Chapter 15 #2
I let that one go because I was looking at Sera, and she was already deep in the route package, adjusting variables with one hand and absently stroking the sleeping kitten with the other.
I'd been right earlier. I did not have a formula for this.
"The timing margin," I said, because the work was the solid ground and I could stand on it. "If they're early, I'm staged and waiting. If they're late, I'm exposed on the shoulder for extra minutes. What's my abort threshold?"
"Fourteen minutes past the window. If they haven't appeared by ten-forty, they took an alternate route, and you come home."
"Ten-forty. Copy."
"And Travis." She looked up from the screen. "If anything feels wrong before you reach the intercept point, you come home. I don't care about the courier or the timing or my confidence interval. Something feels off, you abort."
I could have made a joke. Something dry about her giving operational orders from a chair with a kitten in her lap. But somehow it felt too right to poke fun of.
"Understood," I said instead.
We went through the rest of the plan again.
Maude would relay comms. Sera would monitor the corridor feeds in real time and call adjustments if the courier deviated.
If the intercept succeeded, Sera would route the anonymous tip to law enforcement while I cleared the area.
Clean, coordinated, built by three minds instead of one.
The plan was solid. We both knew it. Now all we had to do was pull it off.
The gear room was always my last stop before leaving for a mission and my first stop on the way back.
I'd designed it for efficiency, not comfort.
Hooks on the wall, labeled shelves, the gun safe built into the reinforced panel.
Everything in its place. Everything where my hands could find it without thinking.
Because usually by the time I was reaching this point, my body was shutting down.
I'd been through this ritual dozens of times, and my body could almost do it automatically. Vest first. I pulled it from the hook and checked the plates by feel, running my fingers along the edges for warping or damage.
The hives started while I was strapping the vest. A prickling heat that began between my shoulder blades and radiated outward, spreading across my chest and down both arms like a slow burn under the skin. Eighteen months of this and my body still hadn't figured out that I was going anyway.
Glock out of the safe. I slid the magazine home and my right hand betrayed me, a tremor deep enough that I felt it in my wrist. I loaded the spares into the vest and kept moving. Comms unit clipped to my collar. Knife back in the ankle sheath.
The same configuration every time, so my hands could find what they needed in the dark without my brain getting involved.
"Travis."
I turned. Sera stood in the doorway.
She took in the room in a single sweep. Me in the vest, gun holstered, welts already rising on my forearms where I'd pushed my sleeves up to check the straps. My right hand resting on the spare magazine with a tremor I couldn't will away.
I didn't stop. I reached for the zip ties and stowed them in the left cargo pocket. Moved through the checklist the way I always moved through it, one item at a time, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and I didn't have room for feeling right now.
She didn't leave. She didn't come closer. She leaned against the doorframe and watched me put myself together while my body tried to take me apart.
Every other time I'd done this, the only witness had been Maude, a voice in a speaker monitoring my vitals, narrating my decline in dry clinical language that I could absorb without it touching anything.
Sera was not a voice in a speaker. She was four feet away and her eyes were on my hands, and she could see every welt and every tremor and there was nowhere to put any of that.
"Maude," I said. "Final systems check."
"All systems nominal. Corridor feeds active. Comms relay tested and confirmed. Your mobile unit is synced, and the route package is loaded. Weather is clear. Patrol schedule unchanged." A pause. "Your heart rate is one-fourteen."
"Noted."
"Also noted: it was ninety-two at this point during your last pre-mission prep. The twenty-two-point differential is worth mentioning."
I didn't respond to that. I knew what the differential was. The differential was standing in the doorway.
I ran a final check on the comms unit. Pressed the earpiece, tested the frequency. Sera's station would pick up the signal from the control room. Maude would relay.
"Comms check," I said.
Sera straightened. "I'll be at my station in two minutes."
She held my eyes for a moment. Steady. No pity, no fear, no performance. She could see the welts on my arms and the tremor in my hands, and she wasn't looking away.
"Come back.” She nodded, then walked out toward the command center.
Two words. Not a request. Not a goodbye. Something in between that I didn't have a name for and couldn't answer without breaking something I needed intact for the next four hours.
I pulled the jacket off the hook and zipped it over the vest. That was it. The final moment where Travis disappeared and the Ghost took his place. A shape in the dark that nobody could describe afterward.
I still hated that fucking nickname.
The hives had spread to my chest and the skin under the vest burned against the plates.
The tremor had settled into both hands with a low, steady vibration that wouldn't stop until I was back inside these walls.
My body was fully committed to its argument against what I was doing, and I was fully committed to ignoring it.
I reached the door. Opened it. The night air hit the welts on my neck and they flared, a sharp sting that would settle into a dull burn by the time I reached the highway.
Sera's voice came through the comms unit, already live, already on.
"Corridor feeds are up. Patrol cleared the stretch eight minutes ago. You're clear to the highway."
I walked into the dark.