Kane gives the order.
The assault team moves like water through a cracked dam. Fast, silent, each one flowing into the space the others create. Stryker on point with Dylan at his shoulder. Mercer and Micah flanking wide.
Roman detaches, because Roman always detaches, sliding into the compound's perimeter with the particular absence of presence that makes him invisible even when you know where to look.
Dar and I wait.
The waiting is the worst part. I've known this from the other side of screens for years, watched operators hold position while clock hands moved like they were dragging through wet concrete.
I never understood the physical reality of it until now.
My heartbeat is audible inside the vest. My palms are damp inside the thin tactical gloves. My knees ache from crouching, and my lower back is reminding me that yoga is not, in fact, an adequate substitute for field training.
"Perimeter secure. Moving to breach point." Stryker's voice.
"Copy." Kane.
"Tech team, you're go in ninety seconds."
Ninety seconds. I count them. Each one lands in my chest with the weight of a metronome set to the tempo of controlled violence.
Dar doesn't count. She crouches beside me with her bag open, hardware prepped, her fingers tapping a sequence on her thigh that isn't anxiety. It's code. She's running through the infiltration protocol in her head, kinetically, the way musicians finger scales before a performance.
"You're doing the thing with your leg," I tell her.
"You're doing the thing with your glasses."
My hand freezes halfway to the bridge of my nose. I lower it.
She smiles, quick and gone, a flash of teeth in the darkness that I tuck away in the part of my mind reserved for things I want to remember when the rest of this night is something I'd rather forget.
"For the record," she whispers, "your tactical vest is on backwards."
"It is not."
"It's not. But the look on your face was worth the lie."
"I'm going to remember this when we're back at base."
"Counting on it."
"Breach." The word comes through the comms, followed by the sound of controlled entry. The difference from hearing it through screens is the concussive feel of it in my chest, apressure wave that has no business reaching this distance but does because physics doesn't care about expectations.
Gunfire. Short, controlled bursts.
The sound is sharp and flat and carries none of the cinematic quality that movies suggest. It sounds like exactly what it is: metal moving through air at lethal velocity.
"Contact, ground floor. Two hostiles down." Dylan's voice, flat and certain.
"Copy. Assault team, clear to the second floor. Tech team, move to insertion point." Kane.
Dar and I move.
Running in a tactical vest with a laptop bag while gunfire echoes through a building is an experience I will never adequately describe and never want to repeat.
My boot catches something — a cable, a threshold strip, the universe's editorial commentary on my fitness for field operations — and my knee hits the floor hard enough to send a shock up my thigh into my hip. The laptop bag swings forward on its strap, the momentum pulling me off-balance, and for one terrible second I'm on all fours in a corridor full of tactical operators with a computer bouncing against my ribs and the taste of adrenaline and humiliation metallic in the back of my throat.
Dar's hand closes on my arm. Not gentle. She hauls me upright with a grip that doesn't care about my dignity and cares very much about my velocity, and I'm running again before my brain finishes cataloging the embarrassment.