Chapter 17
THE DRIVE
TORQUE
I wake up with a woman in my arms and no idea where I am.
For a long moment, I don’t move. Just breathe. Take inventory.
Thin sheets. Flat pillow. The rattle of an ancient air conditioner fighting a losing battle against desert heat. Smell of bleach, industrial cleaner, and something underneath that’s warm, alive, and …
Sarah.
It comes back in pieces. The motel. The breaking.
She was shaking apart in my arms while years of controlled grief finally found its way out.
Washing Costa’s blood from her hands. The codes she gave me, trusting me with the keys to the sky.
The way she curled into me like I was the only solid thing in a world that kept trying to shake her loose.
She’s still curled into me now. Her head on my chest, her hair a dark tangle across my shoulder, her breath slow and even against my skin. One of her hands is fisted in my T-shirt like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she lets go.
The morning light filters through cheap curtains, painting stripes across the bed. Dust motes float in the beams. The air conditioner rattles.
And I’m still.
That’s the strange part. The part that doesn’t fit.
I’m never still. Haven’t been still in seven years.
There’s always movement—keys spinning, foot tapping, something keeping the noise at bay.
But right now, with her weight warm against my side and her breathing steady in the quiet room, I’m not reaching for the keys.
I’m not calculating the fastest route out. I’m not running.
I’m just—here.
She stirs. A small sound, not quite awake. Her hand tightens in my shirt, then relaxes. Her breathing changes—deeper, conscious.
“Hey.” My voice comes out rougher than I expected. Morning voice. Grief voice. Something.
She goes rigid for half a second. The instinct to pull back, to rebuild the walls. Tension radiates from her body.
Then she exhales. Stays where she is.
“Hey.”
One word. But she doesn’t move away. Doesn’t armor up. Just lies there with her head on my chest and lets the morning exist.
“How do you feel?”
A pause. “I don’t know yet.” Another pause. “Different.”
“Good different or bad different?”
“I don’t know that either.” She shifts, tilting her head to look up at me. Her eyes are puffy from crying, her hair a disaster, her face bare of any makeup. She looks younger like this. More human.
She looks beautiful.
Don’t say that out loud. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“What time is it?”
The cheap digital clock reads: 10:58.
“We slept six hours.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s …” She trails off. Processes. “That’s the most I’ve slept in months.”
“Same.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “We should move.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us moves.
The air conditioner rattles. Somewhere outside, a truck passes on the highway, engine growling and fading.
“Levi.”
My name. Not my callsign. Something warm spreads through my chest at the sound of it.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.” She doesn’t explain. Doesn’t qualify. Just the words, simple and raw.
“Anytime.”
She holds my gaze for another moment. Then she pushes herself up, and the spell breaks; we’re two people in a cheap motel room with a mission to finish and a clock counting down.
Time to move.
The motel doesn’t have a continental breakfast, but it has a coffee maker that looks like it survived the Reagan administration. I make a pot anyway. It tastes like battery acid and regret, but it’s caffeine, and that’s what matters.
Sarah emerges from the bathroom looking slightly more put together. The Nevada T-shirt is still too big, the sweatpants still pooling around her ankles, but she’s washed her face and tied her hair back. The queen pendant glints at her throat.
Her feet are in the cheap canvas slip-ons I grabbed from the truck stop. They’re white with a thin rubber sole. On her—director of the NRO, controller of satellites, woman who probably owns twenty pairs of heels—they look absurd.
She catches me looking.
“Don’t say a word.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking you look ready for a beach vacation, not a black-ops infiltration.”
“Same thing.”
The almost-smile. The one I’m starting to catalog, to collect. She doesn’t give them easily, but when they come, they change her whole face.
We split the terrible coffee. Check the room for anything left behind. There’s nothing—we came with nothing; we leave with nothing. Just the clothes on our backs, the weapons in our hands, and the codes in our heads.
Both sets of codes now. Redundancy. Trust.
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero. Four-four-one-echo-bravo-seven-two-eight-five.
They loop in my head, a responsibility I didn’t ask for but won’t set down. If she goes down, I finish this. That’s the deal now.
She’s not going down. I’ll make sure of it.
The car is where I left it—nondescript sedan from the airport, probably flagged by now, but we don’t have better options. I do a quick walk-around, check the tires, glance underneath for anything that shouldn’t be there.
Paranoid?
Maybe.
But paranoid keeps you breathing.
“Clear,” I tell her.
She slides into the passenger seat. I take the driver’s side. The engine turns over on the first try.
The desert stretches out before us. Empty highway cutting through brown scrubland, mountains blue and distant on the horizon. The sun is high and white, bleaching the color out of everything.
I pull onto the road.
We drive in silence for the first hour.
Not awkward silence. Not the strained quiet of two people with nothing to say. Just—silence. The hum of the engine. The whisper of tires on asphalt. The occasional blast of a passing truck.
She’s looking out the window, watching the desert scroll by. Sagebrush and rock, and the occasional abandoned structure, weathering to nothing in the sun. Her hand rests on her thigh, the wedding ring catching the light.
My keys are in my pocket. Not spinning. Just there.
I notice that. Notice that I’m not reaching for them. Notice that the silence isn’t the enemy it usually is.
She broke for me last night. Shattered in my arms and let me hold the pieces while she sobbed out seven years of controlled grief. I washed blood from her hands, dried them, and put her to bed like she was something precious.
And now we’re here. On a highway in the middle of nowhere, driving toward a mission that might kill us both, and the quiet is just that. Quiet.
When did that happen?
“Can I ask you something?”
Her voice breaks the spell. Soft. Careful.
“Yeah.”
She turns from the window. Studies my profile. I keep my eyes on the road, but her gaze is a physical weight.
“Last night. In the bathroom. You said you washed your CO’s blood off when you were twenty-three.”
My hands tighten on the wheel. Reflex.
“Yeah.”
“But that’s not all of it, is it?”
The highway stretches out. Straight, empty, and endless.
“No.”
“Who was it?” Her voice is gentle. Not pushing. Just asking. “The person you weren’t fast enough for.”
The silence crystallizes. Sharp-edged. Dangerous.
This is where I deflect. Where I make a joke, spin the conversation somewhere safer, keep moving so the dark can’t catch up. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.
But she broke for me. Shattered and sobbed, trusted me with the rawest parts of herself.
I owe her the same.
My hands loosen on the wheel. I take a breath. The desert blurs past, and I start talking.
“His name was Jake. Jake Reeves.”
The words come slowly at first. Rusty from disuse. I haven’t told this story—the full story—to anyone. Ever.
“We met in Selection. Delta. Both of us were young and stupid and convinced we were going to live forever.” The memory surfaces unbidden—Jake’s grin, the way he’d clap me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise.
“He was team leader material from day one. Steady. Smart. The kind of guy who made everyone around him better just by existing.”
Sarah doesn’t speak. Just listens.
“Four years we served together. Three deployments. I was his pilot—extraction, insertion, whatever the mission needed. He trusted me to get his team in and out alive.” I pause. “He was the best man at my sister’s wedding. I was supposed to be the best man at his.”
The highway stretches. The engine hums.
“Kandahar. 2017. Standard extraction—grab an HVT from a compound, fly him out. Intel said clean. Intel was wrong.”
The memory sharpens. Sand, sun, and the taste of dust in my mouth.
“Compound was a trap. Taliban forces had the whole thing rigged. Jake’s team got pinned in a collapsed structure. Comms were spotty—interference, damage, I couldn’t tell. But I heard enough.”
Her hand moves. Lands on my arm. Light. Present.
“Jake’s last transmission came through around 1340. ‘Torque, we’re pinned. Grid reference Foxtrot-Seven-Niner. Get here. Get here NOW.’”
It still echoes. His voice, tight with pain but not panic. Jake never panicked. Not even at the end.
“Flight time from my position to that grid—fifteen minutes. Standard approach, standard safety margins, standard everything.” My jaw tightens. “I did it in eleven.”
“Eleven minutes,” she repeats softly.
“Pushed the bird past every limit. Past every safety margin. Past everything that said, ‘this is how helicopters break.’” The wheel creaks under my grip. “Didn’t care. Jake was dying, and I was four minutes too slow, and I was going to make up that time or die trying.”
The desert blurs. I blink it clear.
“When I landed at Foxtrot-Seven-Niner, I found wreckage. Bodies. And silence.”
The word hangs in the air. Silence.
“Jake died ninety seconds before my skids touched the ground. Ninety seconds. I flew fifteen minutes in eleven, and I was still ninety seconds too late.”
The car eats miles while the silence stretches.
I keep talking. Can’t stop now.
“I called his name on the radio. Over and over. ‘Jake. Jake, respond. Jake, goddammit, answer me.’” My voice cracks on the memory. “Nothing. Just static. Just—nothing.”