a code I couldn’t crack….

PART 2 The silence that filled the training yard was so absolute, I could hear my own heartbeat echoing in my ears. The dusty air, which moments ago had been full of laughter and the savage snarl of a charging dog, now felt heavy and dead. Kota was still frozen in front of me, his…

PART 2 The administrator moved. Not walked. Moved. The way people move when four words from the right person have just rearranged their understanding of what the morning requires of them. He disappeared behind the desk and came back with a tablet in his hands before I had finished drawing the breath I had started…

PART 2 The next eighteen minutes were among the most electrically uncomfortable of my life. And I’d spent a night in a forward operating base while mortars dropped every forty-five seconds. Maddox stood beside me at the equipment table. His data book was open. Mine was open. Between us, the Arizona sun was climbing toward…