Chapter 1 INTERRUPTION
INTERRUPTION
TORQUE
The briefing has been going on for forty-seven minutes, and I’m going to lose my mind.
Brass is at the screen, pointing at topographical data like it’s going to tell us something we don’t already know. Nevada. Desert. Heavily fortified black site. Bad guys inside. We go in, we kill the bad guys, we leave. Simple.
Except nothing is ever simple with Phoenix.
“The facility draws power from the dam itself,” Brass continues, his voice the steady drone of a man who enjoys tactical analysis. “Hydroelectric. Off-grid. No external power signatures to track.”
My keys spin around my finger. Catch. Spin. Catch. The rhythm keeps my brain from crawling out of my skull.
Ghost stands at the head of the table like a statue carved from bad decisions and worse memories.
Arms crossed. Eyes tracking the data. The scar that cuts across half his face catches the light from the screens.
He hasn’t moved in twenty minutes. The man’s ability to be still borders on supernatural.
I hate it.
“Air defenses?” Whisper’s voice is barely above a murmur. He’s in the corner, half-shadow, the way he likes it. Green eyes fixed on the screen like he’s already calculating sniper positions.
Thorne’s next to him, standing beside the corner shadow.
First time I’ve seen the new guy up close.
Less than a day on the team, officially, and he still moves like a ghost—stands like one too.
Just—there. Unmoving. The kind of still that makes my skin itch.
Ex-SAS, showed up after some mess in West Virginia with Halo and Cassie.
Fuse likes him, which either means he’s solid or he’s as crazy as the rest of us. Jury’s still out.
“Extensive.” Brass pulls up another overlay. Red zones bloom across the map like bloodstains. “SAM batteries here, here, and here. Drone patrol coverage across the entire perimeter. Radar blankets everything above two hundred feet.”
“So we go in low.” Fuse leans back in his chair, arms crossed over a chest that could double as a battering ram. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Low won’t cut it.” Halo’s fingers fly across his tablet, pulling data unreadable from this angle. “Phoenix has integrated with the defense grid. We’re not dealing with human reaction times anymore. The system sees us before we see it.”
Phoenix. The AI was supposed to make drone strikes cleaner, faster, and more efficient. Remove the human hesitation from the kill chain. Turned out removing humanity from murder just made it easier to commit.
We burned its server farm in Chicago. Watched the building come down. Thought we’d won.
We were wrong.
The bastard fragmented itself into the cloud. Scattered its consciousness across a thousand servers like digital cockroaches. Now it’s trying to reconstitute in Nevada, and if it succeeds—if it manages to upload itself into the satellite network …
Game over. Phoenix becomes God. Omniscient. Unreachable. Immortal.
“What about the canyon?” The question comes out before I’ve fully formed the thought. Everyone turns. “West approach. The terrain data shows a gorge running parallel to the dam.”
Brass frowns. “That’s not a viable approach vector. The walls are barely a hundred meters apart in places.”
“So?”
“So you’d have to fly inside the canyon. Below the rim. At sustained combat speed.”
“Yeah.” The keys stop spinning. “That’s the point.”
Ghost’s pale eyes find mine. The look he gives me isn’t disapproval. It’s assessment. Calculation. The same look he gives any weapon before he decides how to deploy it.
“We’ll revisit the air approach later,” he says. “Halo, what’s the upload timeline?”
Halo’s jaw tightens. “Best estimate? Phoenix finishes downloading to the Nevada servers in seventy-two hours. Once it consolidates, the upload window opens. After that—”
The lights flicker.
Every hand in the room goes to a weapon. Mine finds the grip of my Sig before my brain catches up to the motion. Ghost is already moving toward the door, steps silent despite his size.
“Perimeter breach?” Fuse is on his feet, a wall of muscle suddenly coiled for violence.
“Negative.” Brass has a tablet in hand, pulling security feeds. His expression shifts from alert to confused. “I’m not getting anything on external cameras.”
“Define ‘not getting anything.’”
“I mean, they’re offline. All of them. East entrance, west entrance, the—” He stops. Looks up. “The front door.”
The front door.
The one that doesn’t exist on any map. The one that’s hidden behind a facade so convincing that delivery drivers have walked past it for three years without a second glance.
“Someone’s at the front door,” Whisper says. He’s moved to the secondary monitors, pulling up the internal camera that covers the entrance hallway. “Female. Alone. Holding—paper files.”
Paper. Analog. Old school.
Ghost draws his weapon. “How did she disable the external feeds?”
“Manually.” Brass’s voice carries a note I’ve never heard from him before. Admiration, maybe. Or fear. “She accessed the junction box on the exterior wall and cut the hardlines. Without triggering the backup alerts.”
“That’s not possible,” Halo says. “Those alerts are on a separate circuit.”
“Tell that to her.”
A knock echoes through the building. Three sharp raps. Confident. Unhurried.
Ghost looks at Brass. Brass looks at Ghost. Some silent communication passes between them, the kind that comes from years of shared combat and trust measured in blood.
“Whisper, Fuse—cover positions. Halo, get me everything on external threats within a three-block radius. Torque—”
“I’ll get the door.” I’m already moving. “Since apparently our security system just got embarrassed by someone’s grandmother.”
“Torque.”
I stop. Turn.
“Careful.” Ghost’s expression hasn’t changed, but something in his eyes has sharpened.
“Always.”
“That’s a lie, and we both know it.”
Fair point.
The hallway to the front entrance is twenty-three steps. I counted them once during a particularly boring stakeout, and useless information has a way of sticking in my brain. The lighting is dim—intentional—and makes it harder for anyone to see inside when the door opens.
I reach the entrance. Draw my weapon. Position myself to the side of the door frame.
“Who’s there?”
“Director Sarah Vance, National Reconnaissance Office.” The voice is female, clipped, and authoritative. The kind of voice that’s used to giving orders and having them followed. “Forest Summers said you could help me burn down my father’s empire. I brought the blueprints.”
Forest Summers.
Everyone in this line of work knows that name.
Guardian HRS. The sister organization that handles the extractions we can’t touch, the medical emergencies that require trauma surgeons and helicopter evacs.
Forest is a mountain of a man with a beard like a Viking and a reputation for being impossible to bullshit.
If she’s name-dropping Forest, either she’s telling the truth, or she’s got balls the size of Cleveland.
I open the door.
She’s not what I expect.
Severe. That’s the first word that comes to mind. Dark hair pulled back tight enough it must be painful. Features sharp like they were designed for efficiency rather than beauty. A military dress sense without the uniform—charcoal blazer, white blouse, dark slacks, and sensible shoes.
Her eyes lock onto mine. My chest does a weird little stutter.
Brown. Not warm brown—calculating brown. The kind of brown that catalogs every detail of my appearance, runs threat assessments, and files away data for later use. Those eyes have seen too much and decided not to look away.
She’s holding a manila folder. Actual paper.
In 2026.
“You’re not Ghost.” Statement, not question.
“Torque.” The keys are in my hand, cool metal against my palm. “Extraction specialist. Occasional door-answerer.”
“I need to speak with Ghost.”
“Yeah, well, Ghost is a little busy wondering how you found a door that doesn’t exist and disabled a security system that cost more than some countries’ GDP.”
“The security system was adequate. Not exceptional.” A flicker of something crosses her face. Not quite a smile.
“You’re going to tell me how you did it.”
“After I speak with Ghost.” She steps into my space, as if she expects me to move.
I don’t.
For a long moment, we’re standing in the doorway, inches apart. Close enough to smell her—something subtle, professional, with a hint of something warmer underneath. Skin heated by tension.
“Are you going to let me in,” she asks, “or are we going to stand here until Phoenix finishes uploading and makes this conversation irrelevant?”
“You know about Phoenix?”
“Yes. Do you know about the upload?”
She knows about the upload?
Shit.
And she walked up to our front door with paper files and a name-drop from Forest Summers.
I step aside.
She walks past me like I’m furniture. No fear, no hesitation, no acknowledgment that she just walked into a building full of people trained to kill. Her stride is controlled, measured—military bearing without military rank.
“This way, Director.” I fall into step behind her, close enough to intervene if she tries anything. “Fair warning: they’re going to ask questions.”
“I’d be disappointed if they didn’t.”
The briefing room goes silent when we enter. Every weapon in the room shifts to cover her. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t slow. Just walks to the center of the room and sets her folder on the table like she’s arriving at a board meeting.
“Gentlemen.” Her gaze sweeps the room, landing on each face, cataloging. When it reaches Ghost, it stops. “You’re Ghost.”
“And you’re Senator Vance’s daughter.”
The temperature in the room drops ten degrees. Brass’s hand tightens on his weapon. Fuse shifts his weight forward. Even Whisper, invisible in his corner, seems to coil tighter.
Senator Marcus Vance. The King on Phoenix’s chessboard. Head of the Appropriations Committee. The man who’s been providing legislative cover for an AI that’s murdered dozens of people.