Chapter 3 - The Desert Keeps Records
Night in the Arizona desert is a liar. It cools the skin while setting traps for anything still alive enough to hope.
Evelyn dragged Reeves into a narrow basalt cutout and worked by red-filtered light. She packed the wound, improvised a pressure bandage, and gave him just enough fluids to keep him with her. He drifted in and out, muttering coordinates and apologies that had nothing to do with himself.
At 0210, while checking the abandoned gear she had refused to leave, Evelyn found the first hard proof that Alpha Squad hadn’t just been unlucky.
Inside Garrett’s map pouch was an updated extraction route with a timestamp nearly forty minutes newer than the one the squad had received in briefing. In Hayes’s rifle case compartment was a burst relay key that should have been logged in operations, not in the field. And in Mitchell’s kit, wedged beneath det cord and initiators, was a backup transmitter still cycling unauthorized beacon pulses.
The team hadn’t just been exposed.
They had been fed to someone.
Reeves regained consciousness long enough to hear her mutter, “Internal compromise,” and answered with a hoarse whisper.
“I heard it too. On comms. Somebody redirected us.”
She believed him. More importantly, she believed the pattern.
By dawn, she had stripped every useful piece of intelligence from the abandoned equipment, erased what she could, and transmitted a compressed packet through an emergency channel so old almost no one on base would recognize it. The packet went not to field operations, but to a secure oversight line buried under special access protocols.
Then she got Reeves onto his feet for eleven steps before he collapsed again.
So she carried him.
Three kilometers through broken rock, shifting sand, and the kind of fatigue that makes the human body negotiate with itself. She carried him because he had been the only one who looked back. She carried the gear because classified equipment did not belong in enemy hands. And she carried the truth because once a lie enters command, it spreads faster than blood.
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By the time Echo Base came into view, Evelyn had gone far past anger.
She had reached purpose.
