Chapter 21
Dozer
We reach a gas station by mid-morning, three miles of walking behind us and blisters neither of us mentions out loud.
I use the last of the cash in my pocket to buy time on a payphone that looks like it hasn't been used since before smartphones existed, which feels appropriate given the week we've had.
Hunter picks up on the first ring. "You're alive." No preamble. No, where are you or what happened. Just those two words, and the specific relief underneath them is audible even through a connection that crackles every few seconds.
"We're alive. Lost the car, the gear, the burner line. We're on foot near—" I glance across the road at a faded sign, squinting at it. "Somewhere in Pennsylvania, best I can tell."
"Give me twenty minutes to route clean extraction. I've been trying every backup line for six hours."
"You sound disappointed we didn't die."
"I'd have preferred the paperwork." I know he is joking and I’m glad for the normalcy of friendly banter.
Kenzi makes a quiet sound beside me that might be a laugh. I look at her. She looks back. For one second, we're just two exhausted people standing beside a gas station, and the absurdity of Hunter joking about paperwork is enough to make the morning feel almost normal.
Then the silence on the line changes. I know before he speaks that whatever comes next is going to be bad.
"Dozer." His voice drops into the flat register he uses when he's delivering something he hates delivering. "There's something you need to hear before extraction gets there."
"Say it."
"The body."
Everything in me goes still.
"The convoy transporting it to secure federal custody was hit last night. Professional operation. Overwhelming force. In and out in under six minutes, according to the surviving escort."
The gas station suddenly seems too bright. Too open. Too ordinary for what he's just said.
"Hit how?"
"Stolen." One word. It lands like a shot. "The body's gone. Whoever's behind this didn't just want the evidence you two are carrying. They wanted the primary source removed from play entirely, and they had the resources to take it clean, in federal custody, past a full security detail."
I don't say anything. We thought they just wanted whatever Kenzi found.
Turns out, they were buying their time. I've built the entire mission around one core fact: protect the body and evidence, protect Kenzi, get to D.C.
intact. Now half that equation has been erased by people who can reach into federal custody and take what they want.
"How," I say finally. "How does someone hit us that clean?"
"That's the question I don't have an answer to yet." Hunter pauses. "Which means the leak is deeper than we thought. The phone I’m on isn’t my normal one, I had Ruby forward my calls to a new burner that only she and I have access to. We’ve swept headquarters for bugs and I’ve changed out everything. I’m working from a new secured location.
Again, only Ruby and I have the details.
I’m sending a small team for you, who we know and trust with our lives.
Be careful. We don’t know who is watching. "
I close my eyes for half a second. "Understood."
"Twenty minutes."
"Copy."
I hang up. For a moment, I keep my hand on the receiver. Kenzi doesn't ask what happened. She doesn't have to. She's watching my face, reading me the way she reads everything.
"What?"
"The body."
Her expression changes. "They took the body?"
"Six-minute operation. Gone."
"How?"
I almost smile at the echo of my own question to Hunter, except there is nothing remotely funny about it. "Don't know yet. It means whoever's protecting this reaches high up."
She looks away. Her shoulders tighten. I know that look now. She's rebuilding the entire problem from the ground up and processing it.
"Then the mission failed."
The words hit harder than I expect. I've never heard defeat in her voice before. But it's there now.
"That's the whole reason I came on board," she says. "The whole reason Reyes died. To get that body to D.C. intact. And now it's gone, and I don't know what we're even protecting anymore."
"We're protecting the truth and the evidence in that case."
Even as I say it, I feel the hollow place underneath the words. Because the truth was also in the body, the body was the hard evidence of murder.
"The truth was in the body," she says. "The forensic evidence, the physical proof of murder."
"You still have the samples."
"Some of them." Her voice tightens. "Partial. Not the full picture."
She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. I know what that gesture costs her. I've seen her angry. I've seen her afraid. I've seen her exhausted. This is different. This is grief wearing frustration because grief is apparently still too personal to admit to.
"We came this far," she says quietly. "We lost Reyes. We lost the safe house. We lost almost everything we had. And now the one thing all of it was supposed to protect is just gone."
I look down at the pavement. For the first time since this started, I let myself think about the part I've been avoiding. I failed. Not because I made the decision that got the convoy hit. Not because I had access to the route. Not because there was anything I could have realistically done from where we'd been. But my job is to protect things. People. Assets. Missions. And the body was gone. I don’t know how I could have protected it if it wasn’t with me, but that is beyond the point.
"I should have insisted on running the primary custody myself," I say. “I should have taken the body. Splitting up shouldn’t have been an option.”
Kenzi's head comes up. "You couldn't be in two places."
"I could've made it my job to protect both at once."
"Dozer." I don't look at her. "Dozer." Her voice is sharper this time. I finally turn. She's looking directly at me. "This isn't on you. We split up the evidence for this very reason. Had we been with the body, they could have gotten both. It’s not on you."
"It feels like it is."
"I know." That stops me. She steps closer. "I know the feeling," she says, quieter now. "I felt exactly that way about Reyes. If I’d seen the second shooter quicker."
Her fingers brush mine. Maybe accidental. Maybe not. I don't move away.
"But feeling responsible for everything that goes wrong isn't the same as actually being responsible for it." Her fingers curl lightly around mine. "You taught me that."
I look down at our hands. Her thumb moves once across my knuckle. "I'm trying to hand it back,” she says.
Something in my chest shifts. She's doing it again. Taking something I gave her and using it on me when I need it. I close my hand around hers.
"You're getting annoyingly good at that."
"At what?"
"Using my own words against me."
"I pay attention."
"I've noticed."
And for a second, we're just standing here holding hands beside a gas station payphone like two people who have somehow wandered into the middle of a disaster and decided, against all common sense, not to let go of each other.
I squeeze her hand once before releasing it. "Extraction's coming," I say. "Twenty minutes. We regroup. We figure out what you can still prove with what you've got, and we keep moving."
"Even without the body?"
"Yes, for now anyway, we move on without the body. We have enough.”
She studies me. "That's a pretty confident answer."
"Somebody wanted it gone badly." I look toward the highway. "That tells us something."
"What?"
"That the body scared them."
Her expression changes. Not much. Enough. "You don’t think they destroyed it."
"No."
"They stole it."
"I think they still need it for something. I think there’s more evidence on it, evidence that they can’t simply destroy but is needed for something."
Her eyes sharpen. The scientist in her wakes up. "Then we prove it without the body," she says.
"We do."
"We make what we've got enough."
I nod. She takes one breath. Then another. Kenzi doesn't need someone to save her from the hard things. She needs someone willing to stand beside her while she faces them.
I can do that. Probably better than I should. And I want to do that, probably more than I should.
The sound of a vehicle approaching pulls both of our attention toward the road.
Extraction. They are here early.
Kenzi looks at me. I look back. "We're not done."
Her fingers find mine again before she answers. "No," she says. "We're really not."
And just like that, we step toward the extraction vehicle carrying less evidence than we started with, fewer resources than we need, and exactly one advantage our enemies haven't managed to take from us yet. Each other.
Kenzi
Extraction drops us at a secondary Spartan Elite location two hours later.
It’s not a safe house this time, something smaller, more temporary, the kind of place Hunter's people apparently keep in reserve for exactly the situation we've landed in.
Four walls, a working shower, heat that actually works, and enough quiet for the first time in days to think instead of just react.
Under normal circumstances, I'd call it depressing.
Right now, it feels like a five-star resort.
I let Dozer take the shower first. Partly because he needs it more than I do and partly because watching him walk away with a fresh bandage still visible beneath his shirt does something inconvenient to my concentration that I'm not interested in examining yet.