A single gunshot echoes from inside the building. Nobody turns around.
Stars overhead, scattered across a sky that looks different from the outside than it does from the overlook, wider somehow, as if the sky itself knows that what happened tonight changed the shape of the world beneath it.
I pull off the tactical vest. The weight lifts from my shoulders, and beneath it my shirt is soaked with sweat and my body aches and none of it matters because the war is over and I was here for the end of it.
Dar emerges behind me. Body armor still over her hoodie, cap askew, more of the rainbow hair escaping and capturing the transport's headlights. Laptop bag across her chest.
She looks exhausted and electric and like the most dangerous thing in any room she walks into.
The combination of tactical gear and punk aesthetic and the fierce intelligence behind her eyes makes me want to pull her into the tree line and put my mouth on every inch of her until neither of us can remember what a Committee is.
Instead, I sit on the ground. Because my legs have decided that standing is optional now that the adrenaline is draining, and because this is the position, the same one as the server room floor, the same one as the reboot, and the repetition carries an echo that feels earned.
Dar sits beside me. Laptop on her knees.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
"We did it."
I laugh. The sound comes out rusty and loud and carries through the grounds where Webb's empire used to live. It's not controlled. It's not calculated. It's joy, unfiltered, and the unfamiliarity of it in my own throat makes me laugh harder.
"We did it," Dar says, and there's a crack in her voice that she doesn't bother patching.
Her shoulder presses against mine. Not accidentally.
Deliberately, with the full weight of her body leaning into me, and the contact point burns through the layers between us.
Her hand finds mine. Threads her fingers through, palm to palm, grip firm enough that I can feel her pulse in her fingertips.
Racing. Still racing. Matching mine.
The transport idles. The team assembles. Kane stands at the perimeter, speaking into his phone with the quiet authority of a man coordinating the handoff of evidence that will occupy prosecutors for years.
Victoria walks out of the compound last. Roman is waiting for her.
He takes her hand, and she lets him, and they stand together in the Virginia darkness, two people who spent a decade believing the distance between them was permanent and proved. But who, through stubbornness and sacrifice and the kind of love that refuses to stay buried, proved that it wasn't.
My mountain is a thousand miles away. My screens are dark.
My systems are running on automatic, keeping the place I love safe while I sit on the ground outside a compound in Virginia with gunpowder residue in my sinuses and data in my bag and the woman who broke into my system pressed warm and deliberate and chosen against my side.
For the first time in my life, I'm not watching the mission through a feed.
I was the mission. And I was enough.
24
DAR
Iwake in Tommy's bed, in a mountain fortress surrounded by people who started as encrypted signatures and became family.
There’s a Mountain Dew on the nightstand. There’s also dark chocolate. The server hum is steady, and for the first time in years, there is nothing to fight.
No Committee targeting data waiting on a screen. No weapon to neutralize, no system to breach, no insurance partition to update against the possibility that the institution I trusted would discard me the way the last one did.
The screens in Tommy's quarters glow with nothing more urgent than system diagnostics running green across every sector.