“Did I… did I embarrass you, Emily?” he gasped.
“No,” I wept, pressing harder as the medics swarmed the fence. “No, Ryan. You were magnificent.”
His eyes rolled back, and he went limp in my arms.
Chapter 5: Aftermath and Ashes
The hospital waiting room smelled of antiseptic and stale coffee. It was a sterile purgatory where minutes stretched into hours, and every time the double doors swung open, the air was sucked from the room.
I sat in a hard plastic chair, my left arm immobilized in a heavy sling, the shoulder heavily bandaged and throbbing with a dull, relentless ache. I was wearing borrowed scrubs, my black dress sitting in an evidence bag somewhere in federal custody.
My mother sat three chairs away. She hadn’t spoken in six hours. Her pearls were gone. Her perfectly coiffed hair hung in limp, exhausted strands. She looked like a woman who had woken up to find her entire reality was a stage set, and the walls had just collapsed.
My father was in federal custody. He had surrendered himself to Commander Hayes the moment the base was secured. He would likely spend the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary for treason, conspiracy, and espionage. The architect of his own destruction, and ours.
The television in the corner of the waiting room was muted, but the chyron scrolling across the bottom of the news networks told the story.
MASSIVE PENTAGON BREACH. DOZENS OF DEFENSE CONTRACTORS ARRESTED. ‘GHOST NETWORK’ HALCYON EXPOSED.
It was a bloodbath. Senators, generals, CEOs—the names leaking from the corrupted servers were tearing the country’s power structures apart. Voss was in a black site. The sniper had been killed by the QRF.
And Mercer… Mercer had survived. Barely. Two bullets to the chest, but he was in the ICU. His daughter, Maya, had been rescued by a SWAT team in Long Beach exactly five minutes after the Halcyon network collapsed, before the kill order could be sent.
The double doors swung open. A surgeon walked out, his mask pulled down around his neck.
