[PART 2] The first thing I heard after the cannon stopped was cheering. Not from the speakers—those were still crackling with static and interference—but from inside the ops room itself. Grown men and women who hadn’t breathed in ten minutes were suddenly clapping each other on the back, laughing with the kind of ragged, disbelieving…
[PART 2] The navy shirt was stiff against my skin, the collar rough where my old PT shirt had been soft as a second layer of skin. I stepped out of the admin building into the full weight of the New Mexico morning, the heat hitting me like a wall after the artificial chill of…
[PART 2] The Admiral didn’t wait for anyone to sit back down. He took three steps into the room, each one falling like a gavel on concrete, and stopped directly behind the prosecution’s table. The lawyer who had been smirking thirty seconds earlier now looked like a man who’d just realized he’d wandered into the…
[PART 2] The footsteps stopped just outside the doors. I didn’t turn around. I kept my eyes on the state flag, on the gold fringe, on the carved wooden seal that said “State of Alabama” in letters that had been there longer than I’d been alive. But I didn’t need to turn. I knew the…
[PART 2] Miller’s fingers never closed around my wrist. The sound came first — a low, rising wail that started at the edge of hearing and built fast, too fast, the kind of siren that doesn’t belong to local police or fire rescue. It was deeper. Meaner. The kind of sound that makes your stomach…
[PART 2] The Admiral’s eyes locked onto mine and the world stopped. Not the way people say it stops in movies — everything didn’t freeze into some dramatic tableau. It was quieter than that. Deeper. The kind of stillness that happens when a room full of strangers suddenly understands they’ve been watching something they had…
[PART 2] Colonel Wallace’s hand stayed at her brow, sharp and steady as a blade. The world around us had gone so silent I could hear the flagpole chain tapping against the metal in the breeze fifty yards away. Every phone was up. Every mouth was open. The sun was beating down on my old…
[PART 2] I didn’t hear the gavel fall. The silence that swallowed the courtroom was absolute, a physical thing that pressed in on my ears like the pressure before a storm. General Matthews stood in front of me, his hand a perfect blade at his brow, his eyes meeting mine. There was no showmanship in…
[PART 2] The general’s hand stayed at his brow for a full five seconds. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. The sergeant who had been holding my elbow had let go the instant the tires screamed, and I felt him step back, putting as much distance between himself and Captain Rostova as he could without actually running….
[PART 2] The sound echoed like a gunshot. That was the first thing I registered — not the sight of the doors flying open, but the sound. It was the kind of percussive crack that bypasses your ears and hits somewhere deeper, somewhere in the chest, in the part of you that still remembers what…
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