Chapter 74: Early Strike

The mobilization took eleven minutes, which was three minutes faster than any drill they'd run, which Grace noted without saying because there wasn't time.

The mixed force — Stone pack, Exposed fighters, SRC volunteers — assembled in the yard with the particular focused chaos of people who have been preparing for a thing and are now doing it. Grace moved through the groups, not giving orders so much as confirming decisions that people had already made correctly.

Marcus was at the vehicle line talking to Caleb. She caught the end of it — logistics, access road positions, communication protocol. They were talking. They weren't talking warmly, but they were talking with the efficiency of people who had set aside other things because the current thing required it.

"Northern road and creek crossing," she said, reaching them. "Same as the ESC plan predicted. We split the force — Stone pack and SRC take the creek, Exposed unit takes the road. I move between."

"You don't move between," Caleb said.

"I move between," she said. "I'm the only one who can pull information across both positions and adapt in real time. That's not negotiable."

"Then I'm your shadow," he said. Also not negotiable, in his tone.

She looked at Marcus.

"Your best two fighters at the road," she said. "You command that position. Check in every four minutes."

"And if I need to make a call without checking in?" he said.

"Make it," she said. "Then tell me after."

He nodded. Something in his face that wasn't quite respect and wasn't quite something else.

They drove.

The old mining road was exactly where the satellite images said it would be — a single lane through pine forest, the ESC vehicles moving without lights in a way that would have been invisible to anyone without hybrid-enhanced senses.

Grace saw the first trap at two hundred yards, which was a tripwire pressure-plate designed to be discovered only after the lead vehicle had already passed it.

She stopped the column with a hand signal that moved through the team like a current.

"There," she said, to the scout beside her. "And there." Second position, offset, designed to catch the people who'd avoided the first.

They rerouted. The road curved. The ESC formation was moving parallel through the trees, not knowing yet that their approach had been anticipated.

The ambush happened in a clearing and lasted seven minutes, which in combat terms was long. Grace moved through it with the partial shift engaged — speed and perception turned up past human ranges, the world moving in layers of information.

She saw the sniper in the fir tree at the north edge when he shifted position, half a second before he fired. She was already moving.

She hit Marcus from the left, taking them both out of the sight line, and they went down in the pine needles together. The shot passed through where he'd been.

Marcus was still for a moment. Then he sat up.

"Maybe," he said, and his voice had something different in it, rougher, real, "you're not just Pete's kid after all."

"I know," she said, getting up. "Stay low."

The shot that hit Caleb came from the secondary ESC unit, the one that had flanked east while the primary force drew attention — a tactical decision that Grace blamed herself for not anticipating and would analyze later, not now.

She felt it through the bond before she saw it — a spike of pain that was his, not hers, the bond carrying injury the way it carried emotion. She turned.

He was down on one knee, hand pressed to his side. Not silver, she could see the quality of the blood. Iron rounds, which would hurt him and not kill him, but hurt was relative when you were trying to hold a defensive line.

She felt the shift arrive differently than it ever had before — not from her hands, not from somewhere careful and learned, but from the bond itself, from the pain moving through it and the response her body made to pain that was also hers.

The pack saw it happen. She knew they were watching. She went almost fully wolf in three seconds and took down the two ESC operatives closest to Caleb and the third one on the flank before the shift receded on its own, her body returning to itself in the same organic way that breathing returns after a shock.

She was on her knees beside Caleb before she was fully back.

"I'm all right," he said.

"You're not," she said.

"Relatively," he said. "Grace. I'm relatively all right."

Mitchell worked for twenty minutes while Grace sat on the clinic floor and waited. Then she went in and did what she'd done before — found the frequency, found the damage, pulled the iron residue through herself and let her hybrid biology process it. It was easier than it had been with Pete. Faster. She was getting more precise.

Caleb watched her do it from the table.

When she finished, she sat on the edge of the table and he reached for her hand.

"You shifted for me," he said. "Full shift, almost. I saw it."

"I know," she said.

"You've been practicing for weeks and it wasn't coming and then—"

"And then you were hurt," she said. "The bond doesn't care about timing." She squeezed his hand. "Don't read too much into it."

"I'm reading exactly as much into it as it warrants," he said. "Which is a lot." His thumb moved across her knuckles. "You'd burn the world for me."

She looked at him — tired, bandaged, completely sincere.

"I'd burn the world for you," she confirmed. "But I'd rather not have to."

The ESC officer they'd captured was cooperative under Mitchell's truth compound — a mild pressure, nothing that left lasting effects, standard pack interrogation protocol. She answered questions for twenty minutes.

Grace asked the last one herself.

"What is the main force's target?"

The officer's face was calm in the way truth-compound produced — relaxed, unguarded.

"Not here," she said. "This was a diversion. The main force deployed forty-eight hours ago. They're already in Washington D.C." She looked at Grace with the flat attention of someone stating a fact. "You have a briefing at the White House in forty-eight hours. They're targeting the building. They're targeting the meeting. They're targeting you."

The clinic was very quiet.

Grace looked at Caleb. Caleb looked at Grace.

"Pack the bag," she said.