He tried to humiliate me in front of his squad, but the color drained from his face when he recognized the black and gold patch hidden under my rolled-up sleeve.
“””Morning, General Dust Mop.””
The jeer echoed off the metal walls of the hangar, followed by the sharp, barking laughter of three young mechanics. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t look up. I just kept my eyes locked on the 30mm chain gun of the Apache, my hands moving with a rhythm I had perfected over a thousand lifetimes.
To them, I was just background noise. A stain on the floor. Zephrine Thorne, the weird armory tech who ate lunch alone and never spoke.
I tightened the bolt, feeling the familiar bite of the wrench. It was better this way. Invisibility was safety. Invisibility meant I didn’t have to answer questions about where I was five years ago, or why I was the only one of my team who didn’t come home in a flag-draped box.
“”Hey, space cadet, I’m talking to you,”” the young corporal sneered, kicking my toolbox.
I took a breath, holding the rage in my chest like a grenade with the pin half-pulled. Don’t engage. Stay the ghost.
The hangar doors slid open, letting in a blast of desert heat and the blinding white sun. Major Blackwood strode in, flanked by two lieutenants. He was the golden boy here—decorated, confident, loud. The type of officer who thought he owned the sky.
I turned slightly to shield my face, wiping a smear of grease across my cheek as a disguise. But the heat was suffocating today. Without thinking, I had rolled my sleeves up past my elbows to get better leverage on the w*apon system.
As Blackwood brushed past me, rushing toward the briefing room, he stopped dead.
It wasn’t a casual pause. It was a freeze response. A physiological reaction to a threat.
He turned his head slowly, his eyes bypassing my grease-stained face and locking onto my right forearm. There, faded by sun and time but still distinct against my pale skin, was the patch. Black and gold. A raptor’s claw gripping a lightning bolt.
The Eagle Talon.
The hangar went silent. The young mechanics stopped laughing. They saw the look on the Major’s face—a mix of confusion and pure, unadulterated fear.
“”That…”” Blackwood’s voice cracked, barely a whisper. He took a step toward me, his hand trembling as he reached out, as if he were seeing a phantom. “”That’s not possible. They were all listed K*IA after Samurand.””
I didn’t move. I just tightened my grip on the wrench until my knuckles turned white.
“”Answer me,”” he demanded, his voice rising, drawing the attention of every soul in the building. “”Who are you?””
I finally looked up, meeting his gaze. The disguise was slipping. The ghost was being forced back into the land of the living, and I knew exactly what that meant.
THE QUIET DAYS WERE OVER, AND THE STORM WAS ABOUT TO BREAK!
The hangar air thickened, heavy with the sudden absence of sound. Tools clattered to the floor as the young mechanics backed away instinctively, their earlier bravado evaporating like spilled fuel on hot tarmac. Major Blackwood’s hand hovered inches from my forearm, fingers trembling as though the patch itself radiated heat.
The Eagle Talon. Black field, gold raptor claw closed around a jagged lightning bolt. Not a standard unit insignia. Not something you earned in basic or picked up at the PX. It was the mark of Task Force Talon—black-budget, deniable, the kind of ghost unit that existed only in redacted after-action reports and the nightmares of the men who’d signed off on its missions.
Samurand wasn’t on any official map of operations. Five years ago, in a moonless valley straddling a disputed border, Talon had been inserted to neutralize a high-value chemical weapons cache. The intel was flawless, the target confirmed. What wasn’t in the briefing packets was the double-cross: the cache belonged to an allied government that had quietly funded the very insurgents we were hunting. When the shooting started, it wasn’t just hostiles who opened fire. Friendly fire rained down—deliberate, surgical, meant to erase every trace of the op and everyone who knew the truth.
They listed us all KIA. Burned the records. Scattered the survivors—if any—into deep cover. I was the only one who walked out. Crawled, mostly. Through three days of sand and fever, carrying shrapnel in my ribs and the names of the dead burned into my skull. The Army gave me a new Social, a low-visibility MOS, and a quiet hangar job where no one would ever look twice. Invisibility was the price of survival.
Blackwood’s eyes flicked from the patch to my face, searching for the girl who’d once worn desert camo and a rifle instead of grease and a wrench.
“Thorne,” he rasped. “Zephrine Thorne. You were… you were on the manifest. The after-action said the entire element was—”
“Vaporized,” I finished for him, voice flat. “Convenient, wasn’t it? One thermobaric strike, no bodies to recover, no questions to answer. Clean.”
The major’s face had gone from pale to ashen. He knew. Not the full truth—no one outside a handful of cleared personnel ever would—but enough. He’d been a captain back then, attached to the joint task force that green-lit the op. His signature was on the final approval cable. He’d slept fine for five years assuming the loose ends had burned away in the desert.
Until now.
One of the lieutenants stepped forward uncertainly. “Sir? Should we—”
“Shut up,” Blackwood snapped, never taking his eyes off me. His voice cracked again. “How are you here? How are you alive?”
I set the wrench down with deliberate care, the metallic clink echoing like a gavel. “Because someone has to remember what really happened at Samurand. Someone has to carry the names.”
He took a half-step back, as if the words themselves were a weapon. Around us, phones were already out—mechanics recording, whispers spreading. The hangar doors were still open; sunlight poured in, harsh and unrelenting, turning every shadow sharp.
Blackwood’s jaw worked. He could order silence. He could call security. He could try to bury this again. But the patch was visible now, and visibility is contagious. Once seen, it couldn’t be unseen.
I rolled my sleeve down slowly, covering the insignia again. The ghost slipping back into place—but not quite. Not anymore.
“You can walk away, Major,” I said quietly. “Pretend you saw nothing. File another report. Or you can do what you should have done five years ago: tell the truth.”
He stared at me for a long beat. Then, without a word, he turned on his heel and strode toward the briefing room. Not running. Not fleeing. Just… retreating.
The mechanics watched him go. Then their eyes came back to me—wary, curious, no longer mocking.
I picked up my wrench again, returned to the chain gun. The rhythm resumed: tighten, check, repeat. But the silence in the hangar had changed. It wasn’t empty anymore. It was listening.
Outside, the desert wind howled against the metal walls, carrying sand across the flight line like whispers of old debts coming due. The quiet days were over. The storm had broken.
And this time, it wasn’t going to bury the truth.
It was going to dig it up.
