Chapter 7
TOMMY
Dylan corners me outside the armory with the stillness of a man who's already decided what he's going to say. He's giving me the courtesy of not saying it in front of an audience.
I've been expecting this. Dylan Rourke doesn't do casual encounters. When he shows up in your peripheral vision with that set to his shoulders, the conversation that follows is going to leave marks.
His choice of the corridor outside the armory tells me everything I need to know about his mood. This is the hallway where the operational world lives, weapons and tactics, the physical domain where Dylan is fluent and I'm a tourist. He picked his terrain.
"Walk with me." He says it the way he says everything that matters, flat and leaving no room for refusal.
I fall into step beside him. The corridor is dim, carved rock catching the overhead lighting in uneven planes that throw shadows across his face.
Dylan walks with economy and purpose, each step covering ground without wasting motion.
I've watched him through feeds across years of operations, and the stride never changes.
He keeps the same pace in a corridor as in a combat zone.
The man carries grief the way other people carry oxygen, so constantly that it's become invisible to everyone except the people who've been watching long enough to remember when it started.
"You built the system that keeps this place running." He says it flat and direct, no softening prelude before delivering an assessment you won't like. Dylan doesn't soften. Softening implies the thing underneath needs cushioning, and Dylan deals in things that don't.
"Parts of it." I keep my voice light, casual, the humor right there and ready to deploy, coiling in my throat like a reflex. "Kane built the parts that involve concrete and load-bearing walls. I built the parts that glow."
"You know what it costs when someone inside it can't be trusted."
The humor dies. Dylan didn't come here for banter. He came here for answers, and the directness of his approach tells me he's past the point where my deflections will be tolerated.
"I know what it costs."
"Then tell me what you see when you look at her."
The question is precise. He's asking me to be honest about something I haven't been honest about with myself, and he's doing it in a corridor that smells like cold stone, on his terrain, where honesty is easier to extract from someone standing on unfamiliar ground.
"I see a signals analyst who broke into the most secure system I've ever built and used the access to help us instead of exploit us." The answer's true. It's also incomplete. Dylan reads people the way I read code, looking for the vulnerabilities I don't advertise.
"That's the operational assessment." He stops walking and turns to face me.
The corridor feels smaller with Dylan squared up in it, and the effect is entirely the man filling the space, not the mountain pressing in around us.
"I'm not asking about the operation. I'm asking if your judgment about her is compromised. "
The word choice is deliberate. Compromised is the same word Dar sent through my system, the same word that started all of this.
"My judgment's intact."
"Your judgment has you leaving Mountain Dew on her workstation. Your judgment has you redesigning your relay protocols to account for the way she approaches your perimeter. Your judgment has you spending more time watching than monitoring actual threat vectors."
Dylan's voice doesn't rise. Each observation lands with the flat impact of data presented without commentary, and the commentary isn't necessary. The data speaks for itself.
"I'm not blind, Tommy. Neither is anyone else in this base."
The heat that climbs my neck has nothing to do with the recycled air. I push my glasses up, take them off, and clean the left lens with the hem of my shirt while my brain scrambles for a response that doesn't confirm everything he just said.
"She's a technical asset. I'm integrating her into our workflow. That requires understanding how she operates."
"That requires knowing her favorite drink?"
"I can't have a dehydrated analyst crash during a marathon decryption session. It's resource management."
Dylan looks at me. The look carries a sniper's patience: sustained, focused, designed to outlast whatever defense the target has erected. I've seen Kane try to hold that look and concede the point. I've never seen anyone outlast it.
The weight behind it reaches past tactical training, all the way to a wife and daughter buried under Committee rubble.
"I lost my family because attachment has a cost in this life, and the Committee doesn't care who pays it." The sentence is flat and practiced and carries the polish of words that have been spoken to himself so many times they've worn smooth, and the smoothness cuts.
Dylan's wife Lisa and his daughter Maya died in a Committee bombing years before he ever walked through Echo Base's blast door. It was a targeted strike designed to eliminate witnesses to a Syrian operation. They were collateral damage, wrong place at the wrong time.
By the time Kane recruited him, Dylan had already hunted down everyone responsible, already gone back to work for the Committee, already spent years disappearing people into rooms he built because the grief had eaten through every boundary between what he was and what they needed him to become.
He arrived at this mountain with the loss calcified into his bones, old enough to carry quietly and permanent enough that it shaped every corridor he walked through.
Reagan changed that. Not by fixing him, not by erasing the loss, but by walking into it with her eyes open and choosing to stay. Dylan chose love again after burying everything that mattered, and that's why his question about my judgment carries the weight it does.
He's not warning me from the wreckage. He's warning me from the other side of it.
I know what it looks like when it surfaces because I've watched, through the feeds, from behind my screens. It's the only way I know how to keep vigil for people whose pain I can't touch.
The first anniversary after Dylan arrived at Echo Base, I was running routine security sweeps on the internal cameras and found him in the corridor outside his quarters in the dead hours.
His hands hung between his knees. His eyes were fixed on a point in the stone wall that I'm certain he's still looking at somewhere inside his head.
His face was a thing I've never been able to delete from my memory despite years of trying. It wasn't fresh grief. It was something worse, a man revisiting a wound so familiar he knows its exact dimensions, pressing the bruise to remind himself it's real.
I watched because someone had to make sure he didn't walk out of the mountain and not come back. Kane was watching too, but Kane was doing it in person. I was doing it the way I do everything: through glass, at a distance, useful and useless in equal measure.
It happened every year. It was always the same night, the same corridor, the same point on the wall. I stopped checking because it felt like trespassing, but I never stopped making sure the external sensors were running clean those nights in case he decided to walk.
"Everyone in this mountain is someone I can't afford to lose. I need to know that the people making decisions about who comes through that door are making those decisions with their heads."
"My head is fine."
"Your head redesigned an entire relay protocol overnight because she pointed out a flaw. Your head, Tommy."
The counter lands because it's accurate. I did redesign the relay overnight. I told myself it was operational necessity, that the vulnerability she identified needed immediate remediation, that any competent systems architect would've done the same. All of that's true.
None of it's the whole truth. Dylan's standing in front of me with the eyes of a man who's buried a wife and a daughter, asking me to be honest because the cost of dishonesty in this place is measured in bodies.
"I don't know." The admission comes out quieter than I intend.
"I don't know if my judgment's compromised, Dylan.
I know she's the most technically capable person I've ever worked with.
I know the weapon aimed at this base requires her skills to counter.
I know I can't solve this without her, and I know that assessment is operational, and I know it's also possible that it isn't entirely operational, and I haven't figured out where the line is yet. "
The silence that follows is the most honest sound in the corridor. Dylan holds it, holds my gaze, and then nods once with the tight economy of a man who received the answer he expected.
"Figure it out. Before the Committee figures it out for you."
He turns the corner. I stand in the armory corridor with my glasses in my hand and the taste of an admission I wasn't ready to make sitting on my tongue.
I put my glasses back on and walk to dinner because the alternative is standing in this corridor until the stone absorbs me, and Dylan's right about one thing: I don't have time for that.
The communal area is full when I arrive. The team operates on a schedule that's half military discipline and half family habit, and the evening meal is the closest thing Echo Base has to a ritual that doesn't involve weapons or encrypted communications.
Kane sits at the head of the long table because he always sits at the head. Willa's beside him, and her laugh carries across the room with the warmth of a woman who's seen the worst of what this life offers and still finds reasons to find things funny.
Stryker's loading his plate with the single-minded focus of a man who treats calories as ammunition. Rachel's beside him, telling a story involving Lucas and a mud puddle that has Stryker's mouth twitching despite his efforts at stoic indifference.