The city stretched beneath a haze of heat and exhaust—Algiers didn't blink, it watched. From a minaret tiled in blue and silence, STAR lay prone, body molded to stone. His AX-50 cradled against his shoulder like ritual. He tweaked the scope, breath steady, gaze sharp.
"Let's not miss when the city's holding its breath," he muttered, thumbing the bolt.
Rooftops crawled with rusted satellite dishes and half-stripped antennas—old-world scars twitching under new surveillance.
Below, Ghost moved with Laswell through the crush of the Kasbah quarter, dressed in aid worker vests that didn't fool anyone who mattered. Locals gave sideways glances. Cameras blinked from balconies. The alleys were too narrow, the shadows too loud.
In a side market, the scent of cumin and blood overlapped. A butcher's freezer buzzed like a dying fly.
Laswell yanked the handle.
Inside: Icarus, limp and zip-tied, eyes frozen wide. Mouth sewn shut with fishing line. No signs of torture—just punctuation.
Laswell's jaw flexed. "He didn't talk. That's the problem."
Ghost crouched beside the body, fingers peeling back the collar of Icarus's vest. Tucked in the hem—an old habit from field tradecraft—a half-crushed flash drive and a note, scrawled in Cyrillic and English:
Vetrova still sees the ghosts.
Ghost stood slowly. "Means what he had was nuclear."
No one spoke for a beat. The only sound: STAR's voice crackling low over comms.
> "Clocked a tail two rooftops over. Binoculars, no rifle. Civilian shoes. Could be spotter."
Laswell exhaled through her nose. "We ghost in. But if someone's watching us…"
> STAR: "They're already writing the ending."
The wind shifted. Smoke and salt. Above them, the burnt sky didn't offer shade. Just more questions.
---
The van reeked of diesel and stress. A portable decrypt unit hummed on a folding table, cables coiled like veins across the floor. Outside, Algiers pulsed—calls to prayer, protest chants, the wet slap of market waste. In here, it was all static and ghosts.
Laswell hunched over the drive, tapping through layers of encrypt like she was unpicking shrapnel from flesh.
"Local scrubbed metadata. Not recent," she muttered, dragging a file into view. "They wanted this buried. Badly."
The screen lit up with grainy scans—military ledgers stamped EXTRANEOUS and smeared with approval seals in languages half the team didn't read. Lines itemized out like math for a war crime:
Psych Asset Disbursement, Phase 2 — 470K USD
Containment Protocol Delta/74A – KIA payout signed and sealed
Field Mod: VETROVA – Signal Testing / Operant Behavior Control
STAR leaned in, shoulders tight. He flipped through digital pages like they might still bleed. Photo after photo—young men, barely out of adolescence, grinning in desert sun beside UN trucks. Gear too advanced for the date stamps. Too familiar.
"Those aren't soldiers," he said flat, jaw wired. "They're echoes. Just like Spectre."
Laswell didn't look up. "No. These were pre-Spectre. Vetrova wrote the framework. Valk pushed it into the fire."
Another page loaded: biometric logs, psych evals with redacted lines like slashes. Then the fingerprint.
A thumbprint—centered, clean, and unmistakably old-school. Soviet pattern recognition. Nadia Vetrova's mark.
Laswell leaned back. "She's alive. Still using the same cipher. She wants to be found."
STAR's mouth twitched, not a smile. "Or she's baiting us into a minefield."
Laswell shrugged, but her fingers were already cueing up the next move.
"She's about to find out we ghost better than she thinks."
---
03:00 sharp. A single cigarette dropped into the dry basin of an old French fountain just outside the Kasbah's east wall. No flame, no words. Just ritual.
Ghost stood back from the glow of the tablet screen balanced on a case of disassembled comms gear. Laswell kept her eyes locked on the feed's flicker, signal tunneling through six blind relays and a ghost server in Prague. Ethan stood just off-camera, arms crossed, cheek bruised from the freezer op.
The screen hissed to life.
Nadia Vetrova appeared like smoke curling through marble—red lipstick, crisp collar, cigarette tilted like punctuation. Behind her, the shadow of antique wood and low light. An old villa maybe. Untraceable.
"Congratulations," she said without blinking. "You've unearthed a minefield... wearing snowshoes."
Laswell leaned in, unflinching. "You built the profile code Valk used to fracture our teams."
Nadia exhaled slow. "I built theories. Valk tested applications. Don't confuse science with slaughter."
"Easy distinction to make when you're behind glass," Laswell shot back.
Ethan stepped into frame. No smile, no flare. Just the heat behind his eyes.
"You designed Spectre," he said. "You tested me. What did my partner die for? A damn theory?"
Nadia didn't flinch. "Your partner died because Valk needed the world to watch the NYPD burn… and look away from Mosul."
Ethan's jaw ticked. "And you were the arsonist's architect."
Silence. Then a curl of smoke from her cigarette broke it like a blade.
"I'll give you a file location," she said. "Old Legion outpost. Buried cache. Coordinates encrypted. You'll need the Soviet cipher I used to write it."
Laswell's eyes narrowed. "And what do you want?"
"Protection," Nadia said. "If Valk finds me first, I vanish. If you do… we talk again."
Before Laswell could answer, the signal spiked—static crawling across the screen.
Nadia's image twisted, then dropped.
STAR looked at the blank screen. "She's not running."
Laswell stood, already packing the rig. "No. She's measuring the fuse."
He slid a fresh mag into his sidearm. "Then we'd better move before it burns down the room."
---
A low thump echoed—too dense for wind, too deliberate for random traffic.
Laswell froze mid-keystroke. "Pinged," she said, already shutting down the mobile rig. "Signal breach just spiked eastside, high-gain burst. Someone found us."
Ghost cracked the window shade an inch. "Movement. Six on foot, two flankin' north wall."
His voice didn't rise. It never did.
"STAR?" he asked into the comm.
A chamber clicked in his ear. "Already gone," Ethan's voice crackled back—dry, crisp, no room for doubt.
Outside, night swallowed the city's edges. STAR had taken the tram cable—the one locals said hadn't worked since the coup. He crouched on the line three stories up, rifle balanced on a tension pulley, ghillie suit clinging to rusted metal like mold. Wind kissed his cheek. The scope lit up bodies.
First one: tall, squared jaw, carrying suppressed VSS, wolf-jaw patch sewn over a bleeding star.
He marked him.
Pulled.
The Vine soldier's head snapped back, legs folding like wet rope. Two more moved to cover—amateurs, at least by Ghost standards.
Not by Ethan's.
Second shot—lung. Third—femoral.
They dropped like cut anchors.
Below, Ghost swept the west entrance. Silent hatchet, one flash of steel, a body slumped without noise. He vanished into shadow again.
Laswell dragged the comm case toward the rear hatch as bullets chewed plaster from the front wall.
Nadia's face flickered on the tablet—half-lit, unreadable.
Then static.
Gone.
"Feed's dead," Laswell said, sliding into cover behind a concrete planter. She jammed the backup drive into a drop satchel, snapped it shut. "Either she's compromised…"
Ethan's voice came back over comms, quieter now. "...or testing us."
He pulled back the bolt. Watched for heat signatures that didn't belong.
Smoke rose from the alley—burned rubber and blood. One of the mercs tried to crawl. STAR put a round through his spine.
"They failed the test," he muttered.
Laswell sprinted for the exfil route, Ghost covering her flank. The air smelled like cordite and rain.
High above, STAR remained a shadow stitched to wire, eyes scanning the horizon. He didn't blink.
---
Ethan yanked the portable drive from Laswell's rig, sat on a toppled chair, and ran the file scrub manually—line by line, byte by byte. Most operators would've missed it. Hidden under a dead data block, behind a corrupted checksum string, sat coordinates—lat-long burned into image metadata like someone wanted it found by only one kind of bastard.
He didn't blink.
"Tunisia," he said. "Desert sector. Remote enough no drone hits pass without permission."
Laswell leaned in. "Wight Station."
Ghost raised an eyebrow. "Wasn't that blacklisted after '04?"
She nodded once. "Forward post for pre-Spectre recon squads. Burned in a quiet sweep. Files buried. Operator records sealed."
Ethan rotated the map on his tablet, zoomed into the heatmap overlay, tapped a patch of wasteland that didn't register any thermal return.
"There's a grave there. Not listed under KIA."
Ghost crossed his arms. "Intel marker?"
Laswell's eyes didn't leave the screen. "No. Burial marker."
Ghost turned. "Whose?"
Ethan didn't hesitate. "Name was Morgan. Taught me how to breathe through a rifle shot. How not to flinch when politics start pulling triggers."
Laswell frowned. "Internal execution?"
"Rumor was he refused to sign off on Valk's prototype clearances," Ethan said, voice flat. "Then he vanished."
Ghost rubbed his jaw. "They buried him without a headline."
Ethan stood, set the tablet down like it weighed more than it should. "No ceremony. No tag. Just sand."
A beat passed. No one filled the silence.
Then Ghost nodded. "We dig him up."
Ethan's knuckles tightened around his gloves. "And maybe we dig up the truth."
---
The rooftop still reeked of cordite and spent tension. Wind pressed ash into the edges of the tiles, grinding the night's violence into memory.
Ethan crouched beside the low wall, thumb dragging through the grime until a crude constellation took shape—Orion, arched and incomplete. He didn't need starlight to find it. He remembered where each point belonged. They'd mapped it once, years ago, inside a tent rigged with blackout sheets and too much silence. Morgan had drawn the first star.
Behind him, the others packed without words—muscle memory in motion. Gear latched. Ammo counted. Ghost was already back in black, voice low with Laswell somewhere below.
Ethan kept tracing.
A metallic glint caught his eye—rusted nail, half-bent, driven into a beam by someone long gone. A dog tag hung from it, chain oxidized, edges worn smooth like it'd been handled too many times. No name, just numbers. Burned out of the system, just like the man it belonged to.
He took it.
No ceremony. Just a quiet curl of fingers as the tag disappeared into his pocket.
Footsteps behind him.
Ghost stepped up, eyes hidden behind lenses, voice rough.
> "You ready to exhume our past?"
Ethan's gaze stayed fixed on the stars he'd drawn, fingers smudging the line between two of them. A pause. A breath.
> "I never buried mine."