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The bedroom was a mess. Not chaotic, just lived in by someone who didn’t stay still long enough to care. Clean clothes he hadn’t folded yet were piled on the chair. An empty coffee cup on the dresser next to his dive watch.
He grabbed the duffel and started loading what he needed. Base layers. Tactical pants. A worn jacket. He shoved the boots in toe to heel and pressed them flat with his elbow. Nothing precise. Just fast. Efficient.
A memory surfaced anyway.
Just a flicker.
Him and Kento, back in Kandahar. A game of cards, someone cursing in three languages, dust caught in his teeth from laughing too hard. The sudden crash of reality as the briefing came down hard and clean. Go now. Hit fast. No time for regret.
He didn’t remember how that game ended. Just remembered Kento clapping him on the back and saying, “Don’t die weird, man. You’ll haunt the hell outta me.”
That had been the last time they were both whole.
He raised his head, his gaze snagging on the prayer rug still in the same place he’d left it since… He moved, scooped up the rug. The cloth was folded small, edges fraying. Deep blue, stitched in warm ocher thread. A fadedmihrabarched at its center, aprayer niche, shaped like a doorway pointing the way, flanked by a pattern so worn it almost looked like radiating stars, except Nash knew what they were. Sunflowers. Always turning toward the light.
It had been a gift from an old man during his last stable Afghanistan deployment, Ustad Hamid, a village calligrapher whose grandson Nash had pulled out of a blast zone. He’d pressed it into Nash’s hands with a quiet benediction.Even if you forget the words… the direction will remember.
He swallowed hard. If everything panned out, he’d finally get the truth. If it didn’t…before he could change his mind, he tucked it into his duffel. Then he stood. Shouldered the bag. Left the light on behind him.
On arrival, he was met outside the airport with a plain, forgettable rental car.
Inside the glovebox, tucked into a folded maintenance log, was the weapon Caspari had promised. A Glock 19. Clean. No scratch serial. No bullshit. It fit his hand like an old memory, solid, steady, reliable. He set it against his thigh as he drove, the weight grounding him more than the seatbelt ever could.
The hotel wasn’t much. Quiet. Clean. The kind of place that didn’t ask questions or offer anything extra. Just the basics. A bed. A bathroom. A door that locked.
Nash liked it more than he wanted to admit. He dropped his bag on the bed. There was always that first minute in a new place when the air didn’t know him yet. When the walls felt like they were waiting.
He sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his boots slowly, his fingers pausing once when he reached for the second knot. His knee ached. Scar tissue and something worse. The med board had listed it as a mobility compromise. The SEALs had listed it as done.
He set the boots by the door. Aligned them. Then he tossed his black leather jacket over the chair and reached into the side pocket of his bag. The pill bottle rattled softly. The label was worn, the instructions barely legible. One pill. No more than twice a week. Take with water.
He swallowed it dry and lay back on the bed, arm across his eyes, body loose in the way that wasn’t natural but trained.
Just before the drug took hold, he reached again instinctively for the mat, pressing it to his chest for a second. A habit from a version of himself that used to believe. That used to kneel. Fading, earthy ocher barely showed anymore, but the color was still there, like a promise.
Sleep came. But not peace.
* * *
There was wind.Grit in his mouth. Screaming. Sand caught in his lashes, and blood on his gloves. He turned toward the sound, someone calling his name, and saw movement, a shape in the haze. It was Kento. It had to be. The gait. The way he moved. But his face was wrong. It kept shifting, breaking, like the memory couldn’t settle.
Then it was quiet. So quiet. Until the gunfire started again.
Nash reached for his weapon, but his hands were empty. His boots were gone. His body wouldn’t move. He was screaming for them to run, to fall back, but no one heard him. He turned in circles, breath catching, the sound of a drone overhead cutting through everything like a blade. It was all wrong. The angles. The colors. The time.
Then Kento turned. He had on a Superman outfit. The blue hurt his eyes, the red S on his chest blood red. Half his face was gone. He mouthed something.Why are you still here?
Nash sat up hard, sweat slick on his chest, breath tight in his lungs like he’d run ten miles uphill. The room was dark. The heat fired up. Somewhere outside, a bird called once, sharp and strange against the silence. He pressed a hand to his face, then dragged it down to his chest, grounding himself. He checked the clock. 4:27.
Too late for sleep. Too early for sense.
He got up, dressed, and pulled his laces tight with mechanical focus.
The air was cold, and his breath fogging when he stepped outside. The sky was just starting to lighten at the edges, pale blue creeping behind the ridge. The trail cut west behind the hotel, past a wire fence and through a dry brush path worn down by bored hotel guests and early-morning runners.
He took it at a steady pace. His legs warmed quickly, muscles clicking into memory. He passed a small bluff, then the edge of a drainage ditch, and kept going. The trail curved hard around the bluff, dry grass brushing his calves, the ground patchy with old snow and the broken remains of something that might have been sunflowers once. The dead stalks lay scattered and trampled, snapped underfoot by winter and whatever had come before him, their blackened heads bent low to the ground like they had given up reaching for the sun.
He didn’t slow down. Didn’t let himself look too closely. He followed without thought, without plan, breath deepening as the rhythm took over. This was how he stayed sane.