Page 28

KADE

T he cleanup starts before the fire dies.

Before the last flames exhale their dying breath, the shadows stir. A shimmer at the tree line. A low hum beneath the heat’s receding roar. Blackstrike’s advance team descends in a surgical wave, a silent storm borne on ghost-backs. They move preemptively, erasing details no one has even noticed.

The scent of scorched pine tangles with static and something colder—metal, burn gel, quiet authority. This isn’t cleanup; it’s purification. Evidence and energy vanish into vacuum-sealed crates before the world can blink.

We act without permission, striking before anyone thinks to ask questions.

Blackstrike flows through the dark as drifting smoke—silent, thorough, unseen.

Matte-black fire gear swallows every glint; each step leaves no trace.

I catch fragments: red-lit goggles, packs humming with scan tech, gloves that never touch bare earth.

One of us seeds sensor scramblers among the trees.

Another positions nano-thermite canisters that burn cold, scrubbing away every residual signature we’ve left behind.

To the casual observer it looks like an ordinary haz-mat crew; I know better.

These operators erase truth before dawn can expose it.

By the time the Prescott rigs rumble off the ridge and the last ember gutters into ash, heat clings to my skin in a stubborn second layer.

The air hangs thick with scorched pine, ionized dust, and the metallic bite of nano-thermite.

My lungs feel raw, each breath scraping from the inside.

Ash drifts in lazy spirals, settling on shoulders, boots, thoughts.

Warmth radiates from the ground beneath my feet—more warning than comfort. It’s over yet not gone.

Silent drones already ring the site, barely discernible against low smoke and rising ash, their presence a whisper in charged air. They hover over scorched earth, scanning for anomalies while others sweep low with dispersal charges. Blast signatures lie buried beneath thin sheets of nano-thermite.

Official reports will frame this as a military-grade smuggling bust gone sideways—Dax Fane’s narrative for every federal ear. Stolen pyrotechnics, eco-extremist fallout. He even ties Greer to a flagged Ignis sympathizer, delivering Homeland Security a headline and a tidy villain.

No one says dragon. Not even once. Not in the silence that follows my statement, not in the sidelong glances traded across the debrief table, not even in the encrypted texts I know are already being drafted to higher clearance levels.

The word stays buried, smothered under layers of protocol and plausible deniability.

Because to say it aloud is to invite a truth none of them are ready to face—a truth that breathes fire and walks in human skin.

I give my statement under audio scramble—low light, no video, my voice flattened into something untraceable—as Liv sits beside me. I say what needs to be said. Greer was running contraband. Liv got suspicious. He lured her in. She neutralized the threat. I dropped in as her backup.

It’s clean. Sanitized. True enough to hold up under scrutiny but still a thousand miles from the truth.

By morning, Liv Monroe is a goddamn hero.

The turnaround happens fast—too fast for anyone to rewrite the narrative.

Before the embers finish cooling, the press has already spun her into a miracle.

Local affiliates flood the airwaves with her name and image, a blur of helmet hair, soot-streaked cheeks, and steady hands hauling others out of hell.

National headlines follow, sharp and hungry.

'Firefighter Foils Sabotage.' 'Hero of Prescott Ridge.

' Social media cuts it into a loop—Liv emerging from the smoke, all steel-spined resolve and fire burning behind her eyes, a revenant reborn in flame. A symbol of survival. A woman who didn’t just make it out, but made it matter.

And the best part? The Bitterroot bullshit doesn’t just fade—it gets incinerated.

Commentators who once crucified her now recite her credentials with reverence.

A regional talk show runs a split screen: one side showing the black mark on her record, the other flashing her Prescott footage.

'Reckless Disregard?' is slashed through with crimson. 'Or Relentless Bravery?'

Overnight, Liv’s gone from scapegoat to legend. The footage shows her walking out of the smoke, soot-streaked and alive, and the look in her eyes says she’s not running anymore. She’s done carrying the guilt for what someone else destroyed.

And me?

I’ve never wanted to brand something more than I want her name etched into the place where instinct says she belongs—my mark, forged in flame, made for permanence.

Draven—Blackstrike's tac-comm strategist—and Vale, our ops relay lead, call in the debrief.

We're patched into a secure channel—tight beam, no recording, no log. The tone's clipped, all business, but I can hear the edge in Draven’s voice. His fingers drum once, sharp against the desk, then still. Something’s crawling under his skin.

Vale glances down at his tablet. “That drone—the one Kade torched before we got Greer—got ghosted. But not before Dax jammed the uplink.”

He swipes to a frozen frame—the final seconds of the feed before static swallowed the signal.

“I hit it with a targeted interference burst,” Dax says. “Scrambled the transmission mid-stream. No data made it out—no image, no telemetry, no metadata. And once Kade hit it, there wasn’t even a frame left to recover. It’s ash.”

Draven exhales slowly, relief softening the corners of his eyes. “So nothing leaked?”

“Nothing from us,” Dax confirms. “Whatever anyone saw—if they saw anything—it didn’t come through that drone’s feed.”

We all trade a look. Because someone did see something, and that means someone else was watching.

“We got hits on six nodes,” he says. “Three of them deep shell. Same encrypt trace from Ignis, but there’s bleed. Other hands in the pot.”

Vale grunts. “Cartel?”

“Or worse. Something’s trying to pivot Ignis ops into soft-infrastructure sabotage. Not just fires. Politics. Water rights. Communications.”

Dax breaks in over the feed, sharp and surgical. “If this crosses into political infrastructure, we’re going to lose jurisdiction. This’ll be DHS, NSA, maybe even the damn UN. We need to lock the network footprint before it goes federal.”

“Assuming it hasn’t already,” Vale mutters.

I glance at Liv. Her jaw tightens, the gears turning fast. She's already running scenarios, drawing from the same instinct that made her question Greer, the same instinct that no one listened to at Bitterroot. She sees patterns in the chaos—reads the tilt of a threat before it shows its teeth. I can almost hear her thought: if Ignis is pivoting, who’s holding the reins now?

“Someone wants chaos bigger than flames.”

Draven doesn’t confirm. He doesn’t have to.

Ignis isn’t done. The digital trail from Greer’s burner logs pings across a half-dozen dark networks.

Some of them link back to an unregistered shell running laundered funds out of a cartel node in the Sierra Negra region.

Not wildfire targets this time—this time it looks broader. Dirtier. Political.

There’s a bigger play forming. Something designed to fracture systems while the fires keep attention tied to the surface.

We’re still at the forward base, the Blackstrike Unit’s mobile ops hub running on caffeine, adrenaline, and scorched earth reports.

Triage tents line one side of the clearing, gear pallets stacked with charred webbing and replacement comms. A few field medics are tending to the rookies who made it out.

Most of the crew’s either debriefing or catching breath, trying to convince themselves the worst is over.

I spot her near the back, perched on the tailgate of her truck like she’s always belonged there—like the fire didn’t try to take her hours ago.

The last time I saw Liv in Bitterroot, she didn’t see me.

Not really. She was too busy holding herself together with scraped knuckles and spit.

I’d watched from the ridge above as she stepped off the helicopter, helmet under one arm, soot streaking her throat.

She’d just lost her entire unit to a flashover she wasn’t allowed to talk about, and command was already sharpening the axe.

But she didn’t cry. Didn’t scream. Just stared at the horizon like it owed her something—and she wasn’t going to stop until it paid.

That moment—watching her carry devastation without breaking—cut through me like nothing else ever had.

I’d been sent to Bitterroot to assess operational failures, not fall gut-deep into someone else’s fire.

But watching her, I couldn’t look away. She wore blame like armor, defiance like oxygen.

I admired her before I even knew her name.

And I didn’t step in.

Not because I didn’t want to. Hell, I wanted to tear the whole command structure down for her. But Blackstrike had me tethered to protocol, and interference would’ve jeopardized the op. Back then, she was a line in a dossier. A high-risk variable. Off-limits.

But the truth? I wasn’t just following orders. I was afraid.

Afraid that if I got close, I wouldn’t walk away. That the dragon in me would see what I saw—and choose her on instinct.

Maybe he did. Because even then, watching her hold herself upright in the ashes, I knew: Liv Monroe was a force I wasn’t ready for.

Now I’m ready. Now, I’m all in.

The drone’s gone. The thermite threat neutralized. The city's safe—for now. And for the first time since Bitterroot, I get to walk toward her, not away.