Chapter 7
The MPs dragged Torres away.
Nobody laughed now.
Nobody even breathed loudly.
Harris turned back to Ava.
For a moment, he was not a commander.
He was just a man staring at someone he had mourned.
“I carried you out,” he said quietly. “I saw them close the bag.”
Ava looked past him toward the desert.
“They switched the tags after evacuation. I was alive, barely. A black recovery unit pulled me before the hospital manifest was filed.”
Harris blinked.
“You were classified.”
She nodded.
“The leak was too high. If anyone knew I survived, Torres would disappear. So they buried Captain Ava Ryder.”
Her voice softened.
“And they made me Wraith.”
Harris lowered his head.
“I told your father you were gone.”
Ava’s face changed.
That was the first wound Torres had not caused.
The old one.
The deep one.
“I know.”
“He never stopped asking questions.”
Ava swallowed.
“I couldn’t contact him. Not once.”
Harris looked devastated.
“He died last year, Ava.”
Her eyes closed.
For three years, she had survived interrogation, infection, hunger, heat, and silence.
But that sentence nearly took her down.
Then Harris reached into his breast pocket.
May you like
“There’s something you should have.”
Read Part 8 to see the letter her father left before he died.
