“They call you Nightglass because you can see what nobody else can.”

I looked down at the rifle in my hands. Caleb’s range card was still tucked in the scope mount.

“It’s just a name,” I said.

“People don’t name ghosts for fun.”

The QRF arrived fourteen minutes later.

Helicopters thundered over the ridge, rotors whipping snow into walls of white. Medics swarmed Parker first.

I stood back while they loaded him onto a stretcher.

Ramirez refused to let go of his hand until the crew chief pulled her away.

Ethan limped toward the helicopter, but before he climbed in, he pressed something hard and black into my palm.

A small encrypted drive.

“What is this?”

“We found it inside the relay station before the contractors attacked,” he said.

“Shipment ledgers. Stolen optics and ammo. Route changes.”

His eyes met mine.

“And an archived mission file. It’s marked NIGHTGLASS.”

My fingers closed around the drive.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe not. But someone wanted it to disappear. Looked like they were willing to kill three of my soldiers to get it back.”

“They didn’t kill anyone,” I said.

“No thanks to you.” He managed a thin smile that faded quickly.

“Hannah, there’s more. The contractors knew who you were. Before you even keyed the radio.”

A cold feeling settled in my chest.

“What do you mean?”

“One of them had your call sign on a prepared list. Paper. Official looking. We found it inside the relay station with the drive.”

The wind pushed through the trees and stole my breath.

How did a private contractor have my classified call sign on a list?

The answer came before I was ready to hear it.

The same way our extraction coordinates were changed three years ago.

Because someone inside the military was feeding them information.

A soldier pulled me aside, his face urgent.

“Sergeant Reese, the prisoner is asking for you.”

The contractor leader sat against the helicopter skid, zip ties around his wrists. A medic pressed a bandage to his leg.

He looked up and smiled at me.

The smile was worse than any weapon.

“The famous Nightglass,” he said. “They told me you were dead.”

“People tell a lot of stories.”

He laughed, a low, wet sound.

“Colonel Vail said you’d stay in your kitchen.”

I went still.

“Vail?”

“Colonel Marcus Vail.” He spat the words like they tasted familiar. “He said Nightglass was finished. Three years of soup and silence. He said you would never pick up a rifle again.”

My hands were shaking.

It wasn’t fear. It was the feeling of a door opening onto a room I’d been certain was locked forever.

Caleb’s voice. I could still hear it.

The last thing he’d said to me, before he went down.

“That’s not true, sir. I saw the radio traffic. The extraction coordinates were changed from inside the base.”

Then the shot.

I never saw who fired it.

But now I did.

I watched the prisoner laugh through his split lip, and the pieces came together in my head like a round locking into the chamber.

Vail had signed my reassignment orders.

Vail had walked into the command tent the day after the mission and told me, with a straight face, that it was a communication error.

Vail had sent me to Alaska, three thousand miles from anyone who knew the truth.

And now his contractors had tried to kill Ethan’s entire squad to retrieve a drive that carried proof.

I pressed the drive against my chest.

“Hey,” I said to the prisoner. “Where is Colonel Vail right now?”

The man grinned. “Waiting for you.”

The flight back to Raven took twenty-five minutes.

The whole way, I sat beside Ethan and stared at the drive in my palm.

“I need to get this to command,” he said.

“Not to command.”

He looked at me.

“Someone inside command set this up,” I said. “If we give this to the wrong person, it disappears. And so do we.”

He was silent for a long moment.

“You have a better idea?”

“General Laura Bennett. She took over my old unit six months after the mission. She was there when I testified.”

“You trust her?”

I thought about her face during the hearing. The way she’d looked at Vail when he gave his statement.

“I trust that she looked at him the way I did,” I said.

We landed at 2:47 a.m.

Tarmac lights cut through the falling snow, and I saw a cluster of vehicles waiting outside the aid station.

Colonel Vail stood at the center of them. Coat open. Cigar smoke curling toward the sky.

He looked exactly as I remembered.

Gray hair. Hard eyes. A smile that never touched anything human.

He walked toward me.

“Sergeant Reese,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Abandoning her post. Removing a restricted weapon. Interfering with a training exercise.”