Archive of Our Own

The leather creaked once under him and then did not dare speak again. His spine felt like a rod welded to the high back of the governor’s chair, his shoulders square, his hands set neatly on the blotter. To anyone glancing through the frosted glass of the office door, he would look every inch what he was supposed to be: Governor of Kuwait City, loyal administrator, loyal collaborator, loyal man. A cog that turned smoothly in the great machine.

The telephone receiver felt slick against his palm.

“—I said the same thing yesterday, Colonel,” he snapped into the handset, his voice cutting the air as sharply as he could make it. “And I am saying it again now. No, there is no need for you to send a delegation. The coastal positions are manned. We are in control.”

He listened, lips pressed thin, eyes on the far wall. The voice on the other end crackled through static and tension, some Iraqi army liaison in a bunker miles away. Hassan hardly heard the words, only the tone: suspicion, strain, the undercurrent of panic men tried to suffocate with protocol.

“Yes,” Hassan said. “Of course I understand the stakes. Do not lecture me about the Americans as if I were a schoolboy. You have your responsibilities; I have mine. I am telling you: the administration is functioning. The people are calm. That is my domain, Colonel, and it is in order.”

The next question was more pointed. The colonel wanted details—a report on fuel allocations, the state of civil defense drills, the rumors of some unrest in a southern district. Hassan’s free hand moved to the neat stack of folders on his desk and hovered there, fingers barely touching the paper. He did not open any of them. He knew enough to improvise.

“The fuel situation is tight,” he said, adopting the weary patience he had learned when dealing with senior officers. “We have implemented rationing in the last twenty-four hours. Civil defense drills are ongoing. Yes, ongoing. I was personally present at a demonstration this morning. The people are… cooperative.” He swallowed. “They understand the necessity.”

The colonel said something that made his jaw clench.

“You want written confirmation?” Hassan let a note of incredulous irritation creep into his voice. “You will have it on your desk by 1800. No—no, I am not sending a clerk; it will go by secure courier. You have my word.”

He emphasised the last phrase, as if “his word” still carried weight in a world full of tanks and cruise missiles. The colonel grunted assent and said his farewell in the clipped formula they all used now, the one about steadfastness and duty. Hassan echoed it, hung up the receiver with care, and placed it back in its cradle as if it were an explosive he had just defused.

For a moment the room hummed.

Not with sound. With pressure. With the invisible weight of everything that could not be seen from the door.

His hands stayed where they were, resting lightly on the blotter. He did not allow them to tremble. He fixed his gaze on the emerald glass of the banker’s lamp in front of him, letting his eyes trace the reflection of the room in its curved surface: the bookshelves, the heavy curtains framing the tall windows, the portrait of the President hanging behind him, watching. There were other shapes in that warped reflection—dark, angular, wrong—but Hassan did not let his gaze linger on them. He blinked once, slow, as if merely weary.

A knock came at the office door.

He flinched inwardly. Outwardly, his reaction was a bark, sharp and automatic.

“What is it?”

The doorknob did not turn. His staff knew better than to enter without invitation, especially now. From the other side, muffled but distinct, came Maha’s voice, his chief secretary.

“Excellency, I have the updated coastal inventory for your signature, and the Interior Ministry is on the second line—”

“I am on a call,” he snapped. “Leave the file outside. Tell the Interior Ministry to wait.”

“The Minister insisted, Excellency. He said—”

“Then tell the Minister,” Hassan said, raising his voice enough that it would carry down the corridor, “that I will speak to him when I am finished dealing with the army. If he wishes to complain, he may do so in writing. Now leave the file and return to your desk. Do not disturb me again until I call for you.”

There was a pause, a small silence in which he imagined her standing there, papers hugged to her chest, mouth half open. He could picture the look on her face perfectly; he had seen it often enough. Confusion, concern, the beginnings of questions she would never ask aloud.

“Yes, Excellency,” she said finally.

Footsteps withdrew. A faint scrape signalled a folder being set down right against the threshold. Then her shoes tapped away along the polished marble of the corridor, merging with the murmur of other voices, the distant ring of other phones.

He exhaled, quietly. The air left his lungs in a controlled stream, as if he were exorcising a tremor.

He was not on a call, of course. Not anymore. The line he had just hung up remained blessedly silent. The other telephones on his desk—there were three, each a different color to mark a different level of importance—sat in their cradles like coiled snakes.

He lifted his right hand from the blotter. The skin of his palm bore a faint imprint from the receiver. His fingers were damp. He dabbed them unobtrusively on his trouser leg under the desk, moving only from the wrist down, keeping the rest of his posture rigid. His neck ached. His lower back throbbed where it pressed into the chair.

Chain, he thought, and the word came unbidden. I am chained to this desk.

He did not look at the corners of the room.

Instead, he reached for the green phone, the one connected to the ministry’s internal network, and dialed a number from memory. It rang once, twice.

“Civil Affairs,” a man answered, bored, anonymous.

“This is the Governor,” Hassan said. “Put me through to the director.”

There was a flurry of hurried assent on the other end, the sound of the handset being transferred. Hassan kept his gaze on the papers in front of him, eyes sliding over lines of text without absorbing any of it: requisition requests, patrol schedules, lists of ration card numbers. His own signature was on many of them, looping and decisive. He recognised his handwriting without remembering the moment it had been committed to paper.

The director came on the line, breathless. “Excellency. I did not expect—”

“I have just spoken with the army,” Hassan cut in. “They are concerned about reports of agitation in the residential sectors near the old souk. What is the situation?”

“Minor, Excellency,” the director said quickly. “A few incidents of refusal to comply with the blackout orders. Some women shouting in the street when the electricity was cut. Children. It has already been addressed.”

“How addressed?” Hassan asked.

“A patrol made a show of force. There were no detentions, Excellency. We cautioned them and… the streets are quiet now.”

Hassan let him talk, detail bleeding into detail: the broken curfew, the whispers about the Americans, the leaflets fluttering into courtyards like small white birds. He listened with half an ear, his mind already sliding ahead to what he needed from this call. He could not appear unconcerned—that would be suspicious—but if he overreacted, the director would smell fear and pass it upwards, and the men in Baghdad had a nose for weakness.

“Tell your patrols to show themselves but not to provoke anything,” he said at last. His voice settled into a tone he knew sounded like authority: flat, impatient. “We do not need martyrs. We need calm. If you push too hard, the Americans will see it and use it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Excellency.”

“And if you send me another report typed by that idiot in your office with the crooked margins, I will send him to inventory sugar ration cards in the desert,” Hassan added, almost lazily.

There was a flustered apology. Hassan let it wash over him like warm water. Bureaucratic irritation was a luxury, and he wielded it carefully; it made him sound like a man who had nothing more pressing to worry about than formatting. A man who was not sitting in an office that felt, at this moment, smaller than a cell.

“Good,” he said. “Now get back to work. I want a written summary on my desk within the hour.”

He hung up again. The click of the receiver seemed, absurdly, louder than the gunfire he had heard in his youth.

Silence.

He did not move.

Outside the tall windows, the day lay heavy and brown across the city. Dust and exhaust smeared the light. The air-conditioning hummed softly, the only sound in the room besides the faint ticking of the ornate clock on the wall. The smell of cigarette smoke clung to the curtains and the upholstered chairs opposite his desk. It had seeped into the wood over the months, into the books, into the leather. It had seeped into him.

He stared at the calendar blotter. Someone—Maha, no doubt—had circled the date in red ink, the numerals neat and precise. Next to it, in her tiny handwriting, a reminder: Call with Baghdad, 1500. It sat like a stain.

Another knock at the door.

This one lighter, tentative. A different voice, Ahmed’s, one of the junior clerks.

“Excellency?”

Hassan’s jaw clenched so hard his molars ground.

“What?” he snapped.

“Forgive me, Excellency,” Ahmed said, voice wobbling. “There is a courier from the Interior Ministry. He insists on a signature, and there is also the municipal engineer waiting about the—”

“Handle it,” Hassan said. “You have a pen, do you not?”

“Yes, Excellency, but the courier says he must see you in person.”

“He says,” Hassan muttered, staring at the desk. Of course he does. They must always assert their tiny power. “Tell the courier that if he insists on seeing me, he may wait until I am available. If he complains, make a note of his name and pass it to Maha. We will see how long he enjoys such privileges.”

“But, Excellency, he is—”

“Ahmed,” Hassan said, letting his voice drop into a colder register, “if I wished to be interrupted, I would have left my door open. Do not make me repeat myself.”

There was a strangled sound, then: “Yes, Excellency. Apologies.” Footsteps retreated once more.

Hassan closed his eyes briefly. The lids felt thin, the light pressing through them red and grainy. His heart was beating too fast. He counted the beats in the same steady rhythm he had used when he was a much younger man, standing in a very different room, waiting for a verdict.

One. Two. Three. Four.

He opened his eyes.

The room looked the same. It did not feel the same.

He wanted, fiercely, to stand—to roll his shoulders, shake out the stiffness, pace to the window, pull the curtain aside and look down at the city. To see the streets, the cars, the clusters of people moving through the heat. To reassure himself that the world beyond this office still existed.

He did not move.

The weight of his own body on the leather seat was suddenly a consideration, a calculation. If he shifted, the chair might creak again. If the chair creaked, one of the shapes he was not looking at might react. If they reacted, something small and irrevocable might happen.

Another phone rang. Not on his desk, this time; faint, muffled, from somewhere deeper in the building. Someone else picked up. Voices. Doors. The endless machinery of occupation turning.

He kept his own phones silent by sheer will. He would choose when they rang. He would call before he could be called.

His gaze drifted, against his will, to the framed photograph on the desk.

It faced him, not visitors. A woman and two boys at a beach somewhere along the Gulf before the war, the horizon a dull strip beyond them. The boys were squinting, hair blown sideways by the wind. The woman, his wife, was laughing at something out of frame. He had told Maha to leave the picture when she cleared the desk of personal clutter months ago, after the installation ceremony. He had thought then that it would be a comfort, an anchor.

Now it felt like evidence. Proof of vulnerability.

He turned it face down with two fingers. The sound it made on the blotter was barely a whisper.

He reached for the red phone.

It was the line to the puppet cabinet, the ministers with their inflated titles and their hollow authority. He dialed the Interior Ministry himself rather than waiting for their call, because initiative could be interpreted as strength. A man calling to report order sounded better than a man summoned to explain why it was missing.

The Minister answered with florid courtesy.

“Excellency Governor,” he said. “You honor me with your call.”

“I am told you wanted me,” Hassan said, allowing a trace of irritation to sharpen the edges of his words. “I assume it is important, since your courier is cluttering my corridor.”

“A minor matter,” the Minister said quickly. “There is a directive from Baghdad regarding evacuation procedures should the Americans attempt a landing. The President wishes to ensure you are… fully informed.”

Hassan let the man talk. The directive was vague, full of slogans and assurances, the usual combination of bluster and paranoia. When the Minister’s voice began to falter, Hassan cut in.

“You may assure the President that the coastal administration is prepared,” he said. “I have already coordinated with the army liaison. The people are being instructed to remain in their homes. We will not have panic in the streets.”

“Excellent, excellent,” the Minister simpered. “I knew you would be ahead of us as always.”

“Then perhaps next time you will assume as much before you send a courier to loiter outside my office,” Hassan said. “It undermines the appearance of calm when your functionaries behave like alarm bells.”

A nervous chuckle filtered down the line. “Of course, Excellency. I will… make sure they understand.”

“Do that,” Hassan said, and hung up without a farewell.

He sat there, hand still on the receiver, feeling the tremor in his fingers. He pressed his palm flat on the desk to still it. A bead of sweat slid down from his hairline, along the side of his face, and into the hollow above his jaw. The air-conditioning breathed cool air over his skin, but it did nothing for the heat inside his chest.

Enough, he thought. Enough calls. Enough performances.

But he knew there would be more. As long as he remained at this desk, the phones would tether him as surely as any chain. His voice was his weapon now, his posture his armor, his signature his only shield.

He became aware, then, of a presence to his left.

Not a sound. They were too disciplined for that. It was simply a shift in the weight of the room, a subtle rearrangement of pressure on the air. The sensation of eyes on the side of his face, of attention narrowing from somewhere just beyond the edge of his peripheral vision.

Hassan did not turn his head. He allowed himself only the smallest movement: the tilt of his gaze, down, then up again.

The emerald glass of the lamp reflected the office in miniature. In its curved surface, the corners of the room were no longer just dark wood and shadow.

In the far left corner, near the bookcase, a figure stood as still as the shelves themselves: a man in mottled cloth that seemed to drink the light, sleeves tight around corded forearms, gloved hands wrapped around the black length of a rifle held across his chest. His face was partially obscured by some kind of veil and goggles, but Hassan could see the line of his jaw, clenched, patient.

In the opposite corner by the tall windows, another man, equally motionless, his weapon angled toward the floor, the barrel pointed nowhere and everywhere at once. The faint spill of daylight from behind turned him into a silhouette, only the edges of his gear catching a dull gleam.

Behind Hassan, in the corners he could not see without turning, he knew—knew with the certainty of someone who had felt the muzzle at the back of his neck not long before—that there were two more. One by the door, invisible to anyone standing outside it, positioned so that if the handle turned uninvited, the first thing the intruder would meet would not be the governor’s eyes but cold metal. Another in the far rear corner, covering angles Hassan did not understand but accepted as part of the geometry of his captivity.

They had said almost nothing since the moment they came. A few brief commands in accented Arabic, quieter instructions in English between themselves. After that, silence. They did not need to speak. Their presence said everything.

They were not tall in any heroic sense, not towering monsters. They were men of ordinary height and build, their equipment blending into the room’s darker wood and leather, their boots planted squarely on the carpet. Their weapons were not brandished, just held, like the tools of a trade they had practiced so often it had become part of their posture.

But to Hassan, they might as well have been pillars supporting the ceiling.

He sat rigid at his desk, chained by duty and fear, fielding calls and barking orders to maintain the illusion that he governed this office, this building, this city. In reality, the true authority in the room resided in the four wordless silhouettes occupying its corners, eyes on him, guns at the ready, their silence as eloquent as any decree from Baghdad or Washington.

He kept his back straight, his expression composed, his voice ready for the next ring of the phone, while the truth stood all around him in the shadows, unblinking and unsoftened:

---

The annex door gave under the slightest pressure, hinges exhaling a dull sigh into the hot, dust-thick air.

Cpl. Imran “Ivy” Iqbal slipped through first, rifle raised, the slight forward hunch of a man who expected nothing more than empty rooms and unused furniture. This was supposed to be a quiet sweep—a side building on the estate perimeter, likely a guard rest area or storage. Secure it, lock it down, prevent any bright idea of a flanking move when the main game began at the palace.

Behind him, Tpr. Callum “Nails” Mercer slid in sideways, closing the door with a careful hand, easing the latch into place so it wouldn’t click. The corridor beyond was narrow and tiled, the kind of cheap off-white that looked permanently grimy no matter how often it was mopped. A faint smell of detergent and old cooking oil hung in the air, layered over with the chalky scent of concrete.

Both men paused, letting their eyes adjust from the low light outside to the gloom inside. The building was cooler than the courtyard, but not by much. Somewhere, unseen, a small motor buzzed—a fridge compressor or a tired air-conditioning unit trying and failing to matter.

Ivy’s boots moved first, whisper-soft on the tile. He flowed down the corridor, weapon tight into his shoulder, muzzle leading. His left hand hugged the front grip, knuckles pale inside the glove, finger off the trigger but curled in the way that meant readiness, not hesitation.

“Clear right,” Nails breathed behind him, voice barely a vibration in the air, as he swept the short stretch behind the door.

Ivy reached the first interior doorway on the left, its frame chipped and scuffed at shoulder height where someone had brushed past a hundred times carrying something heavy. He stole a glance past it—small room, stacked crates, a metal chair. Empty.

He let his breath out through his nose in a controlled line. So far, the annex matched the brief: unimportant, peripheral, forgettable. A place you sent junior staff or servants, not a place you stationed anyone with authority.

Two more steps. Another doorway ahead, this one open, a rectangle of slightly darker shadow.

He moved toward it, body aligned with the wall, rifle angled inward.

Bare skin slapped the tile in a quick, startled step.

Ivy stopped dead.

The sound was tiny—no louder than a dropped spoon—but in the taut silence of the annex it might as well have been a gunshot. His brain mapped it instantly: not a boot, not sandals, not a heavy adult stride. Small. Light. Bare feet.

He froze mid-motion, every sense reaching forward.

Something moved in the doorway.

She appeared in a slice of weak light: a thin girl framed by the chipped plaster, a rag dangling from one hand, the other clamped around a cheap plastic spray bottle. Her hair was dark and pulled back in a rough knot, strands escaping around her face in damp curls. She wore a faded dress that might once have been blue, hem hitched slightly above bony ankles, bare toes gripping the cold tile.

Her eyes were enormous.

For half a heartbeat, nobody moved.

The girl’s gaze crashed into Ivy’s—straight into the black circle at the end of his rifle—and her chest hitched as she sucked in air, the sharp, reflexive inhale of something wild cornered in a too-small space. She took half a step back, bare heel skidding slightly, as if her body wanted to turn and run but hadn’t yet received the order.

The rag dropped from her fingers and hit the floor with a soft, wet sound.

“Shit,” Nails murmured under his breath, too low for her to hear, the word more an exhale than a curse.

Ivy’s weapon stayed up, but his shoulders tightened in a different way now—less about the threat, more about the collision of training with an unexpected shape. This wasn’t a guard, or a cleaner in sensible shoes, or some lazy conscript leaning on a cigarette. This was… small. Wrong. A variable the plan hadn’t bothered to include.

The girl spoke.

Arabic came tumbling out of her in quick, bright bursts, tripping over itself in her haste. The words were sharp-edged with fear and outrage, the tone of someone who had never been taught to be deferential to strange men in her corridor. Her voice was high and breathless, but not shrill—more demanding than pleading.

Ivy caught almost nothing.

He heard the interrogative rise, the emphasis on the first word—*Man?*—and a phrase he half-recognised from news reports and long-ago family arguments. To him, it was a wash of unfamiliar consonants, but the shape of it was clear enough:

Who are you?
Why are you here?
What are you doing in my space?

He felt, absurdly, like an intruder at someone’s kitchen door rather than a soldier executing part of a carefully timed operation in an occupied city.

“Hold,” he whispered, not to her, but to himself and to Nails.

The girl’s eyes flicked from Ivy to Nails and back again, taking in everything she did not have words for: the mottled pattern of their uniforms, the compact aggression of their rifles, the stark foreignness of their kit. She saw the wrapped grips, the taped magazines, the blackened buckles that did not catch the light the way the local police belts did. She saw their faces—half shadowed, half revealed under helmets and goggles—and the way they did not fidget or bluster.

Whatever she read there, it did nothing to ease the tension in her shoulders. Her fingers curled around the handle of the spray bottle as if it were a weapon worth having.

“Say something,” Nails breathed, pinned in place behind Ivy, just inside the door. He didn’t take his eyes off the hallway behind them, but his voice carried a tight strain. “Before she screams the place down.”

Ivy’s mouth was dry. His mind flicked, uselessly, through everything he did not have: fluent Arabic, a rehearsed phrase, a neat piece of cover story to conjure from the air. He had a few scraps from childhood—his parents arguing in the kitchen, religious phrases barked at him when he forgot his manners, TV sermons half-tuned in on satellite channels—but they jumbled together in his head now, none of them fitting this moment.

The girl took another small breath, chest rising, lips parting. Another question pushed out of her—a string of words, heavier now with anger and fear. She darted a glance over her shoulder as if considering the route back, the distance to wherever the nearest adult might be.

Ivy shifted his grip a fraction, not lowering the rifle, but easing its angle so it no longer pointed directly at her chest. The movement was tiny, controlled. The sort of adjustment that would have earned a nod on the range. It didn’t change the fact that he was still a stranger in her doorway with a gun.

“Easy,” he murmured, more instinct than strategy. He doubted she understood the word, but tone carried in any language.

He could feel Nails behind him, coiled like a spring, caught between options that were all wrong. A shout, a rush, a hand over the girl’s mouth—any of it would be loud, messy, a flare against the careful darkness the troop was working in. They had slipped into this annex because it was supposed to be simple. Secure, clear, move on. No complications. No witnesses.

But witnesses didn’t usually come in bare feet and worn dresses, clutching cleaning rags.

For a heartbeat that stretched thin, nobody in the corridor committed to anything.

The annex was suddenly full of small, sharp details: the half-wiped streak on the tile where her rag had been, the faint tang of lemon cleaner in the air, the way the afternoon light from a distant window painted a crooked rectangle on the floor between them. Ivy became acutely aware of every breath he took, every tiny shift in his boot soles.

He was not frozen because he was afraid of her. Fear wasn’t the shape of this moment.

He was frozen because the solution he had rehearsed a thousand times—the fast, hard action against a threat, the clean neutralisation before the enemy could react—had no place here. You could not apply the same pressure to a child without breaking more than the mission.

She was a problem that could not be solved with speed.

“Ivy,” Nails hissed again, the nickname a warning and a plea all at once.

Ivy swallowed, feeling the muscles in his throat protest. The girl’s eyes were on him, wide, unblinking, daring him to define what he was. Soldier, intruder, saviour, thief. Friend. Enemy.

He opened his mouth, chasing words he barely owned, and took the first small step into a lie that would have to be gentler than his training, and slower than his heartbeat.

---

It crouched in the narrow alley at the back of the police station like an afterthought: a slab of rust-pocked metal below street level, reached by a short run of chipped concrete steps that collected rubbish and blown sand. A single padlock, fat with layers of paint, hung through a chain looped around the handle and the hinge bracket.

Capt. Rowan “Ash” Sherborne stared at it for half a second, breathing slow through his nose. He listened the way he’d been trained to listen: not just for footsteps or voices, but for the city itself. Distant traffic. A dog bark somewhere further down the block. The faint, irregular clank of something metallic inside the building—pipes, maybe, or an inattentive guard.

He gave a small, chopping signal with his hand.

Sgt. “Mick” Mallory eased forward with the bolt cutters.

The cutters were wrapped in tape to muffle any contact, the hinge greased until it moved like oiled shadow. Mick positioned the jaws around the padlock’s shackle, adjusting by feel in the dark. The alley stank of old urine and diesel exhaust; sweat prickled under everyone’s gear.

Ash watched their arcs of fire even here—Kite covering up and left toward the corner of the yard, Mantis taking the higher angle to the right, her weapon nestling naturally into the notch between shoulder and collarbone. No torches. No white light. Just the vague silver of a low moon reflected in puddles and the darker mass of the station’s rear wall looming above them.

Mick squeezed.

The shackle went with a soft, compressed crunch, far quieter than it had any right to be. The weight of the padlock sagged, then he caught it in one gloved hand before it could swing, chain links clinking. He unthreaded it from the fittings with exaggerated care, feeding the chain free a link at a time. Metal rasped on metal in a sound that made Ash’s teeth ring, even though it was barely louder than a breath.

He coiled the chain and lock together and laid them on the step, where a shadow would swallow them whole.

Ash stepped up, put his hand on the door handle, and paused again.

One more listen. One more scan of the alley. The world beyond their immediate bubble remained indifferent; nothing moved that shouldn’t.

He twisted.

The door didn’t open so much as complain—its initial resistance replaced by a heavy, sticky swing. The hinges exhaled a low groan that vibrated through his palm. He stopped it after a few inches, felt the vibration die away, then eased it further, letting the darkness within open in front of them like a slack mouth.

A breath of air rolled out: damp, cool, edged with mildew and the metallic tang of old pipes. It carried no fresh cigarette smoke, no recent sweat, no cooked food. The smell of a place people used, but did not live in.

Ash glanced back, held up three fingers. Kite, Mantis, Mick.

“Same order,” he mouthed. “No light.”

Kite dipped his head, visor catching the faintest hint of sky glow. The younger man moved first, gliding through the narrow gap like the darkness had been cut to his shape. He held his rifle high, muzzle framing the emptiness ahead. As he stepped over the threshold, his boots hit metal—a short grate—and then the beginning of a stair.

Ash followed, shoulder brushing the door, feeling the rough paint under his sleeve. Behind him, Mick and Mantis closed the line, the last pair of boots leaving the alley.

Mick eased the door shut until it was just short of latching. They could not risk the distinct click of the tongue engaging in the strike plate; better a sliver of open than a sound that might carry. To anyone glancing from the yard, it would look closed enough.

The world compressed.

Inside, the air was thicker, cooler, pressing against skin that had been baking for hours. The blackness had weight; it pressed against their NVGs, turned every step into a negotiation between what they could see and what they could infer.

The stairwell dropped away beneath Kite’s feet, narrow and steep. The metal steps were tacked onto the wall like an afterthought, edges worn smooth by decades of boots. Ash could feel rather than see the cold metal through the soles of his own boots when he stepped onto them, the faint give of bolt heads under weight.

They descended.

One at a time, feet finding each step by habit and muscle memory. They kept three points of contact at all times—boot, boot, hand on the rail when they could stand to use it—but mostly they trusted balance and training. The only sounds were the tiny scuffs of fabric and the quiet, controlled rasp of breath inside their own heads.

Torches stayed dark. They all had them clipped to their rigs or taped under their barrels, but to use them now would be to throw a spear of light up the stairwell, advertising their arrival to anyone with eyes.

After the first turn, what faint ambient glow leaked through the door vanished. The darkness became total, thick enough to feel on their faces. NVGs turned it into a grainy wash of murky shapes—walls, pipe runs, the cold geometry of the stairwell—but left plenty of holes where the unknown could lurk.

Kite reached the last step and felt nothing beyond it.

He froze, one boot on metal, the other hovering, dangling over absence. He tapped his heel lightly, searching. The floor beyond was not where it should have been.

“Mind the step,” he breathed, barely more than moving air.

Ash’s hand brushed the back of his rig in acknowledgement. He stepped down, testing for himself. His boot found concrete—uneven, chipped, lower than standard—then something else, a loose piece of rubble that slid a fraction. He corrected his balance in a micro-adjustment, core muscles tightening.

The stair spat them out into a low-ceilinged basement that felt more like a storage underbelly than a designed space. Through the NVG haze, Ash picked out shapes: a thick concrete pillar dead ahead, just off center, like a trunk growing out of the floor; a tangle of old pipes clawing along the walls and overhead; a forest of crates and boxes stacked without obvious care.

“Down,” Ash murmured, and the order rippled through them.

Kite dropped first, sinking into a low crouch by the pillar, rifle up and sweeping, the concrete at his back giving him something solid. Mantis flowed to his right, finding a tuck where an old shelving unit created a natural corner. Mick moved left, slipping behind a pair of crates banded with rusted metal straps, weapon covering the open void beyond.

Ash took a knee near the base of the stairs, partial cover from the lifted lip of concrete and a cluster of pipework. He angled himself so he could see both back up the stairwell and forward into the basement’s throat.

For a moment, none of them moved.

The environment resolved around them, details bleeding in. The floor was a mess: cracks, missing chunks, patches where someone had poured new concrete over old, leaving ridges and dips. A broken pallet lay half-buried under dust near the pillar, one slat splintered upright at an angle like a crude stake. A line of water stains crept along one wall where a pipe had leaked once and then been only half-heartedly repaired.

This was not a neat, flat surface you could sprint across. It was a twisted ankle waiting for anyone who moved faster than their eyes.

Overhead, pipes crisscrossed in a haphazard grid, some insulated with peeling, grimy wrap, others bare metal sweating in the cooler air. They created low overhangs that forced the men instinctively to keep their heads down, and cast deeper shadows even in the NVG-green.

Beyond the pillar, the basement narrowed into a choke point: walls closing in, ceiling dropping slightly, storage units and boxes pushed up against each other until there was only a central channel—just wide enough for two men abreast if they were willing to scrape elbows and gear.

A funnel.

Ash’s mind drew the geometry in a heartbeat. The way a shooter placed at the far end could rake the entire length of that channel. The lack of hard cover once you stepped out from behind the pillar. The blind spots created by the pipe clusters where an enemy could hug the wall and remain unseen until the last second.

He felt his body settle into that knowledge. The mission brief had told them “basement access, likely lightly used, low traffic.” The reality was something else: a corridor of stone and steel designed by accident to favour whoever already held the far side.

He shifted his weight, testing how far he could lean without exposing more than an inch of helmet past the pillar. His knee pressed into grit. A small, sharp pebble bit through his trouser fabric. Sweat tickled between shoulder blades, trapped under plate.

Mick’s voice came soft over the net, compressed into their earpieces.

“Ground’s a joke,” he muttered. “Watch your ankles.”

“Copy,” Mantis replied, equally quiet. “Pipes overhead. Watch your bangs.”

Kite, scanning, added, “Channel ahead. No decent cover once we’re in it.”

Ash didn’t need the commentary; he saw it all. But hearing it said aloud anchored the reality, turned it from the murky feel of a problem into concrete constraints they could work with.

He risked a glance back up the stairwell.

From this angle, the metal steps rose into darkness, the faintest wash of lighter gray at the very top where the door’s imperfect seal let a trace of outside light leak through. That door was now a point, far above them. To get back to it, they would have to climb the narrow stairs, single file, turn their backs to the basement, and hope nobody decided to come investigate a slightly ajar entrance with a missing chain.

There would be the door itself to contend with again—its groan, the possibility that, this time, someone on the other side might be close enough to notice. Retreat would be the loudest thing they could do.

He felt the decision settle over them like the dust that coated the pipes.

There was no quietly backing out of this.

They were inside the building’s throat now, and it would not be cleared by reversing. The moment they had cut the lock and stepped through the door, they had passed a line. Down here, in the belly, that line felt literal.

Their way in had become a funnel; their way out ran through whatever waited at the other end.

Ash let out a slow breath, grounding himself in the familiar rhythm. Forward was where their training lived. Forward was where the plan was. Forward was where the objective was.

“Right,” he murmured into the net, his voice low and even. “We’re committed. Pillar’s our last decent cover. From here on, we’re in the pipe.”

He shifted his grip on the rifle, felt the stock settle more tightly into his shoulder.

“On me,” he said. “We go slow, we go quiet, we don’t trip on any of this crap. Eyes up, guns up. The only way out is through.”

He caught Kite’s small nod in the glow of his NVGs, the younger man’s jaw set like stone.

Ahead of them, the dark corridor gaped—a narrow, crooked vein leading deeper into the station’s underworld. The concrete under their knees was cold and uneven. The pipes overhead dripped once, somewhere in the darkness, a single fat drop falling like the tick of a slow clock.

They rose from the deck as one, low and controlled, and began to move forward into the funnel.

---

The next call began before he quite realised he had agreed to it.

The red phone had barely settled back into its cradle when the green one trilled—three short, insistent bursts, as if the building itself were tapping its foot at him. Hassan al-Rashid swallowed down the curse that rose in his throat and snatched it up before the second ring had fully died.

“Governor,” he said, the word coming out clipped and dry. “Yes. Yes, I am here.”

A senior undersecretary from the Ministry of Information poured into his ear, all oily deference and bureaucratic panic thinly disguised as concern for the nation’s morale. Hassan listened with half his mind, the other half still counting the beats of his heart against the tight band around his ribs.

The office felt smaller again.

He heard the door out in the corridor open and close, quick. Footsteps, voices. The building was filling with the late-afternoon shift—clerks, typists, guards rotating posts. The world was continuing as if everything were normal.

Inside his office, nothing was.

As the undersecretary droned about unhelpful rumours on foreign radio stations, something moved at the edge of Hassan’s vision. Not the door, not the window, not the hulking portrait behind him. A different kind of motion—precise, purposeful, unhurried.

Major Havers appeared at his elbow like a shadow thickening.

Hassan hadn’t heard him move from his previous corner. One moment the man had been a fixed shape by the bookcases; the next he was beside the desk, a solid presence in mottled cloth, rifle slung and muzzle dipped but never far from usefulness. The Major’s face was mostly hidden behind the veil and goggles he wore, but his eyes—pale, disconcertingly cool—showed just enough above the dark cloth.

In his gloved hand he held a folded sheet of paper.

He set it down on the blotter beside Hassan’s right elbow with the same care a doctor might use laying out a scalpel. No flourish, no sound save for the soft whisper of paper on leather.

Hassan flicked a glance at it, then back to the green phone, as if the act of looking directly would somehow be visible down the line.

“—we have received reports,” the undersecretary was saying, “of certain… broadcasts from Cairo and London. They exaggerate the enemy’s strength, undermine the people’s confidence, and misrepresent the unity of our leadership. The President wishes to ensure that your office is actively countering—”

“Of course,” Hassan cut in smoothly, forcing his voice into the familiar groove. “We are already engaged in that task. My staff have prepared statements for the state channels. The mosques have been instructed to remind worshippers of their duty. There is no question of disunity here.”

His hand drifted, seemingly idle, until his fingers brushed the edge of the folded sheet.

CALL LIST was written at the top in block capitals, in a hand that was not his own.

Below, a neat column of names and numbers. Not his usual rough note-taking, no loops of his handwriting. This was a deliberately constructed chain: district administrators, police chiefs, utility directors. Some he recognised instantly; others he had only ever seen on paper. Next to some names, short annotations in the same firm script:

“CONFIRM POWER STATUS.”
“ASK ABOUT RUMOURS OF LOOTING.”
“MAINTAIN CONFIDENCE, NO SPECIFICS.”

Beside each name, a time window was pencilled in, the next hour carved into precise segments.

Not orders shouted. A quiet script.

He understood immediately.

They wanted him to call these people, in this order, and say things that would sound, to anyone listening in the middle, like exactly what a functioning puppet governor ought to say—concerned, authoritative, informed. They wanted a pattern of phone traffic that would look normal on whatever boards the Iraqis watched in their comms rooms. The illusion of a man at the centre of a web, not a man bound to a desk with invisible rope.

His throat tightened.

“Excellency?” the undersecretary’s voice prodded. “Are you still there?”

“I am listening,” Hassan said. “You are repeating yourself. The rumours will be addressed. I will personally speak to the district imams. We will ensure that any talk of an ‘imminent landing’ is treated as the foreign propaganda it is.”

The words tasted like ash, but they came easily. He had been doing this too long.

He let his fingers unfold the sheet one corner at a time, keeping the movement small, contained, the phone pressed to his ear with the other hand. The paper crackled softly, a sound entirely lost beneath the undersecretary’s anxious breathing.

From somewhere behind the curtain to his right came a faint, metallic click.

Pinner.

Hassan could not see the man clearly from where he sat without turning his head, but he could sense him: a lean, angular shape tucked neatly between the fall of heavy drapes and the tall window, half-swallowed by fabric’s shadow. The faint outline of his shoulders, the suggestion of his helmet breaking the straight lines of curtain pleats.

In his hands, a device the size of a paperback novel, grey and anonymous-looking, bristling with two stubby aerials. A cable ran from it to a coiled earpiece, another to a small box clipped under his rig. Its front face had a tiny panel of LEDs—no more than six, pulsing in different patterns, green and amber, one faint red.

Pinner’s gloved fingers moved over the controls with almost absent-minded ease, as if he were tuning a radio rather than quietly warping the electrical heartbeat of the building.

“Minor fluctuations on your side?” the undersecretary was saying. “We heard a slight… distortion. There have been reports of interference with the lines.”

“Of course there have,” Hassan said smoothly, eyes skimming the first name on the list. “The Americans are rattling the wires like children. But the lines are secure. If you are worried about interception, perhaps you should be more cautious in what you choose to say.”

A sharp little inhale from the other end, then hurried backpedalling. “Naturally, Excellency, naturally. We are simply—”

“Doing your duty. As am I,” Hassan said. “Now, if there is nothing further of substance, I have work to do.”

Behind the curtain, one of the green LEDs on Pinner’s device blinked twice, then settled into a steady glow. The corporal angled the unit, watching the tiny signal strength bars dance. Satisfied, he adjusted a dial by a fractional turn, then lifted his head and listened—not with ears, but with his whole posture. Somewhere in that grey box, circuits were watching the spectrum of the palace’s telephone lines, blurring certain spikes, smoothing others, taking the harsh edge off anything that looked like the jagged scream of an emergency.

No drama. Only procedure.

“Very good, Excellency,” the undersecretary said, defeated. “We will forward you the official talking points—”

“I have enough talking points,” Hassan said. “What I need are competent reports. Ensure your people are sending them, and we will all sleep better.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. He dropped the receiver back into its cradle with more firmness than was strictly necessary.

His hand lingered on the phone a moment longer than it should have, fingers resting on the cool plastic. He could feel the tremble there now, the faint betrayals of muscle and nerve. He flattened his palm on the desk again, sliding it deliberately onto the sheet of paper as if he were merely straightening it.

His eyes moved to the first name.

District Commissioner al-Bayati – Northern Quarters – 14:10–14:20.

A pencil tick sat by the time slot, lightly drawn, as if to say: we are already into your hour.

Hassan’s gaze slid sideways, toward the door.

Through the frosted glass panel he could see the blurred shapes of the outer office: Maha’s desk, the edge of the filing cabinets, the vague suggestion of movement as someone passed. The strip of light at the threshold was intact—no shadows under it, no looming forms.

He imagined the staff out there, heads bent over typewriters and adding machines, pens scratching on paper. They were close enough that he could hear the faint clack of keys when the building was quiet. Close enough that if he raised his voice—if he shouted, screamed, knocked the phone off the desk—someone would definitely hear.

His heart lurched toward that thought, toward the image of throwing the door wide, of stepping into the outer office and saying, in whatever words would come, that there were armed foreigners inside the governor’s sanctum. That something had broken in from outside the occupation, something that did not belong to Baghdad or Washington.

A shadow moved at the edge of his vision.

He shifted his attention, and it was there: the black circle of a rifle barrel, utterly still, just visible where the man by the door had settled himself in the natural blind spot of anyone looking out.

Hassan couldn’t see the man’s face—not from this angle—but he could see the muzzle, slanted fractionally downward, relaxed in the way a coiled snake might be described as relaxed. It was not aimed at him, not quite. It was simply present. Indifferent. An object, waiting.

His throat constricted.

The thought of shouting evaporated.

He reminded himself, almost angrily, that he was not a fool, not a child. The men in his office had not come here to indulge him in heroics. They had come with their own plan, their own hierarchies, their own fear of failure. If he tried something dramatic, the first casualty would not be the occupation. It would be whoever happened to be nearest the door when it flew open.

His staff.

He looked down at the call list again, forcing his attention to settle there, to sit obediently where it was being placed.

A clear, disciplined script. A set of actions that, if carried out precisely, would keep everyone alive and the façade intact for another hour.

The white paper glowed under the desk lamp. The ink was crisp, dark, free of the blots and hurried corrections that marred his own notes. Someone had thought about this. Someone had sat in a quiet place and, at leisure, arranged the names in the order in which they wanted the city’s nervous system stroked.

Behind the curtain, Pinner shifted his weight with such care that the fabric barely stirred.

He tapped the device lightly with a knuckle, then brought his lips close to the microphone pinned to his collar.

“Lines are clean,” he said, voice pitched so low it might not have existed outside the tiny speakers pressed into his teammates’ ears. “Local exchanges look normal. No spikes.”

“Copy,” came a faint murmur from somewhere in the room—Harker, probably, or one of the other men buried in the panelled corners. They spoke like ghosts, their words travelling in wires, not air.

Hassan’s hands were not part of that network. His words, though, were.

He picked up the receiver again, this time the black phone that connected to the district offices. The weight of it felt heavier now, as if knowledge had increased its density.

He dialled the first number on the list, the plastic wheel ratcheting back under his finger with soft clicks.

As the line rang, he forced his shoulders down a fraction, loosening the rigid band of muscle across his upper back. The illusion of ease was as important as any phrase he would say. Men who sounded terrified invited questions. Men who sounded bored invited obedience.

The call was answered on the third ring.

“Commissioner al-Bayati,” a dry voice said, cautious.

“This is the Governor,” Hassan replied, slipping into a tone he reserved for equals he did not respect. “Give me your current status.”

A pause, then a flurry of movement on the other end—papers being shuffled, a chair scraped. The Commissioner began to report: power outages in two streets, an incident with a broken transformer, rumours of looting that amounted, on closer inspection, to three boys stealing fruit from a vendor.

As the man spoke, Hassan let his gaze drift again—not fully to the door this time, but to the side where the guard’s weapon occupied the corner of his vision. The muzzle remained where it had been, motionless. The man behind it might have been carved from the same dark wood as the doorframe.

For a strange second, Hassan felt a flicker of gratitude for that stillness. It was awful and obscene, but it was steady. Predictable. Unlike the men in Baghdad who changed their moods like shirts, the foreign soldiers in his office appeared to have only one: cold competence.

The Commissioner’s voice wobbled slightly as he mentioned the rumours.

“People see the ships on television, Excellency,” he said. “They listen to foreign radio. They say the Americans will come by sea… that they are already off the coast. Some think it will be… soon.”

“Then tell them,” Hassan said, letting steel creep into his voice, “that the Americans have been ‘coming’ for months and yet we remain. Tell them that if they want their families safe, they will not be on the streets gawking at rumours. They will be in their homes, obeying orders. Have your officers present themselves in the markets. Visibly. Calmly. We do not need to shoot anyone. We need to be seen.”

Al-Bayati agreed fervently, the relief audible.

“Good,” Hassan said. He checked the sheet. Next to the Commissioner’s name, in neat pencil, someone had written: “ASK ABOUT HOSPITAL FUEL.”

“Your hospital generators,” he added smoothly. “How much fuel do they have?”

A flurry of consultation off-mic, then a number. Less than it should have been.

“Get more,” Hassan said. “If you cannot, inform the Ministry of Health and copy my office on your request. I will not have pictures of dying children blamed on your incompetence.”

“Of course, Excellency, I—”

The line popped slightly, a hiccup of static.

“Signal’s fluctuating,” al-Bayati said, distracted. “The line—”

“It is fine,” Hassan said, too quickly. “You are fine. Get your officers on the streets, Commissioner. Tell them to walk, not drive. Wheels make people nervous. Boots reassure them that someone is there.”

He hung up before the man could protest further about the line.

Behind the curtain, one of the amber LEDs flickered and steadied. Pinner’s fingers made another minute adjustment, thumb and forefinger moving no more than a millimetre. He watched a schematic on a clipped-on screen—simple, monochrome bars representing traffic on the local exchange. The governor’s call had been a soft wave, cresting and falling like any other, indistinguishable from a dozen conversations about invoices and transport manifests and marital grievances.

If the governor had tried to shout, or slam the phone, or dial an emergency code, the pattern would have looked different—sharp spikes, sudden jumps. Pinner’s job was to make sure any such anomaly either died before it left the building or stroked flat enough not to trigger the wrong curiosity.

He preferred it when he didn’t have to smooth anything at all. Clean lines were easier.

Hassan set the receiver down gently.

His hand was steadier. Not calm—he doubted calm was an option for him today—but steadier. The act of doing something—of making calls, asking questions, issuing instructions—gave his nervousness something to wrap itself around, like a vine around a trellis.

The next name on the list waited.

He glanced once more at the door. No movement under the gap. No shadow shifting against the frosted glass. Maha and the others were out there, working, unaware that the voice of their governor was moving along a path written by foreign hands.

His gaze slipped to the muzzle by the door again, a black punctuation mark at the edge of his vision.

The weapon did not move. It did not need to. Its indifferent presence was enough.

He inhaled, slow and measured, and reached for the phone again, his finger already finding the next sequence of numbers on the script.

---

The first rounds came down the stairwell like thrown stones.

A sharp, flat crack from above, echoing off concrete, and then chips of mortar spat off the wall next to Tpr. Lewis “Kite” Keene’s head, bright-white in his NVGs for a heartbeat before gravity dragged them into dust.

“Incoming!” Mick snapped, already moving.

The basement, which had been all shadow and potential, snapped into hard lines.

Kite reacted before the echo died. He shoved himself left, boots skidding on grit, and dropped behind the nearest thing that had any height to it—a low metal cabinet shoved up against the wall, its paint bubbled and flaking. He hit the concrete shoulder-first, teeth clacking, rifle pinned tight to his chest to protect the optics.

Another shot cracked, this one slamming into the cabinet with a dull, punched-metal thud. The impact rang up through his forearm.

“Contact top of stairs,” he hissed, voice controlled but clipped, as he rolled onto one knee.

He forced the cabinet’s layout into his head: waist-high, maybe a meter deep, bolted to the wall at one end. Enough to cover his torso if he stayed low, not enough to hide his helmet if he got lazy.

He edged his barrel around its corner, not over the top—never over the top—and took a snapshot up the stairwell. The world telescoped: the ragged concrete steps, the chipped edges, the narrowing rectangle of the upper landing, and then a blurred silhouette at the top—shoulder, head, rifle, muzzle flare.

He fired two rounds, fast and clean, riding the recoil back into his shoulder, then ducked again as the reply came back in a harsh string—unsuppressed, angry shots tearing into the walls and steps, sparking off somewhere behind him.

On the other side of the basement, Farah “Mantis” Mansell moved right, not away from the gunfire but into a new angle on it. She slid behind a cluster of pipes that erupted from the floor and ran overhead, thick with peeling insulation, and used them like a half-wall. They weren’t ideal cover—they’d stop fragments, not dedicated fire—but they broke up her silhouette and gave her something solid to hug.

“Got right,” she breathed, settling her cheek to the stock.

From her position, she could see a different slice of the stairwell—where the upper wall met the ceiling, the lip of the landing, a few inches of banister. Enough to watch for movement. Enough to punish anyone trying to lean around for a better look.

She waited until she saw a flicker—just a suggestion of a head and shoulder—and snapped a short burst at it, three rounds, no more, the shots thudding into concrete and metal, forcing whoever was up there to think twice.

“Pinned,” she said. “They’re hugging that wall now.”

Between them, the stairwell became a shape, not just a place: a rising funnel of kill zone, its angles and edges mapped in instinct.

Capt. Rowan “Ash” Sherborne took it in in a single glance.

Kite low behind the cabinet on the left, Mantis anchored by the pipe cluster on the right. The stair’s mouth between them, a dark throat flickering with occasional muzzle flash from above. The uneven floor under his own boots—cracked concrete, scattered rubble, the jagged edge of a broken pallet near the central pillar. Overhead, pipes and ducting and low beams that forced them to keep their heads down even as they tried to look up.

Geometry, he thought. This is what it always comes down to.

He tapped Mick’s shoulder, and the sergeant leaned in, their helmets almost touching, their faces ghostly in each other’s NVG glow.

The look they exchanged was brief and absolute: a weighing of options that didn’t take long, because there weren’t any good ones.

Back out the way they’d come? Up the narrow exterior stairs, backs to the threat, dragging their noise with them, then try to clear whatever response they’d just triggered at street level?

Not viable.

Stay here, in this half-cover pocket at the base of the stairs, trading fire with an unknown number of shooters above until someone on their side got unlucky, or someone on the other side decided to roll a grenade down?

Also not viable.

Forward, then. Always forward.

Mick’s jaw tightened. He gave the smallest of nods. It was as binding as any signed order.

“We’re in it,” Ash murmured over the net. “No backing out. We push through.”

“Copy,” Kite and Mantis said in near-unison, the words overlapping.

Another round smacked into the pillar near Ash’s head, punching a fist-sized chip of concrete out of it. The shard spun sideways and burst into dust mid-air, a white cloud swirling into his left eye.

Pain flared—sharp, immediate. It felt like someone had shoved grit straight under his eyelid. His eye clamped shut on reflex, tears springing as his body tried to wash the intrusion out.

“Fuck,” he hissed, hand twitching up before he stopped it. He wanted to rub, to clear the irritation, but discipline trapped the gesture. Hands on the gun. Eyes—plural or singular—on the fight.

He blinked hard instead, rapid, jerky motions. The world doubled and blurred in his left eye, but his right still saw through the NVG lens, green and grainy but adequate.

Mick shot him a quick sideways glance, caught the squint, and snorted softly. “You’re pretty enough with one eye,” he muttered.

Ash huffed out a humorless breath. “Save your flirting for after,” he said, voice tight.

Nobody slowed. Nobody asked if he needed a moment. This wasn’t the sort of pain you got to schedule around.

“Right,” Ash said, forcing his focus back to the geometry. “Kite, you keep that stair throat honest. Mantis, I want them pinned every time they think about leaning. Mick, on me. We’re going to take center, one meter at a time. No one gets clever and stands tall.”

“Roger,” Kite said, already shifting his weight, setting himself for another peek-and-shoot cycle.

Mantis adjusted her position, tucking her knee under her to give herself a better brace against the pipe cluster. She rolled her shoulders back once, loosening the tightness in her upper back, then settled in, eyes fixed on the upper shadow line.

The basement punished haste.

The floor was a trap of its own—pits, cracks, debris that could turn an ankle or send a man sprawling if he forgot, even for a heartbeat, that it wasn’t a parade square. Above, the pipes and low concrete beams meant any panicked lunge forward could end with a smashed NVG unit or a cracked skull. And the stairwell itself was a perfect chute for rounds bouncing down, shedding energy but not danger.

Ash and Mick moved like they were advancing through a minefield they could see but not fully trust.

They went low, half-crouched, guns up, each step a deliberate placement of boot on concrete already scanned in the last heartbeat.

“Cover,” Mick said quietly.

“Cover,” Ash echoed.

Kite popped up, swung his barrel around the cabinet edge, and sent another pair of rounds snapping up the stairwell. The flashes above jerked away as whoever was up there flinched back.

“Now,” Ash said.

He slid out from behind the pillar, moving diagonally across the open patch between his cover and the base of the stairwell. His boots smoothed over small stones; he felt each one shift but he’d already shifted his weight to compensate. His rifle tracked upward, muzzle hovering just shy of the stair mouth, ready to crank up if a face showed.

Mick flowed with him, slightly behind and to the side, his own weapon covering the upper right quadrant. Between them and Mantis, they could cover most of the angles that mattered.

Another shot spat down from above, this one lower, ricocheting off the step edge and skittering along the floor in a whining spin. It pinged off a bit of metal near Mantis’s position. She didn’t flinch; her body pressed into the pipes, she squeezed off two short bursts in response, a mechanical answer to the intrusion.

“Still two up there,” she called softly. “Maybe more. Heard shouting behind them.”

“Roger,” Ash said. “Kite, give us a big noisy breath in three, then back off. On my mark.”

He counted silently.

Three. Kite inhaled, feeling the familiar tightness spread across his chest, then leaned out.

Two. The stairwell flashed up in his scope, the grainy smear of a man’s shoulder and cheek caught in the open for a fraction of a second.

One. Kite fired, not to kill—though he’d take it if it came—but to own that slice of space for the length of an exhale.

A yell from above, cut off midway. A weapon clattered once, then slid, the sound amplified as it bounced off the steps.

“Hit something,” Kite said, breathless. “No eyes on where.”

While the noise of that brief exchange still bounced off the walls, Ash and Mick moved another meter.

They hugged the base of the stairs now, close enough that the angle from above made it harder to hit them unless someone leaned almost horizontally over the banister. Ash felt the cool shadow of the stair structure fall across his back, a different temperature on his neck where sweat evaporated.

His left eye still burned, tears streaking down his cheek under the NVG mount, but his right eye saw clearly enough: the first three steps ahead of him, chipped and dirty, the underside of the fourth step forming a low concrete lip overhead. He could see the faint smears of shoe rubber on the edges where station staff had trudged up and down for years.

“One meter,” he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else. “We’re doing this in bites.”

Mick’s breathing was steady in the net. “Could be worse,” he muttered. “At least no one’s switched the lights on.”

Another burst from above, wild this time, rounds slamming into the wall opposite and sending fine shrapnel of plaster and concrete dust down on them like dry rain. Small granules pattered on their helmets, caught in the folds of their gear.

Mantis answered with a measured three-round burst, then a pause, then two more. Her fire wasn’t angry; it was clipped, purposeful, a metronome of suppression.

“Keep their heads down, love,” Mick said under his breath.

“Doing my best,” she murmured back.

Kite shifted his position behind the cabinet again, crawling a foot to the side to change his shooting angle. The metal casing creaked softly under his weight, protesting years of neglect bolstered by sudden use as cover. He ignored it, pressing his cheek against the stock, reminding himself to watch his elbows so they didn’t stray into the exposed area.

Ash gestured with two fingers, the signal small and tight.

“Next step,” he said. “Same drill. Kite, on my call. Mantis, punish anything that moves.”

They moved like that, the fight turning into a sequence of repetitions, each one slightly different, like climbing a new set of stairs that kept shifting at the edges.

One meter at a time.

Kite leans, fires, tucks back.
Mantis reads the gap, adding sharp punctuation to any brave silhouette above.
Ash and Mick steal another slice of ground, boots feeling for level patches in the gnawed concrete, muzzles tracking the upper landing.

A ricochet bit sparks off a pipe near Mantis’s head, the metallic whine buzzing in her ear like an angry insect. She didn’t duck; she simply shifted her body by an inch, sliding along the pipe cluster to a fresh nook, and kept the rhythm.

“More voices,” she noted calmly. “Sounds like they’re dragging someone. Might be your man, Kite.”

“Sorry,” Kite said, without the slightest hint of apology in his tone.

They kept moving.

The basement punished haste, so they refused to give it any. No lunges, no blind rush up the steps to “end it quickly.” That was how you caught a round in the throat. Instead, they treated every meter as its own problem to be solved: cover, angle, fire, move.

Ash’s sliced, irrigated eye kept watering, but the pain flattened into background noise. His world had shrunk to the geometry of the stairwell and the ticking progression of steps taken.

Five meters. Four. Three.

Every time they gained one, the idea of retreat became more absurd. Not just tactical nonsense but physically perverse; the muscles in their legs had already told their brains that forward was the only direction they recognised now.

“We’re nearly at their toes,” Mick said quietly after one more cycle, his voice edged with a grim satisfaction. “Another meter and we’ll be knocking on their floorboards.”

Ash felt the corner of his mouth tighten in something that might, later, be mistaken for a smile.

“Then let’s be polite,” he said. “One more meter. Make it count.”

---

Ivy’s first instinct was to tighten his grip on the rifle.

His second, mercifully, was to loosen it.

He drew in a breath that tasted of detergent and old dust and lifted his left hand, palm out, fingers spread. Not a threat, not quite surrender. Just the universal, fragile request for a moment.

“Easy,” he murmured, his voice barely above the hum of the fridge compressor somewhere deeper in the annex.

Rasha’s eyes flicked to the raised hand, then back to the gun. She didn’t step forward, but she didn’t bolt either. She held herself in a half-coiled stance, knees angled as if ready to move in any direction the instant some internal calculation tipped to flight.

Behind Ivy, Nails stayed exactly where he was supposed to be—half-turned, rifle covering the only other doorway that fed onto this corridor. His body was angled so he could see past Ivy with one eye and back the way they’d come with the other. His stance screamed readiness, all taut lines and prepared violence, but his voice, when he spoke, was a thin, urgent thread.

“Keep her quiet, mate,” he whispered. “Please.”

As if Ivy could just reach out and turn down a dial.

The girl said something else in Arabic—short, sharp, a sentence punctuated at the end with a rising tone. Ivy heard *inta* in there, maybe, the you that his grandparents had thrown at him when he’d done something especially stupid as a kid. Her accent bent the vowels in a way that tugged at a memory he didn’t have; Iraqi, he would be told later, though in this moment all he knew was that she sounded different from the Egyptian newscasters his mother used to watch late at night.

He had nothing solid to stand on—no years of schooling, no comfort in the language. Just scraps. Fragments. Tone.

He let his raised hand stay where it was, steady, fingers spread.

“Rukky…” he started, grasping for the word that meant “wait.” His mind flailed and came up with nothing he trusted enough to speak aloud. Better to stick to what he knew he could say and not mangle.

He softened his face instead, let his shoulders drop a fraction, tried to bleed some of the aggression out of his posture. The weapon was still in his right hand, still very much present, but its muzzle was angled at the floor now, not at the centre of her chest.

“Salaam,” he said.

The word felt odd in his mouth, formal, like wearing a suit that didn’t belong to him. He made himself say it properly, not the half-buried childhood version—*s’lam* muttered at an uncle on the phone—but the full greeting his parents would use when they called Karachi, syllables separated and clear.

“Sa-laam.”

Rasha’s eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. Not in recognition of the word—he suspected that would come next—so much as in surprise that anything in this moment might be familiar.

“Salaam,” she echoed, but the way she said it was different. Lighter, quick, the consonants softened by a Gulf cadence. Her head tilted slightly, as if testing the word back at him to see if it fit.

Ivy licked his lips, suddenly dry.

He tapped his chest with the fingertips of his raised hand, just once.

“Muslim,” he said carefully.

As lies went, it wasn’t particularly bold. His family would have said it wasn’t a lie at all. His parents prayed, fasted, observed what they were supposed to observe. He had grown up with Qur’anic recitations in the background, the call to prayer as a cassette tape rather than a lived sound outside a window. But by the time he’d been old enough to choose for himself, he’d chosen other things. The army. The pub. Distance.

He had the word, though. And down here, in a dim annex in occupied Kuwait, it was the only shield he could offer her that didn’t come attached to a gun.

He tapped his chest again, a fraction firmer.

“Muslim,” he repeated. Then, grasping for something soft to balance it, “sadiq.” Friend.

He was not entirely sure where he’d hauled that from—school lesson, bit of a film, overheard tourist phrase in some London café—but it sounded close enough.

Rasha stared at his hand, at the place he’d tapped. Then her gaze swept up to his face, lingering on his eyes, then flicked to his jaw, to the dark stubble on his upper lip, the line of his nose. She was cataloguing him, he realised. Measuring his features against the men she knew and the men she feared.

Her brow furrowed.

She answered him in a rush.

Arabic spilled out of her again, fast and bright. This time the word *Muslim* was in there, unmistakable, wrapped in other phrases—questions, by the sound of it. There was an *anta min…* something, something—where are you from? maybe. Then something that sounded like *shurta*—police—or he might have been grasping, forcing pattern onto sound. A small hand ran through the air as she gestured vaguely toward the door, the courtyard beyond, the world.

She wasn’t screaming.

That was what lodged in Ivy’s brain more firmly than the words he couldn’t decipher. She was not shrieking, not calling for help at the top of her lungs, not melting down into hysterics. Her voice was high and quick, but there was control in it. Demand, not blind panic.

She wanted answers.

Like a child who had seen too much and had simply decided, somewhere inside herself, that nobody was going to explain anything to her unless she dragged the explanations out by sheer force of personality.

“Ivy…” Nails murmured, a warning in the syllables now. “You losing her?”

“Hold,” Ivy said, almost without thinking, and shifted his palm a few inches closer to Rasha, like he was trying to give her the idea that the gesture was for her, not the corridor.

He nodded slowly, as if what she’d just said had slotted perfectly into some mental schema.

“Naam,” he said. Yes. At least he trusted that one. “Naam, naam.”

It didn’t fit, really. Yes to what? Yes, I’m Muslim? Yes, I am from… wherever you think I am from? Yes, we are the police, the army, the invaders, the men who come in the night?

He hated it. Hated the uncertainty of his own words, the way he was layering his ignorance over her fear.

He made his face do what it needed to do anyway.

He let his features settle into something that tried to be reassuring. Soft mouth, steady eyes. He kept his gaze on hers and resisted the urge to let it flicker around, to check the corners of the room, the line of the skirting board where the shadow sat thicker, the door behind her shoulder. That was Nails’ job. Nails would handle it. If Ivy started scanning, she’d read that motion as predatory.

He needed her to see something else.

He dipped his head once, a tiny nod, as if he were answering a question she had actually asked.

“Muslim,” he repeated, the lie smoothing itself out as he said it again. “Sadiq. La mushkila.” No problem.

He hoped that was right. It sounded right. His grandmother would have tutted at his accent, but down here, in the thin wedge of space between a young girl and disaster, it would have to do.

Rasha took another breath, a little slower this time. Her hand on the spray bottle loosened, fingers uncurling from around the plastic neck until it hung by her side again, forgotten. The rag lay where she had dropped it, a damp, dark smudge on the tile.

She fired another question at him.

This one came in two distinct bursts. The first half was tight, clipped, the vowels pressed together. The second was stretched a little, the tone rising at the end again in that child’s not-quite-defiance. Ivy thought he heard something like *bayt*—house—then *aina*—where—and then something that might have been a name, short and sharp.

She was looking not just at him now but past him, over his shoulder, at the space where the corridor opened up toward the yard and, beyond that, the main house where the governor was playing at authority at a desk. Or maybe she was thinking of another building entirely—her own home, the place she should be in the middle of the day instead of here with a rag and a bottle.

“I’ve got nothing,” Nails muttered softly. “Sounds like telly to me.”

Ivy nodded again.

He didn’t understand. Not properly. The language was coming at him as if through a wall, the individual syllables distinct but the meaning blurred, like watching lips move through thick glass.

But the tone—he could read that at least.

She was not pleading for her life. She was not begging him not to hurt her, not yet. She was interrogating him. Who are you? Are you with them or with someone else? Are you another kind of danger or a way out?

He nodded as though she had asked if he was here on purpose, as though she had demanded to know whether this intrusion had shape, or if it was chaos come to swallow her.

“Shwaya, shwaya,” he said, dredging up the phrase from a holiday years ago, an embarrassed exchange with a waiter in some coastal town. “Little, little. Arabic shwaya.”

He tapped his temple, then shook his head slightly, giving her an apologetic half-wince.

“La afham kwayyis,” he added, mangling the grammar but hoping the meaning would limp through. I don’t understand well.

Rasha’s expression shifted, very slightly.

Her mouth tightened, the corners pulling inward. Not fear, not yet. Something like exasperation. As if, in addition to everything else, she now had to deal with the fact that the strange armed men in her corridor were incompetent linguists.

She said something under her breath that might have been a curse. Then she straightened—a small adjustment, spine lengthening, chin lifting a few millimetres.

Her next words came slower.

Still Arabic, still threaded with that Iraqi lilt, but more spaced, as if she were talking to someone hard of hearing or dim-witted. She used her hands more this time: one palm pointing to her own chest, then to the room behind her; then a vague gesture toward the main house, then an upward flick, indicating something above—another floor, the roof, the sky.

Ivy watched her hands as much as her mouth, trying to grab meaning from the whole picture.

“Ah,” he said softly, seizing on the only safe anchor he could find. He nodded, put his own hand to his chest. “Ana… Imran.” He hesitated, then, remembering where he was and what name these men used for him, added, “Ivy.”

He felt ridiculous, introducing himself to a child in the middle of a covert operation.

Her eyebrows knit. She repeated the name—“Imran”—under her breath, rolling it around in her mouth, then tried “Ivy,” the English nick shaved of its edges by her accent.

Her gaze slid past him again, briefly, to Nails.

Nails, feeling the weight of it without seeing it, shifted one boot half an inch, grounded himself, and gave the smallest of chin lifts.

“Hi,” he muttered, then, realising the uselessness of the word, added, “Salaam,” in a clumsy echo of Ivy’s earlier attempt.

Rasha’s focus snapped back to Ivy.

She said his name again, more firmly this time, as if pinning it to him, then launched into another string of Arabic.

He caught *Imran… Muslim…* and something that sounded like *leish*—why. Then a longer phrase wrapped around *huna*—here.

Why are you here.

That much, even he could read in the line of her mouth, the way her chin jerked toward the corridor, the door, the unseen world beyond.

He nodded once more, slowly.

He hated himself for it.

Because the answer, in any language, was not a thing you told a child: We are here to hold your leaders hostage while large ships pretend to threaten your shore so that bigger men can play a game of war in the desert. We are here to make sure the illusion holds, so that when the real attack comes, it falls where we want it.

He could not give her that.

So he gave her another lie, softer and smaller and painted in the colours she might reach for in her own head.

He tapped his chest again.

“Muslim,” he said, for the third time, the word sitting heavier each repetition. “Sadiq. Huna…” He gestured vaguely toward the floor, then made a roof shape over his head with his hand. “Bayt… safe.”

He wasn’t confident about that last bit. The grammar was atrocious. He knew that much. It probably sounded to her like a toddler insisting *house good here*.

But he poured as much steady warmth into it as he could manage, let his voice go soft around the edges, the way his mother’s had when she’d told him stories at night about prophets and deserts and men who refused to bow to tyrants.

Rasha’s eyes searched his face, hunting for cracks.

He nodded along to her next flow of words as though he were following every nuance. In reality, the meanings slid off him like water off glass. He was nodding at her tone, at the shape of her fear, at the horrifying familiarity of a child forced to ask adult questions.

“Yes,” he said quietly, even though he did not know what he was agreeing to. “Naam. I understand.”

He didn’t.

Not the words, not her life, not the precise calculus she was doing right now, weighing two strangers against the possibility of worse strangers arriving later.

But he understood enough to know that if he faltered now—if he let his own uncertainty bleed through—she would hear it. And once she heard it, she might scream. Or run. Or do something that would make Nails jerk his rifle up in a reflex they would both regret.

So he kept nodding, kept his palm open and his voice low and his lie alive between them like a fragile bridge.

Behind him, Nails shifted his stance by another degree, weight distributing, muzzle subtly adjusting to keep the other doorway under control. His eyes flicked to the girl, then back to the empty corridor beyond, always moving, always counting beats. But he could feel the shift in the air between Ivy and the girl—the way her voice had dropped half a register, the way Ivy’s shoulders had unwound a fraction.

“Whatever you’re saying,” Nails murmured, “it’s working. Don’t stop.”

Ivy didn’t answer him.

He just looked at Rasha, nodded again, and pretended, with every fibre of his being, that he understood.

---

The line clicked dead with a little sigh, and for the first time in what felt like an hour, Hassan al-Rashid let himself remove his hand from the receiver before it became part of him.

The undersecretary’s voice disappeared into the building’s hum—absorbed by the walls, the carpet, the buzzing fluorescent tubes buried in their fittings. The office settled around him, the silence pressing at his ears like cotton.

His fingers lingered on the black plastic cradle. The tremor in them was still there, but it had lost its wild edge. Panic, furious at being ignored, had sulked off to curl somewhere in his chest instead of rattling his bones. His body, disgusted at the constant flood of adrenaline, had made a decision on his behalf: panic would not help. Precision would.

He drew in a breath, slow and deliberate, and let it out through his nose.

The call list lay just to his right, a narrow strip of white in the lamp’s pool of light. Names, numbers, little pencil annotations. A choreography of concern. They were not his steps, but he knew how to dance if someone handed him the music.

He slid the paper closer with two fingers, as if all he were doing was aligning it more neatly with the blotter’s edge, the way he might in an ordinary meeting with a visiting trade delegation.

“Next,” he murmured, not to anyone in particular.

He lifted the receiver again. His hand felt steadier as it wrapped around it, knuckles less white. Muscle memory took over; he did not need to look at the keypad. He had called half these numbers often enough to be able to dial them in his sleep. Today, for the first time, he was doing so on cue.

As his finger traced the first arc on the dial, there was a soft scuff of movement beside his shoulder.

Major Havers leaned in, the movement so small it barely registered until his shadow fell across the corner of the desk. He bent at the waist, not enough to crowd Hassan, but enough that his voice could travel the short distance without ever rising above the paper-soft rustle of fabric.

“Keep it boring,” he said, in English.

His tone was conversational, almost bland, but the words carried a weight Hassan felt land somewhere between his shoulder blades.

Boring.

Yes. Of course. Bored men did not attract attention. Bored conversations did not prick the ears of wire-listeners in comms rooms. Bored officials did their jobs, signed their forms, issued their instructions, and went home. Bored was safe.

Hassan nodded, the movement minimal, as the dial span back under his fingertip with a series of muted clicks.

The line rang once. Twice.

“Water Authority,” a voice answered, nasal and distracted.

“This is the Governor,” Hassan said, slipping automatically into the faintly irritated tone of a man who considered all public utility offices inherently incompetent. “Put me through to Engineer Darwish.”

There was a flurry of apologies, the shuffle of a handset being transferred, the muffled murmur of a hand over a receiver—someone announcing his call to someone else in the room.

Harker straightened up, fading back into his corner by the bookcase. The movement was as soft as his approach, barely perceptible. Hassan felt rather than saw him step away. The echo of the Major’s words stayed by his ear.

Keep it boring.

The lamp hummed. Beyond the curtains, somewhere on the street below, a horn blared and cut off. Somewhere deeper in the building, a typewriter clacked.

Darwish came on the line with a wheezing sort of obsequiousness. “Excellency, I am honoured. Forgive the delay, I was—”

“You were away from your telephone,” Hassan said, cutting him off, a faint smile touching his lips that did not reach his eyes. “Perhaps you have mistaken the nature of your job. The pipes are beneath the ground, Engineer, not your head.”

There was a strangled laugh, a burst of nervous agreement. “Of course, Excellency. I was just inspecting the—”

“Spare me the poetry,” Hassan said, letting the smile bleed into his voice. “I need a simple update. How many mains have you had to shut down since yesterday?”

No mention of ships. No mention of Americans. No mention of war.

Just pipes. Mains. Valves.

Boring.

Darwish launched into his report with the eagerness of a man finally being invited to recite a memorised speech. Two mains temporarily out near the industrial district, a pump house having trouble maintaining pressure in Mansouriya, an old pipe burst in a residential street where someone had tried to tap illegally. He layered excuses over each issue like plaster, assuring the Governor that his men were working tirelessly, that any disruption would be minimal, that the people would hardly notice.

Hassan let him talk, punctuating the flow with small, impatient noises—“mm,” “hmm,” the occasional pointed “and?”—the way he always did. If anyone was listening to this from outside the building, they would hear nothing out of character. Just a tired administrator chivvying an overworked engineer through the slog of municipal reality.

He felt the absurdity of it even as he played his part. All around them, cities were bracing for bombardment, generals were staring at maps, ships were cruising offshore like wolves. And here he was, asking about burst pipes.

“—we have secured additional chlorine supplies,” Darwish was saying. “To ensure water quality. There is no risk of contamination, Excellency. I assure you.”

“Good,” Hassan said. “The last thing I need is diarrhoea on top of everything else. You think the people complain now? Give them bad water and you will hear a noise, Engineer.”

He let out a chuckle.

The sound startled him. It bounced off the office walls in a way laughter hadn’t in months. For a heartbeat, he was aware of how grotesque it was—this little puff of amusement in the middle of the building’s tight-wound fear.

But the undercurrent of tension in Darwish’s voice eased, just slightly. The man on the other end laughed too, gratefully, eager to join in the performance.

“God forbid, Excellency,” he said. “We will not allow such a… eruption.”

Hassan huffed again, playing the joke out just enough to make it feel natural.

“There. You see?” he said. “You can be amusing as well as useful. Make sure your men are actually doing what you say they are doing. I will not have half the city without water if something… inconvenient happens.”

Silence on the line, then the engineer’s careful response. “If you mean, Excellency, should the situation… escalate—”

“I mean if anything happens,” Hassan cut in, firm but still almost casual. “A sandstorm, a fire, a donkey wanders into your pumping station. Have you forgotten where we live? The gods of mischief do not need Americans to cause trouble.”

Another little ripple of laughter, this time tinged with relief.

Behind the curtain, Pinner watched the signal trace on his device, the call a smooth wave in a sea of other waves. Nothing sharp. Nothing panicked. The jammer/spoofer’s small LEDs glowed steady. As the governor’s voice travelled down the line, the box ensured that any sudden spike in volume, any frantic over-speed in words, was nudged gently back toward normal. Noise reduction on human fear.

In the far corner by the door, the man with the rifle in the blind spot did not move at all. He did not need to. His job was simple: ensure the theatre continued unbroken.

Hassan swiveled his chair a fraction, enough that he could look at the wall clock without making it obvious. The second hand crawled past twelve, into the next minute. He did the arithmetic without really thinking—how long had he been on with Darwish, how many calls remained on the sheet.

“All right,” he said, cutting the engineer off mid-recitation about replacement filters. “Write up a brief report. Three paragraphs. No lies, no excuses. Just what is broken, what you’ve done, what you will do. Have it on my desk within the hour.”

“Yes, Excellency. Immediately.”

“If you send me anything longer,” Hassan added, dryly, “I will assume you are padding it with nonsense and I will have Maha test you on it line by line. You do not want that. She has teeth.”

Darwish stammered agreement, still chuckling nervously. Hassan let the call end on that little bubble of forced camaraderie. He replaced the receiver gently and allowed his hand to rest on it for a moment, feeling the faint vibration of the connection settling.

The grotesqueness of it pressed against his ribs.

He had just laughed. They had just shared a joke about diarrhoea.

He could feel Harker’s earlier words hovering in the air like a subtitle.

Keep it boring.

He didn’t know if the Major heard the laughter as grotesque, or if, from where the man stood, it was simply a useful tool, another data point in the illusion of normal governance. To the SAS officer, perhaps, this was clean work: no screaming, no bodies, just a man at a desk making sure everyone else believed the world was the same as yesterday for a little while longer.

Hassan picked up the call list again, scanning for the next name.

Municipal Sanitation. Then Street Lighting. Then the head of the central hospital.

His mouth twisted. Tomorrow, someone might bomb the water plant. Shells might fall on the electrical substation. The nice, neat lines of phone calls and memos and reports would vanish in smoke. But for this hour, the occupation demanded the appearance of continuity.

He glanced sideways, just enough that he could see Harker’s silhouette near the bookshelves—a dark slab against the polished wood. The Major was still, watchful, one hand resting lightly on the sling of his weapon. Even at this distance, Hassan could feel the man’s attention. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t sympathetic. It was… invested. This was a component of his operation, and he needed it functioning.

Hassan lifted the receiver again and dialled the next number on the sheet. His fingers no longer shook. His voice, when he spoke, came out smoother, almost conversational.

“Sanitation Department,” came the tired, nasal voice on the other end.

“This is the Governor,” Hassan said. “Tell me something interesting about rubbish.”

The clerk at the other end gave a startled snort.

Hassan smiled, because the theatre required it, and felt the mask settle more firmly against his skin.

He was not fooling himself about what he was doing. He was performing normality for an audience that might include a listening post in Baghdad, a bored sergeant in a comms van, and four silent foreign soldiers in his office. The script in front of him had been written by hands that were not his own, edited by men whose names he did not know. His job now was to deliver it so well that no one else realised it was a play.

As the clerk began to explain the timetable for refuse collection under blackout conditions, Hassan forced another dry chuckle into the conversation, just at the right moment. It came out sounding almost genuine.

---

The first warning was not the crack of a single shot, but the change in the air.

A sharp, barked command in Arabic spilled down the stairwell—too fast to parse, but braced on a tone Ash recognised from a dozen other fights: fear trying to disguise itself as authority. Then the muzzle flashes bloomed at the top of the stairs, bright ghosts in the NVGs, and the world turned into noise.

Rounds came pouring down the stair throat in a ragged, angry torrent.

They weren’t aimed, not properly; whoever was up there was spraying the dark, hoping brute probability would do the work that marksmanship might not. The shots slammed into the stair edges with metallic shrieks, chewed the wall by Ash’s head into a geyser of white dust, ricocheted off the low ceiling in high, whining ricochets that made the pipes ring like struck bells.

“Ash!” someone shouted over the net, and then the channel filled with the clipped grunts of men pressed into the concrete.

“Down!” Mick’s voice cut through it, not loud but edged like a blade.

His hand came up in the same instant—palm flat, chopping downward twice—reinforcing the order without wasting words. Kite ducked lower behind his cabinet, pressing his helmet into the cool metal, boots scuffing against the floor as he tucked his knees in tight. Mantis hugged the pipe cluster so close the rough insulation snagged faint fibres on her sleeve.

The stairwell was a funnel for noise as much as for bullets. The roar from above bounced off concrete and steel, rolling over them in waves. It was impossible to tell how many weapons were firing—two, three, half a dozen. The echoes folded over each other until it sounded like a full platoon was up there, all of them enraged.

Mick flattened his back against the crate stack that was passing for his cover and stuck two fingers toward Kite’s last known position, then rolled them in the air—keep your sector. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at Ash, then jerked it up the stairs. Question and answer in one motion.

We’re not staying here. We’re going up.

Ash met his eyes across the short stretch of floor between pillar and stair base. For a heartbeat, everything seemed to slow—the frantic chatter of rounds above stretching into a distant storm. His left eye, still stinging from the earlier shower of concrete dust, blurred the world into a green smear. His right eye saw it clearly: Mick’s set jaw, Kite’s hunched shoulders, Mantis pressed behind her pipes, the stair mouth vomiting bullets.

They had no idea how many were on the landing. The echoing acoustics made every voice double, every footstep sound like two. For all Ash knew, there could be three men up there—or ten. The only certainty was that the longer they stayed pinned at the bottom of the stairwell, the worse their odds got.

“Can’t sit in the bowl,” Mick said, voice compressed and calm in Ash’s earpiece. “They’ll get brave or lucky.”

Ash didn’t bother replying. They both knew it. This position—half cover, limited mobility, direct line into the enemy’s muzzle flashes—was a waiting room for disaster. The exterior door behind them might as well have been bricked over. To fall back now would mean turning their backs to the fire, scrambling up those narrow metal steps, then wrestling with a door that shrieked when you breathed on it.

Retreat wasn’t just cowardice here. It was tactically suicidal.

He leaned his helmet edge against the pillar, closing his gritty eye; the pain sharpened his thinking.

Forward, then. But not in a blind rush. The basement was unforgiving—uneven ground underfoot, low overheads, cover that protected one angle while exposing another. A panicked charge up the stairs would hand the Iraqis exactly what they were trying to buy with all that blind fire: bodies in the open.

So they needed something else.

Not heroics. Space.

“Listen to me,” Ash said, voice low but steady over the net. “We’re going to buy ourselves a gap. Two seconds of nothing. That’s all I want.”

Another burst raked the wall above his head, a round shaving fresh concrete into the air. Dust snapped into his face; some of it found the edge of his exposed eye and stabbed under the lid like grit. The eye spasmed shut, tears blurring the green wash of the NVG.

He bit off a curse and forced the lid open again. It watered freely now, but he could still see. Good enough.

“On my count,” he continued, as if someone hadn’t just shot the wall half an inch from his skull. “We stagger. One gun up at a time, short bursts. Different angles. I want them thinking they’re surrounded and I want them hugging that floor.”

“Copy,” Mantis said immediately.

“Roger,” Kite added, the word clipped by his breathing.

Mick gave a single, fierce nod that Ash could hear as much as see. “I’ll anchor you,” he said. “Call it.”

Above them, the Iraqi shooters did exactly what panicked men with automatic weapons in a superior position tended to do: they kept pouring rounds downward, hoping volume would solve what accuracy couldn’t. The stairwell filled with the hammering noise, the air thick with dust and the scorched-metal tang of ricochets.

Ash raised his hand where only his own team could see it, three fingers extended.

“On three,” he said. “Kite first. Mantis on my mark. Mick, then I’ll take the last bite. After that, we move.”

He folded one finger down.

“Three.”

Kite inhaled deeply, bracing his shoulder into the cabinet. He could feel the metal vibrating under the impacts, each round a distant thud. He squeezed his eyes shut for half a heartbeat, opened them again, checked his muzzle’s position.

Ash’s hand folded the second finger.

“Two.”

Mantis wormed another inch around her pipe cluster, bringing a different slice of stairwell into view. Up top, she glimpsed a leg, a flash of fabric, the edge of a rifle butt as someone shifted position. She let her finger rest against the trigger, measured her breathing.

Ash’s last finger folded.

“One.”

“Kite,” he said. “Up.”

Kite rolled out just enough to give his barrel a clear corridor. He didn’t present more than his hands and the upper quarter of his helmet to the stairwell’s gaping maw. Through his sight, he caught the blur of a man’s shoulder leaning into the spray, arm extended, muzzle flaring.

He didn’t wait for a perfect target picture. Perfect was for ranges. This was about taking ownership of a space.

He sent a three-round burst snatching up the steps—controlled, fast, riding the recoil back into cover. The recoil hammered into his shoulder, rattling up his arm. One of the rounds sparked off the banister; another thudded into the wall. The third found something softer, judging by the cut-off shout from above.

“Down,” Ash snapped, and Kite was already pulling back, flattening himself behind the cabinet as a ragged reply came down, a panicked spray chewing fresh chunks out of the concrete pillar.

“Mantis,” Ash said, almost on top of it. “Now.”

She slid her barrel forward through the cage of pipes and picked a new angle—higher, where she’d seen movement. Her red dot settled on the dark strip under the landing’s lip where someone might try to peek.

She squeezed off two rounds. One punched into the upper wall; the other cut sparks from the edge of the stair metal.

“Two more,” she muttered, and sent them, stepping her fire along where any sensible man would have his boots.

A voice yelped something guttural. The volume from above stuttered for half a breath as a weapon jerked off target.

“Down,” Ash ordered.

She eased back, hugging the pipes again. A fresh fusillade tore down in reply, angry and blind—rounds ricocheting off the pipe casings, whining away into the gloom.

Ash counted beats in his head.

“One… two… three…”

“Mick,” he said. “Your turn. Keep it low.”

Mick grunted acknowledgement, the sound more animal than word. He dropped to one knee, leaned his shoulder into the corner of the crate stack, and angled his rifle not directly up but toward the underside of the landing where he judged the enemy’s feet would be.

He fired short, savage bursts—two, pause, two—walking his shots along the strip where steel met concrete. Each burst was a message: you move, you die.

Dust and concrete spat from the edge under the landing. A boot scraped, urgent, as someone yanked their foot back from the invisible line of fire. More shouting above, overlapping now, men trying to talk over gunfire and their own fear.

“Ash,” Mick said, teeth bared in a grin that never reached his eyes. “Floor’s feeling hot up there.”

“Last one,” Ash said. His tone didn’t rise. “Stack it.”

The Iraqi return fire came down again, but there was more hesitation in it now, more gaps as the men above tried to work out where the rounds were coming from, how many shooters were below. The basement was serving them poorly now; the same echo that had multiplied the Iraqis’ apparent number was doing the same trick for the SAS.

Ash shifted his weight, boots finding new purchase in the rubble.

He slid out from behind the pillar just enough to put his muzzle through the narrow gap between it and the bottom step. From here, he could see nothing but the underbelly of the stair structure and the jagged shadowed line where the landing overhung.

He didn’t need a clear target.

He needed to draw a line in the enemy’s mind: this is what happens when you show yourself.

He fired four rounds in quick succession, timing each squeeze between the echoes of the shots from above, so that his own fire cut across theirs rather than blending into the same rhythm. Each one smacked concrete or metal, showering the void under the landing with grit.

He stopped as abruptly as he’d started.

“Everyone hold,” he said into the net. “No one fire.”

For a moment, the only sound was the ringing in their own ears and the drip of something unseen in the darkness.

Then, predictably, the Iraqis sprayed again—another wild barrage, rushed and poorly aimed, chewing at walls and stair edges rather than at specific targets. They had lost the thread of where the danger actually was.

“Wait for it,” Ash murmured.

The volley stuttered, faltered as magazines ran low and fingers burnt out their nerves. Someone above shouted for more ammunition; the word *rasas* floated down, stretched thin by the stairwell. Another voice answered, nearer the corridor, not the landing. A weapon clacked on empty; a man cursed.

There. A tiny ragged hole in the seam of the firefight.

Ash counted in his head.

One.

Two.

The stairwell was suddenly quieter than it had been since the first shot—still tense, still awful, but not the continuous roar it had been. In that sliver of comparative silence, their own breathing sounded loud, the whisper of boots on grit like a shout.

“That’s it,” Ash said. “That’s our space. Kite, you and me up one step. Mantis, keep them honest. Mick, anchor bottom and watch for clever bastards trying to flank from the side.”

He could almost feel the relief and readiness coming back through the net—muscles unclenching just enough to move, focus narrowing from simply not dying to the next task.

They’d bought themselves two seconds. Not with heroics, not with some glorious charge, but with measured aggression and disciplined fire. Two seconds where the men above were reloading, shouting, thinking instead of shooting.

It wasn’t much.

In a concrete throat where every meter was a fight, it was everything.

“On me,” Ash said quietly, planting his boot on the first chipped step, ready to spend those seconds like the precious currency they were.

---

Rasha’s gaze dropped from Ivy’s face to his hands.

She took in the gloves first—black, snug, not the thin cotton or rubber the cleaners wore, but thick fabric reinforced over the knuckles. Then the cuffs disappearing into sleeves patterned in a way she hadn’t seen on the local police or soldiers. Her eyes moved along his forearms, over the webbing that crossed his chest, the pouches clipped to it, the radio wire running up toward his ear. The rifle in his right hand, held in that loose-but-ready way, barrel angled down but never relaxed.

Whatever words he had just used—*Muslim, sadiq*—were one thing. His kit was another.

Her eyes came back up, sharper now. She wasn’t looking at his face to see if he was kind. She was looking at him the way you looked at a stray dog near your door: is it hungry, is it sick, is it going to bite.

Soldier, her whole body concluded. No matter what his mouth said.

Ivy felt the moment land between them.

The little bit of ease he’d bought with “salaam” and that clumsy claim of kinship started to evaporate. He saw it in the way her shoulders tightened again, in the way her toes curled against the tile. The hand that had loosened on the spray bottle tightened again, plastic distressing under her grip.

Think.

He dragged his gaze off the rifle, off the jagged decision points—shoot, grab, gag, none of them acceptable—and reached instead for something he hadn’t touched in years.

His mother’s voice, late at night, drifting under a living-room door.

A story about a guest in the desert, about doors that stayed open and hands that never hit someone who came to them thirsty. He could not have recited the text if his life depended on it. He barely remembered if it was a hadith or his mother’s commentary on one. It had come to him as a child in a warm, cluttered flat in Birmingham, his parents arguing half in English, half in Urdu, and then falling quiet when some scholar on a satellite channel spoke about mercy being the measure of a believer.

He did not remember words.

He remembered shapes.

He took his left hand, the one still half-raised, and altered the gesture.

Instead of the straight-palm *wait*, he brought his fingertips together over his head, thumbs touching, and spread them in a rough triangle. A roof.

“Fi… fi bayt,” he said, the grammar certainly wrong. In the house.

He let the roof shape hover a second, then lowered it, spreading his hands outward, palms down, indicating the space around them, the annex, the corridor, maybe the whole estate if she was feeling generous.

Inside is under cover. That was the idea.

Rasha watched his hands with a frown, her eyes following the motion like she might follow a teacher’s chalk on a blackboard. Her chest rose and fell in quick, shallow breaths, but she didn’t try to bolt. Not yet.

Behind Ivy, Nails shifted his weight minutely, redistributing it along his heels. His rifle stayed trained on the far doorway, but his eyes cut sideways for a heartbeat, checking Rasha’s stance, then Ivy’s hands.

“What are you doing?” he hissed, not quite able to keep the bewilderment out of his voice.

“Working,” Ivy breathed back, without looking at him.

He brought his left hand down from the roof shape and curled it as if holding an invisible cup. With his right, he mimed pouring something into it—water, he hoped her brain would supply—then lifted it toward his mouth, taking an exaggerated, silent sip.

“Ma’,” he said. Water. At least he was sure of that one.

He lowered the imaginary cup, then pushed his hand out toward her in offering, fingers soft, palm up: here, for you.

Rasha’s eyes followed the invisible cup as if it were real.

Her throat bobbed once.

There was an old story, he remembered—half-remembered, really, a thing his mother had paraphrased, torn up and stitched into one of her lectures. About the Prophet insisting that a guest be fed even when there was barely enough for the family, about lamps dimmed and plates turned so the guest wouldn’t see others pretending to eat. About mercy and protection as basic obligations, not charity.

He couldn’t tell it the way it had been told to him. The words weren’t there anymore. But the heartbeat of it—the rhythm—was still somewhere in his bones.

He grasped at it.

“In… in our deen,” he began, and winced internally at how strange his own voice sounded. “Our… Islam.”

He tapped his chest again when he said it, reinforcing the claim he wasn’t sure he deserved.

Rasha frowned harder, but she stayed where she was, every line of her sceptical and listening.

“In Islam,” he continued, English leaking into the gaps whether he liked it or not, “if someone comes… to your door…”

He gestured with his empty hand, making a rectangle in the air to indicate a doorframe. Then he mimed someone small standing at it—his hand flat, then coming forward, then pausing at the edge of the invisible frame.

“Daif,” he said, grateful when the word surfaced. Guest. “When daif comes…”

He mimed opening the door: hand on an invisible knob, swing of his wrist. Then he drew the roof again, hands meeting overhead, smoothing down, as if laying a blanket of protection over an unseen figure.

“You must… ah…” He groped for the verb. “Tahmi.” Protect. “You must protect. Not… not hurt. Give… ma’.” He mimed offering the cup again.

His grammar was appalling, and he knew it. Conjugations were somewhere back in his parents’ house with the carpets and the tea set. But the outline of the thing was there: house, guest, protection, water.

He could feel Nails’ stare between his shoulder blades now.

“Since when d’you do Friday school?” Nails muttered, half awe, half disbelief.

“Since now,” Ivy whispered, teeth barely moving.

Rasha’s gaze moved between his hands and his mouth, trying to map the gestures to meaning. She caught *deen*, *Islam*, *daif*, *ma’*, *tahmi*—little islands in his sea of broken speech. The furrow between her brows eased a fraction.

She spoke again, slower.

It was still rapid Arabic, still wrapped in that Iraqi lilt, but the words came with more space around them, as if she were talking to a much younger cousin or a foreign uncle. He recognised *bayt* this time, and *ahli*—family—and something like *khatar*—danger. Her hand lifted, mirroring his roof shape clumsily, then jabbed down at the floor, then out toward the courtyard.

Inside safe. Outside danger.

Her eyes searched his face, demanding to know which side of that equation he occupied.

Ivy nodded, seizing on the connection like a drowning man on driftwood.

“Naam, naam,” he said quickly. “Bayt… huna… aman.” House here safe.

He swept his hand low along the corridor, indicating the annex, the walls around them, the very tiles under their feet. He then jabbed his thumb lightly toward the outer door—the route they had come, the world beyond.

“Baraa…” he said. Outside. The word scratched its way up out of some long-unused corner of his mind. “Baraa… khatar. Danger.”

To underline it, he lifted his rifle a fraction, not pointing it at her, but toward the outer world, suggesting that whatever he had brought this here to do, it was meant for something beyond her, not for her. He hoped she understood the distinction.

Rasha’s eyes flitted down to the weapon again, then back to his face. It was impossible to tell whether she believed him. But something in her shoulders loosened, just a notch.

Nails took a half-step back along the wall, re-angling his coverage so that he could both keep the far doorway under his sights and get a clearer look at Rasha’s feet. If she bolted, he’d see the weight shift before it happened.

“You’re telling her what?” he asked quietly. “That we’re, what, house spirits?”

“Guests protect guests,” Ivy murmured, half to him and half to Rasha. “Or… something like that.”

He turned back to her more fully, willing his body language to do what his words couldn’t. He brought both hands up again, fingers forming the roof shape over his own helmet. Then he separated them, one hand remaining bent over his head, the other floating forward, the shelter extending until it hovered over where she stood.

“Anā…” he tapped his chest. “Tahmi.” Protect. Then, after a heartbeat, “Anti… daif.” You (female) are guest.

He winced internally at the clumsiness, but he pushed the thought aside. This wasn’t an exam. It was a negotiation with a scared child and the unforgiving calculus of a covert operation.

Rasha’s lips parted slightly.

Something like indignation sparked in her eyes, flaring up alongside the fear. She said his name again—Imran, the way she’d decided to say it—and then loosed another short volley of Arabic that sounded, by tone alone, like *I live here, you idiot, this is my house, not yours.*

She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the room behind her, then toward the ceiling, then jabbed it toward his chest with an annoyed flick.

She was saying, without needing him to understand the words: *You are the guest. I am the one who belongs.*

Ivy almost laughed. The sound came out as a tiny huff through his nose.

“Yeah,” he conceded softly in English. “Fair point.”

He nodded, more emphatic this time.

“Anti bayt,” he said, stumbling but committed. “You… house. Ana…” he lifted his hands, palms open in front of his chest, fingers slightly curled, the universal gesture of I come in peace and with empty hands—even if one of those hands still held a gun. “Daif. Guest.”

He tapped his chest again. “Daif. Sadiq.” Guest. Friend.

A muscle in Rasha’s jaw twitched.

She was still afraid. It sat in the tightness around her eyes, the way her toes stayed ready for flight, the small tremor in the hand that held the spray bottle. But the fear was now braided with something else: a grudging engagement, the way you might be irritated with a stranger who had just knocked your world off its axis and then had the nerve to use your own language badly in an attempt to fix it.

She glanced past him, toward Nails, then back at Ivy.

“Huwwa…” she said, tipping her chin at Nails, voice dipping in distrust. He caught the masculine pronoun clearly enough. “Huwwa… Muslim?”

Nails made a face that nobody could see beneath his scrim and goggles. “What’s she say?”

“She wants to know if you’re in the club,” Ivy said tightly.

Nails huffed. “Tell her I’m the choirboy.”

Ivy didn’t translate that.

Instead, he angled his body a fraction so that Rasha could see both of them at once.

“Huwwa…” he began, gesturing toward Nails with his free hand, then hesitated. The easy lie would have been to nod, to drag his mate under the same false roof.

He couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

He settled on something softer.

“Huwwa… sadiq,” he said. He made the friend gesture again, drawing an invisible line from his chest to Nails and back. “Sadiq ana. Sadiq anti.”

Nails, catching enough of the rhythm, gave Rasha a short, almost sheepish half-salute with the hand not on his rifle.

“Salaam,” he repeated, a fraction less mangled this time.

Rasha stared at them both, measuring.

The air felt thick, as if the annex itself were holding its breath. Somewhere behind her, a tap dripped into a bucket with slow, regular plunks. Further away, in the main house, a door banged and a man shouted something, the words indistinct.

Nails’ fingers twitched on his weapon. His eyes scanned the sliver of corridor behind Rasha’s shoulder, hunting for any sign that her voice might bring company.

But she was not raising it.

She glanced once more at Ivy’s hands, watching as he brought them together again, making that roof shape, then lowering them slowly, deliberately, until his palms hovered at chest height, as if he were smoothing the air itself.

“Rahma,” he said quietly, the word rough on his tongue. Mercy.

It was a big word to hang in such a small space.

He didn’t elaborate. He couldn’t. He didn’t trust himself not to turn it into something unrecognisable. He just left it there, in the air between them, a single clear note amongst the static.

Rasha’s brows drew together, knitting in a new pattern.

She murmured something—too soft for him to catch properly—that sounded like a fragment of a saying, something about mercy and strength. It might have been her own thought, might have been an echo of something an imam had said at the mosque, might have been nothing at all. But the tone of it lacked the sharp edges of her earlier questions.

Her grip on the spray bottle loosened again.

Slowly, almost grudgingly, she released it. The plastic clunked against the tile this time, rolling a little before coming to rest against the dropped rag.

For the first time since they’d come through the door, her hands were empty.

She held them in front of her, fingers hovering uncertainly in the air, as if she were trying to decide what shape her own story would take in this moment: fists, claws, or something more open.

Nails let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. The corner of his mouth lifted behind the veil. “Didn’t know you had a sermon in you, Ivy.”

Ivy didn’t take his eyes off Rasha.

“Me neither,” he said, voice low. “Let’s hope it sticks.”

---

Kite moved on Ash’s breath.

“Now,” the captain said, and the younger man was off the first step like a released spring, body low, rifle welded to his shoulder.

He skimmed along the inside edge of the stairwell, keeping as close to the wall as physics and his kit allowed. The chipped concrete rasped against his sleeve; grit rolled under his boots. For a moment his world narrowed to three things: the next patch of cover, the angle of his muzzle, and the knowledge that somewhere just above, a man with an AK was trying to guess where his head would be.

He didn’t sprint. This wasn’t a film. Speed without thought was suicide in a space like this. He moved in a series of sharp, controlled surges—half a step, pause, another half—his weight always ready to drop flat at the first crack of a too-close round.

Mantis shifted in concert.

From her slot behind the pipes, she slid a little further around the cluster, rifle tracking the upper third of the stairwell. As Kite advanced, her angle changed; what had been a frontal shot line became a diagonal cut that could punish anyone leaning too far over the banister to take a potshot.

“Got your top,” she said quietly into the net. “If you see boots, I see knees.”

“Copy,” Kite grunted, not breaking his focus.

Mick peeled off the pillar a heartbeat after Kite, keeping close enough that a single stretch of arm could close the gap between them.

His boots found the same footholds Kite’s had just tested. That was one advantage of going second—you knew the floor would hold. But it also meant you were stepping into the wake of someone else’s luck. If Kite went down, Mick needed to be close enough to drag him back behind the nearest bit of concrete without exposing himself to the full appetite of the stair throat.

He kept his rifle angled high enough to cover the second band of stairwell—where a second shooter might be hanging back—while trusting Kite to handle the immediate mouth.

Ash came last out of their little quartet, but not in the sense of lagging.

He was just far enough back to see the whole picture: Kite’s low silhouette hugging the wall, Mick’s bulk filling the centre line, Mantis a dark notch behind the pipes, the stark geometry of the steps and banister and overhead pipes turning the space into a diagram in his head.

He moved in their wake, two fingers flicking out in small, decisive gestures: slow, stop, up, down, shift left.

His eyes were everywhere—up the stairwell for flashes, across to Mantis to check her line, back down to the uneven floor whenever the angle changed. He could feel the grit still grinding in his left eye, tears filming his vision, but he had trained for worse. His right eye did the aiming; his left handled peripheral blur.

Above them, the stairwell was a throat coughing fire.

Muzzles flared at the top landing, white-hot bursts in the NVG green. The Iraqis had gone from wild spray to something approaching rhythm—shorter, sharper bursts, someone up there barking orders in Arabic, trying to impose a little discipline on the fear.

“Yalla, yalla—tahht! Tahht!” Down, down.

The words slashed down the concrete funnel, stretched and distorted by the echo. Another voice shouted something about *rasas*—ammo—and someone else snapped back a reply that sounded more like a curse than a report.

Rounds still came, whipping down to chip steps and walls, but there were micro-gaps now, tiny inhalations where the shooters above were listening for the sound of their own success.

Kite gave them nothing.

He hugged the inner curve, slid past a step that had a broad chunk missing from its edge, and used the jagged bite as a mini-sump for his boot. His lungs burned from the restrained pace; every instinct he’d picked up as a young lad wanted to sprint and get it over with.

He ignored them.

“Two more to the first landing,” he whispered, the words barely more than breath.

“Hold your shape,” Ash replied. “Mantis, punish any head that pops. Mick, if he goes down, you go up.”

“That’s reassuring,” Mick muttered. But his tone held a grim humour. He knew his job.

The stairwell felt alive now.

The noise poured down in hot waves. Each shot that struck concrete or metal sent vibrations through the structure and into their bones. The smell of burnt powder thickened the air, mixing with dust and the cold damp of the basement. Overhead, the pipes creaked in sympathy.

Ash felt the space as a living thing: the stairwell’s throat narrowing, the landing above like a clenched jaw waiting to bite.

“Cover,” he said, and the team moved again.

Kite slid up another step, keeping his shoulders below the line where a bullet coming straight down the centre would travel. The banister above him shook as rounds hammered into it, paint and splinters flying. One pellet of concrete slapped his cheek, hot and sharp, but he didn’t flinch; he just recorded the sting and filed it away for later.

Mantis saw a flash of movement—a head, just a fraction too bold above the landing lip, eyes wide in the NVG glow. She didn’t hesitate.

Three quick shots, walking up toward where the head had been.

The silhouette jerked backward, vanished. A scream knifed down from somewhere off to the side, high and shocked. It cut off as someone barked another order.

“Got one’s courage,” she said flatly.

“Nice,” Mick breathed.

He stepped up into the gap their fire had bought, keeping his body between Kite and the bulk of the stairwell, his own rifle angled half a step higher. If anyone up there decided to roll a shot along the wall, it’d hit his plates, not Kite’s head.

Ash moved when they did, staying just shy of the first step, then climbing onto it when they cleared enough of an angle. He was the distance piece, the one preserving the overall shape while the others filled in detail.

“Keep moving,” he said. “Don’t give them a steady target.”

They were close enough now that he could hear more than just the words from above.

He heard breathing—ragged, strained. The skitter of a boot slipping slightly on dust. Metal clanking as someone reloaded in a hurry. A man coughing, hard, trying to clear the dust from his throat. The faint click of someone else’s safety being flipped off or on.

The beast’s throat growled.

A burst of rounds stitched the wall by Kite’s shoulder, each impact a sting of concrete dust. He ducked, dropped almost to a crawl. One boot skated on a patch of loose rubble; his knee hit the edge of a step and pain flared up his thigh.

Mick’s hand clamped onto the back of his rig instantly, hauling him sideways against the vertical face of the stairs, dragging him out of the line of most of the ricochets.

“Got you,” Mick grunted.

“I’m good,” Kite hissed back, even as he blinked hard against the dust in his eyes. He shoved Mick’s hand off and re-established his own balance, resentment and gratitude neatly spliced together.

“Keep eyes up, Keene,” Ash said, not unkindly. “Floor will kill you slow, they’ll kill you fast.”

“Copy,” Kite muttered.

They reached the last step before the landing.

From here, the world compressed further. The underside of the landing overhung them like a low ceiling, forcing them to crouch even more. To go any higher, they would have to commit—rising into a slice of space where, for a heartbeat, their heads and shoulders would be fully exposed to whatever waited at the top.

The voices above were closer now, less echo, more raw sound. Someone was shouting “ikhaf! ikhaf!”—be careful—but the tone was already frantic. Another man snapped something hoarse in reply, voice breaking.

Mantis shifted again, wriggling around her pipe cover to catch a new angle on the landing. From here, she could see the far edge of it—a strip of floor, the base of a wall, the bottom of a door frame leading deeper into the station. A flicker of shadow moved across that strip—someone darting past, out of her line of fire.

“At least three still mobile,” she reported. “One limping. Heard something metal go over. They’re not loving us.”

“Feeling’s mutual,” Mick said.

Ash considered the geometry.

Staying here—one step below the landing—was marginally safer than topping it, but only marginally. They were still in the throat, still subject to any panicked volley from above. And they weren’t getting any closer to the objective. The longer they waited, the more likely someone else in the building heard the firefight and decided to come investigate from another route.

“In for a penny,” he muttered.

He touched Mick’s shoulder, then tapped two fingers toward the landing in a quick, decisive gesture: up-left for Kite, up-right for Mick. He held the same two fingers horizontal, then rotated them, indicating the arc of fire he wanted covered. Then he tucked them in and pointed at his own eyes, then at the corridor beyond the landing—he’d take whatever came after.

Kite saw it, understood, and nodded once, sharp.

Mick rolled his shoulders, loosening the tension.

“Mantis,” Ash said quietly. “Give us a two-count of heavies up top, then go cold. Kite, you burst on her second. Mick on his. I’m last man out of the hole.”

“Roger,” Mantis said. She took a breath, settled herself, and let her world shrink to the few inches of grenade-coloured concrete she could see at the edge of the landing.

“Ready,” Kite whispered.

“Always,” Mick replied.

The stairwell’s roar dipped again as the men above hesitated, caught between the fear they’d already tasted and the orders they were probably still being shouted at them.

Ash heard the gap and took it.

“Mantis,” he said. “Now.”

She popped her barrel an inch further around the pipes and fired, not at a specific target but across the top edge of the landing, a staccato four-round burst that walked from left to right. It was loud, harsh, the shots cracking and ricocheting, chewing up the lip of the floor. Cement dust billowed upward.

Before the echoes finished bouncing, she dropped back into her cover.

“One,” Ash said.

Kite moved.

He surged up the last step, knees bent, body low but committed. In that instant, his head and shoulders broke the line of the landing, NVG lenses catching the chaos above: a cramped square of floor, a scuffed skirting board, a toppled chair, an Iraqi policeman pressed flat against the far wall, weapon clutched to his chest, eyes screwed shut against the shards falling from Mantis’s last burst.

Kite didn’t give him a chance to open them.

He pivoted left, as per the plan, muzzle snapping to the man’s mid-section. Two rounds, controlled, stitched across the centre mass. The man jerked, folded, weapon slipping from his fingers.

“Contact down,” Kite spat.

“Two,” Ash said, almost on top of it.

Mick was already moving.

He took the last step in one big stride, throwing his weight into a short, brutal lunge right. His rifle came up, tracking for movement. Another Iraqi—this one in military fatigues rather than the brown of the police—was half-crouched near the banister, trying to shove a fresh magazine into his AK. The man’s eyes were wide, mouth open on some unfinished shout.

Mick put a single round into his chest, then another into his upper shoulder as the body twisted.

The rifle clanged against the banister and bounced once, then fell back onto the landing.

“Two down,” Mick said. “Landing not clear—hearing movement deeper.”

Ash was already seconding their ascent.

He took the steps in a tight, controlled rush, boots hitting each tread with just enough force to lift him without sending him sprawling on the slick dust. His rifle was up as he came level with the landing, muzzle swinging to cover the doorway into the corridor beyond—the true mouth of the beast.

He didn’t fully step onto the landing. He planted one foot on it, kept the other on the uppermost stair, using the difference in height to bleed a little of his profile out of any straight line of fire.

The corridor beyond was a narrow, harsh-lit channel—fluorescent strip on the ceiling flickering, walls stained and pocked. A blurry shape at the far end was retreating around a corner, boots slapping tile. Another shadow loomed halfway down, poised behind a doorway, rifle poking out.

“Still got at least one in the corridor,” Ash said. “Corner right. Mantis, can you reach?”

“Negative,” she replied. “No angle. I’m blind past the lip.”

Kite shifted, stepping fully onto the landing now, putting his back into the wall to the left of the stair mouth. Mick mirrored him on the right, crouched low, rifle trained on the immediate floor space in front of them.

The stairwell behind them still felt like a throat, but the physics had shifted.

Down there, in the basement’s mouth, they’d been the ones at the bottom of the funnel. Now, at the landing, they were at least on a ledge in that throat—a small, precarious one, but with more options. They could move sideways, not just up or down. They could see into the corridor. They could choose to push further in, or—if everything truly went to hell—reverse into the stairwell with less of their bodies exposed.

They were still in the trap.

But now the trap had a direction, and that direction was forward, into the corridor where their objective—and whatever waited to stop them—lay.

Ash felt that shift in his bones.

He sipped air, blinked the last of the grit from his bad eye, and tightened his grip on the rifle.

“Right,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “We’ve got our foothold. Let’s go take the rest of the throat.”

---

Rasha’s breathing slowed.

Not much—she was still a child in a corridor with two armed strangers—but enough that the quick, rabbit-fast flutter at her throat eased into something more measured. The fierce furrow between her brows softened a notch. The story Ivy had fumbled into existence hung in the air between them like a thin curtain: crooked, threadbare, but better than staring straight into the naked face of fear.

She was not calm because she believed him.

He could see that in the way her toes still curled against the tile, ready to spring, and in the set of her jaw. Whatever trust she had was provisional, conditional, granted not to his words but to the fact that they were, so far, just standing there talking instead of doing anything worse.

But the story gave her something else to think about: doors, cups of water, hosts and guests and the rules that ought to be there even when the world had clearly forgotten most of them.

She spoke again.

The words came in a shorter line this time, not the flooding rush of earlier; a question pared down to its bones. *Ana…*—I—*wa ahli…*—and my family—something about *huna*—here—and then a sharper phrase with a rising pitch, a child’s blunt interrogative.

Or maybe it wasn’t about her family at all. Maybe it was simpler, more direct, a question that cut straight through religion and stories and uniforms.

Are you here to hurt us?

Ivy heard almost none of it at the level of vocabulary. What he caught was the way her voice sat between wariness and demand, the tiny quiver of vulnerability buried in the last syllable. An answer was required, and it wasn’t the kind you could dodge with grammar.

He inhaled slowly, feeling the weight of what he did not know press in on him.

If he said too much, stumbled over words he didn’t understand, it could spook her into doing something unpredictable. If he said nothing, the silence itself might be its own answer.

So he did the only thing he could: he reached for the smallest possible promise he could make without choking on it.

“La,” he said, shaking his head once, firmly. “La… la ḍarar.” No harm.

The second word was a guess, dragged from a half-remembered prayer or sermon. It felt right enough in his mouth, even if the pronunciation wasn’t perfect.

He pointed two fingers gently at his own chest, then rotated his hand out toward her, palm up, as if offering the words between them.

“La ḍarar,” he repeated. “No harm.”

Her eyes narrowed, weighing the claim.

“Āmina,” he added, letting the tip of his tongue touch his teeth on the middle consonant. Safe. He hoped. It was another word from childhood, a word his mother had used when she’d checked twice that the front door was locked at night: *al-bayt āmin.*

He gestured lightly at the floor between them. “Anti huna… āmina.” You here safe.

It didn’t sound like poetry. It sounded like someone assembling a sentence from pieces scavenged off a dusty shelf. But he let his voice sit low and even, no wobble, no haste.

Behind him, Nails’ stance eased by a fraction, though the barrel of his rifle stayed rock-steady on the far doorway.

“She buying it?” Nails breathed.

“She’s… hearing it,” Ivy murmured. “That’s something.”

He could see the hesitation in her now, the internal weighing of risk. Her gaze flicked to the annex doorway behind him, toward the main house; then back to his hands, then his face. The idea of safety was tempting—of course it was—but she had lived under an occupation long enough to know that safety was often a trap with a polite voice.

He needed something more tangible than mangled words.

He slid his right hand—slowly, deliberately—down the front of his rig, feeling for the familiar outline of a small plastic bottle clipped into a side pouch.

“Hands,” Nails murmured, warning instinctively as soon as he saw the movement.

“Water,” Ivy said back, just as quietly.

He kept his eyes on Rasha as he worked the bottle free. His rifle stayed in his right hand, tucked under his arm, muzzle still angled toward the floor. He used the fingers of his left to ease the bottle out of the pouch and bring it up where she could see it, open palm wrapped loosely around the clear plastic.

Her gaze snapped to it.

It was nothing special—just a squat, unlabeled bottle with a white cap and faint condensation on the inside walls. But in a city where the taps were temperamental at best and everyone knew the generators could fail at any time, water meant more than refreshment. It was life, stability, the things adults worried about in low, hushed voices.

He made sure she could see it was sealed. Then, very slowly, he brought his thumb and forefinger up to the cap.

The plastic ridges were rough under his glove. He turned it in tiny increments, careful to keep the movement controlled. He stopped just before the tamper ring would give with a little *crack*.

Then he pinched the cap between finger and thumb and twisted that last fraction of a turn with as much control as he could muster.

The tamper ring parted with only the faintest crinkle of overstressed plastic. No sharp snap, nothing loud enough to echo up the corridor.

Tiny detail. Big intent. Keep the world quiet.

He unscrewed the cap the rest of the way in three smooth motions, and the faint smell of clean, stored water rose, cutting through the annex’s blend of detergent and old pipe.

Rasha watched every millimetre of it.

Her throat moved again, a small convulsive swallow, like her body responding before her mind made its decision.

Ivy set the cap lightly on his palm, then tipped the bottle in a way that showed her the mouth: clear, empty, no trick. He took half a step forward, staying low, keeping his shoulders relaxed.

He paused when he was still a good meter and a half away from her—close enough to extend his arm fully, far enough that she had room to move without feeling cornered. Then he brought his hands together, cradling the base of the bottle in his right, supporting it with the fingers of his left, and extended it toward her.

His fingers were steady. It surprised him.

“Ma’,” he said again quietly. Water. “Laki.” For you.

He didn’t push it at her. He let the bottle hang in the air between them like another question, his arms the bridge she could choose to cross or not.

For a beat, she didn’t move.

Her eyes bounced from the bottle to his face, then flicked past his shoulder to Nails, registering the second man’s posture, the way his weight sat evenly on both feet, the angle of his weapon. Her gaze didn’t linger, but it noted.

She was not just watching their hands.

She was watching their eyes.

It was an instinct older than language: measure the hunter by his gaze. See if he is looking at you as a problem, a prize, or a person.

Ivy kept his own eyes steady, not fixed in an unblinking stare—that could read as menace—but calm, alive. He let a fraction of his own fear show—enough to mark him as human, not enough to shake his voice.

“It’s all right,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t understand the words but trusting tone to carry again. “Mā fi mushkila. No problem.”

He tilted the bottle a little, making the water inside slosh lightly against the plastic. The tiny sound seemed loud in the quiet corridor.

Rasha’s shoulders lifted on a breath. Her small feet shifted, toes uncurling, heels grounding more firmly.

Slowly, as if testing whether the air itself might bite, she extended her hand.

Her fingers were slim, nails uneven and ragged. There was a faint ring of darker skin around her wrist where a bracelet had been worn tight and then removed. She reached out, hesitated a centimetre from the bottle, and then closed her hand around the ridged plastic.

Her palm brushed his gloved knuckles for a heartbeat. Her skin was warm.

Ivy resisted the urge to flinch away. He kept still while she anchored her grip, then gently let go, transferring the weight of the bottle entirely into her hands.

She drew it back to herself immediately, retreating that same half step, bringing the bottle in against her chest like something that might be stolen.

She didn’t drink at once.

She held it, considering, eyes tracking from the mouth of the bottle back up to Ivy’s face. Her gaze dipped briefly to Nails—despite himself, he straightened his back under that quick appraisal—then returned to Ivy.

Whatever she was thinking, it moved behind her eyes clearly enough: water didn’t mean innocence; men had been kind before and then cruel in the same breath. But a man who gave you something without grabbing your wrist or raising his voice was, for the moment, a better option than the ones who only knew how to take.

She lifted the bottle, sniffed once at the open top, then brought it to her lips. The first sip was tiny, barely wetting her mouth, a test. The second was larger, the hollow of her throat moving as she swallowed. A droplet of water escaped at the corner of her mouth and traced a thin, bright line along her chin before falling onto the front of her dress.

She lowered the bottle again, still cradling it in both hands.

“Shukran,” she said, almost under her breath.

The word floated between them like a shy truce.

Ivy felt something unclench in his chest.

He dipped his head in acknowledgement, the only response he could think of that didn’t risk mangling another phrase.

“Afwan,” he managed anyway, quietly. You’re welcome.

Behind him, Nails exhaled, the sound ghosting through the net and the air at the same time.

“Okay,” Nails murmured. “She’s drinking your water instead of screaming the station down. I’ll take that as a win.”

Rasha’s eyes flicked to him once more at the sound of his voice, then back to Ivy. The hand that held the bottle tightened slightly, but her shoulders did not climb back up around her ears.

For now, the bottle was something to hold that wasn’t fear. A small, solid weight, cool against her palm, anchoring her in a moment where everything else was slipping.

And Ivy, watching her, realised that in a building full of men with guns and radios and plans, the quietest, most fragile piece of their operation might be the fact that one frightened girl was, for the time being, choosing to stand still and drink rather than run and shout.

---

For a few heartbeats, the stairwell held its breath.

The last of the wild fire from above fizzled out in a half-hearted string down the wall, then stopped. The echoes rolled away into the concrete belly of the building, leaving behind only the tick of settling dust and the harsh rasp of their own breathing in their ears.

Kite pressed his back against the landing wall, feeling his pulse hammer through his plates. Mick was a solid weight on the opposite side of the stair mouth, crouched low, rifle trained into the corridor. Ash held the middle, half on the top step, half on the landing, muzzle covering everything the other two couldn’t see. Behind and below, Mantis hunched in her pipe nest, the stair throat yawning dark between them.

“Lull,” Mick murmured. “They’re thinking.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re smart,” Kite said quietly.

The building itself seemed to be listening.

Then the footsteps started.

Not on the stairs in front of them. Overhead.

Thudding, hurried impacts on a different run of flooring—heavier than the light, scuffing traffic of clerks. Boots. Several pairs, moving fast. The sound came from slightly off to their right, not directly above the stairwell but close enough that it vibrated faintly through the handrail under Kite’s fingers.

“Movement above,” Mantis said at once. “Not on our stairs. Different line.”

She didn’t need to understand the snatches of Arabic that filtered down with the noise. She could hear intent in the tempo alone: the compressed, breathless staccato of men who’d realised the fight was not going their way and were rushing to fix it.

“Flank,” Ash said, already mapping the geometry in his head. “There’s another stair or a hatch that feeds in near here. They’re trying to get an angle.”

“Can they drop in behind us?” Mick asked.

“Not if we don’t let them,” Ash replied.

Mantis shifted.

She peeled herself away from the pipes in one smooth, low slide, boots whispering on the gritty concrete. Her rifle stayed tucked into her shoulder, muzzle always within a corridor of potential targets. She flowed across the base of the stairwell, keeping low enough that if someone above leaned over they’d see only darkness and the dull sheen of pipes.

The stair structure was not a neat, enclosed box. It had gaps—triangular spaces where one flight didn’t quite meet the wall, metal braces that left sightlines between levels, a section where a maintenance man had once cut a section away to run an extra drain. Those architectural sins were her opportunity now.

She tucked herself into the shadow under the turn of the second flight, where the stairs kinked and left a narrow, upward-looking wedge between two concrete slabs. From here, she could see a sliver of the upper floor—just enough.

“Kite, Mick, hold that landing,” Ash said. “If they come straight, you own the corridor. Mantis, tell me what you’ve got.”

“Working on it,” she breathed.

The footsteps overhead grew louder. They were right above her now, crossing some kind of metal grating or thin concrete. Each footfall sent a faint tremor through the structure. Voices, low and urgent, bled through—a man barking something about *thani darajah* (second stairs), another saying *min wara* (from behind).

She angled her rifle up, careful not to clack the barrel against the underside of the stairs. Through the narrow wedge of space, framed by two slabs of grey, she saw them.

Boots first: scuffed black leather, laces loose. Trousers in army green and police brown. Shins flickering past as two, three, four men hustled across her tiny slice of sky. They were cutting behind the stair core, heading for a secondary descent point—a service stair or hatch that would spit them out somewhere level with the landing or even below it.

“Four at least,” she whispered. “Moving to our rear. They’re going for another stair.”

“Can they see you?” Ash asked.

“Not unless they belly-crawl and poke their eyes through concrete,” she said. “They’re above and back.”

“Then make them regret it,” Mick muttered.

Mantis waited.

She tracked the rhythm of the footsteps—how far each stride carried, the time between impacts, the slight drag in one man’s pace that marked him as wounded or simply slower. She waited until that dragging step was in the middle of her tiny window.

Then she squeezed.

Short bursts. Two, then a fractional pause, then two more. The shots cracked upward, harsh and bright in the confined space. Sparks spat from the underside of a steel crossbeam; a fragment of concrete flaked off and spun away. One of the boots jerked sideways mid-stride, the leg attached to it collapsing as if the rest of the body had been yanked backward.

A scream tore down, high and sudden. It cut off almost at once, swallowed by a barked order and the abrupt scuff of bodies hitting the deck above.

“Got one,” Mantis said. “The others are hugging the floor. They didn’t like that.”

The footsteps stopped. Instead, she heard the harsher scrape of cloth on concrete as someone crawled, the clatter of a weapon being dragged rather than carried.

“Now they know we can see them,” she added. “They’ll be cautious.”

“Good,” Ash said. “Cautious is slow. Slow is our friend.”

Kite flicked a glance upward, as if he could somehow see through the slab between levels. The idea of men directly above them, trying to work out a way down into their backs, made the skin between his shoulder blades itch.

“Can’t sit here forever,” he muttered.

“No, we can’t,” Ash agreed.

He was doing his own mental arithmetic. Every extra minute they spent in this concrete throat was another minute for someone topside to notice that the basement radio wasn’t answering, that a phone wasn’t being picked up, that the patrol schedule had a sudden, unexplained gap. Every minute increased the chance of a bored station chief deciding to walk downstairs in person, or of someone throwing the wrong question up the chain and landing it on the desk of a man who knew how to smell an anomaly.

Their presence here wasn’t just a tactical incursion; it was parasitic on a larger deception. Elsewhere, ships were hugging coastlines, broadcasts were being crafted, puppet governors were being forced to play their parts. If the police station’s internal drama suddenly spilled into the streets—sirens, panicked calls, uniformed men racing through the neighbourhood with stories about ghosts in the basement—it could warp the narrative their side was working so hard to control.

The operation’s integrity depended on this fight being an invisible one.

That meant it had to be fast.

“Ash,” Mick said quietly, as if reading his thoughts. “We drag this out, we’re screwed. Every second is them turning their heads to the wrong bit of the map.”

“I know,” Ash replied. “We’re not here to win a siege.”

He glanced back down the stairwell, toward Mantis’ position.

“How’s our top?” he asked her.

“Spooked,” she said. “They’re not stomping around anymore. Crawling, swearing, one of them’s doing that loud whisper thing. They still want to come down, they just don’t know where your bullets are.”

Ash considered the risks.

If they stayed put, they’d get boxed—pressure from the corridor in front, pressure from the flank stair behind once the Iraqis worked out a path. If they pushed now, hard, they could potentially hit the corridor fight before the flanking group got organised, keeping the initiative.

“We push,” he said finally. “We take the next set of stairs, get out of this bowl. Mantis, you’re our lid—if they commit on that flank route, punish them. Kite, you’re point. Mick, you’re on his shoulder. We move like we’re late for a flight.”

Kite huffed softly. “Let’s get our boarding passes, then.”

Ash checked his own position, shifting his boots into the best launch stance he could manage on the gritty, uneven step. The stairwell they’d been fighting over was only the first climb—from basement to this intermediate landing. Another flight rose ahead, narrower, the concrete softer at the edges from heavier use. At the top of that flight, a thick metal fire door sat in its frame, paint flaking, a faint sliver of lighter air visible in the gap at the bottom.

Light.

Not sunlight, not yet—just the harsher, whiter wash of the building’s ground-floor strip lights. But it meant open corridors, not concrete caves. More angles, more options. And, crucially, somewhere they might actually reach their objective.

“Okay,” Ash said. “On my count, Kite goes. Mantis, give us a two-count of noise on those overhead lads to keep them flat. Mick, you’re welded to Kite’s pack. I’m last again.”

“Copy,” Mantis said. She shifted her barrel a few centimetres, sighting on a patch of overhead concrete that she knew led to nowhere in particular but would sound loud as hell to the men lying belly-down on it.

Ash held up a hand, fingers spread.

“Three,” he said softly.

He folded one finger.

“Two.”

Mantis inhaled, feeling the stock settle against her shoulder, her cheek bone finding its familiar rest.

“One.”

“Go,” he said.

Mantis fired first.

She sent a precise, angry hammering of rounds up into the overhead slab, the bullets chewing into concrete and steel. Dust and grit rained down on the men above, and the noise, in that confined space, was savage. If you were lying up there with your face pressed to the floor, it would sound as though the whole ceiling was about to come down.

A man yelped, swore, scrambled. Someone else shouted what sounded like “Down, down!” with a lot more urgency than before.

Kite was already moving.

He exploded off the landing and onto the next flight, boots hitting the first step and driving him upward. This time he let himself go faster—still not a blind rush, but speed tilted further toward boldness than caution. The gap Mantis had bought them wouldn’t last long.

He took the stairs in low, bounding strides, three at a time when the footing allowed it, two when the concrete looked treacherous. His rifle tracked the top of the stairs, muzzle hovering just below the door threshold. He was half-expecting someone to swing that metal door open from above and stand there silhouetted, spraying down.

“Nothing on the door,” he grunted. “Yet.”

Mick came behind him, one hand ghosting over the back of Kite’s rig—not gripping, not yet, but close enough that if the younger man hit something slick or a round caught his leg, Mick could haul him upright or drag him sideways before gravity and bullets decided who owned him.

“Watch your feet,” Mick said. “Step twelve’s missing a chunk.”

“Why? You save it a Christmas card?” Kite muttered, but he adjusted his stride.

Ash followed, the stairwell tightening around them. The further up they went, the more oppressive the geometry became; the walls seemed to lean in, and the overhead dropped until his helmet almost brushed the underside of the next landing. The air turned warmer, the faint smell of sweat and cheap cologne trickling down from the levels above.

Mantis stayed put in her gap, muzzle angled up, ears filtering for any sign that the flanking group had shaken off its shock. She heard someone moving cautiously, slower now, dragging something metallic. She fired another two-round burst, not aiming at the sound so much as the mindset—reminding them that the space above their heads was unfriendly.

“They’re still staying low,” she reported. “No one’s committing to stairs yet.”

“Keep them honest,” Ash said. “We’re nearly at the top.”

The rectangle of light at the gap under the upper door grew as they climbed. Dust motes shimmered in it, floating like slow snow. The heavy metal slab that separated them from the ground-floor corridor was closed, but it wasn’t latched—the faint line of brightness along its vertical edge told Ash the latch bolt wasn’t fully engaged.

“Door’s not seated,” Kite whispered when he saw it. “Easy push.”

“Hold,” Ash said.

He reached the last step and put a hand on Kite’s rig, anchoring him in place. They were pressed into the return angle of the stair—half concealed by the wall, half exposed to whatever might be beyond the door.

They listened.

On the other side: muffled noise. Boots, again, but these were different from the frantic pounding overhead—more regular footfalls, someone pacing, standing, shifting weight. A chair creaked. A radio crackled briefly. A voice spoke in Arabic, bored, complaining about something trivial—the coffee, or the shift, or the heat.

Normal life. For now.

“Two, maybe three close to the door,” Ash murmured. “We breach clean, they won’t know which way to look.”

Kite nodded, muscles taut.

Mick shifted behind them, bringing his rifle up into a tighter ready. His elbow brushed the rough concrete of the wall, leaving a thin scrape in the dust.

“Ash,” Mantis said suddenly, voice sharper. “Overhead’s adjusting. They’re moving back. I think they’re going to look for another way round—maybe a hatch further along. You’ve got maybe thirty seconds before they try something clever again.”

“Understood,” Ash replied. He could feel the clock grinding in his bones now.

They could not afford a prolonged firefight in this stairwell or the corridor beyond. The longer it went on, the more it risked spilling into shouting on the radio nets, into panicked calls to other stations, into a blot of noise on a wider map where certain people needed everything to stay deceptively quiet. The whole reason they were here—in this particular, miserable, stinking concrete throat—was to take one knot of resistance out of the equation so that other, bigger lies could stand unharmed.

That meant the corridor ahead couldn’t become a drawn-out brawl.

He leaned in close to Kite’s ear.

“We go in hard,” he said. “In, clear, through. We don’t get stuck in the doorway. You see a weapon, you drop it. You see hands up, you scream at them later. We need this done.”

“Roger,” Kite whispered. His throat was dry. He swallowed it down.

“Mick?”

“Right with you,” Mick said. “You point, I bite.”

Ash checked his grip on his rifle, then took one last look down the stairs to where Mantis’ muzzle was a sliver of black against grey.

“Two more bursts, then you’re up behind us,” he told her. “We’ll need your eyes in the corridor.”

“On it,” she said. “Make them regret getting out of bed.”

She sent another precise burst up into the overhead, purely for psychological effect now. The ceiling shuddered; someone above shouted something that translated easily even without language—“Enough!”—but they stayed prone, pinned by the invisible threat.

That was the space he needed.

Ash nodded once to himself, drew in a breath, and set his hand against the cool steel of the upper door, feeling the slight give where the latch hadn’t caught.

“Ready,” he said. “We’re climbing toward light, lads. Let’s not die in the dark.”

He pushed.

---

The sound came in thin at first, like a vibration under the tile.

Rasha heard it before either of them did. Her shoulders went rigid, the bottle of water tightening under her fingers until the plastic crinkled. Her head tipped slightly, as if her ears were reaching for the world beyond the annex walls.

Then Ivy caught it too.

A car engine, not close, not far—somewhere out on the street that ran past the estate. The note was rough, slightly out of tune, the way older engines always were in cities like this: something between a police truck and a battered civilian sedan. It rose as it approached, then held, lingering at a pitch that suggested the vehicle had slowed outside.

Nails shifted his weight just enough that his kit creaked.

Rasha’s eyes jumped to the far wall where a small, high window sat half-obscured by a thin curtain. Dusty light slanted in along its edge, drawing a pale rectangle on the opposite wall. Outside, the engine idled, the sound thickening, then dropping as someone blipped the throttle or let it rumble in neutral.

“Shit,” Nails breathed. He angled his rifle a fraction more toward the annex door, then held up his free hand.

Not to Rasha. Not exactly.

He raised one finger to the mesh over his mouth and nose, a quick, firm gesture, then turned that same hand outward, palm facing the empty corridor, the walls, the air—as if he could press the entire building, the entire city, into silence.

The message was broad, not personal: everyone shut up now.

Rasha’s gaze snapped from the window back to Ivy. The questions that had been burning in her eyes a moment ago—about who they were, why they were here—were temporarily pushed aside by the more immediate calculation of what that engine meant. Patrol? Visitor? Family?

Her fingers dug into the bottle again, the clear plastic deforming under the pressure.

Ivy felt the change in the air, the way the annex seemed to tighten around them. The engine note threaded under his skin like a wire. He knew what Nails was thinking: if whoever was in that vehicle decided to get out and come inside, the fragile balance with this girl would evaporate in an instant.

“Keep her eyes on you,” Nails murmured, lips barely moving. “Don’t let her get up and do something heroic.”

Ivy swallowed.

The story. He’d cracked it open already—about guests and doors and water. It didn’t matter that he barely remembered the details. What mattered was that it had given her somewhere else to put her fear. He needed to keep that going, keep her attention tethered to his mouth, his hands, not to the engine humming just beyond the walls.

He dredged up another fragment from some long-ago talk in his parents’ living room.

“Fi zaman,” he said quickly, knowing his tenses were wrong but hoping the shade of meaning would be enough. Once, in a time. “Fi sahara… desert.”

He drew a wavy line in the air with his left hand, indicating dunes, heat.

Rasha’s eyes flicked to his hand, then to the window again, then back. Her breathing had gone shallower, but she wasn’t moving.

Outside, the engine idled, then revved lightly. A door slammed—a dull, heavy thump. Voices, faint through the annex walls, spoke in Arabic. One of them laughed, a short, barking sound. Another replied, more serious.

Ivy kept going, forcing his own voice to settle into a different cadence—slower, more rhythmic, the way his mother’s had when she’d told him stories to keep him from getting up and checking the front door during thunderstorms.

“Rajul… man,” he said, sketching a figure in the air with a vertical gesture, then tapping his own chest. “Daif, traveller. Very tired.”

He let his shoulders slump, panting theatrically for two shallow breaths, then mimed stumbling toward an invisible doorway.

“Yaji,” he said. Comes. He knocked gently on the empty air beside him with his knuckles, three soft taps. “Tuk, tuk, tuk.”

Rasha’s fingers loosened slightly on the bottle. The ghost of a frown crossed her face; she was listening, even if she thought the story was clumsy.

Ivy pushed on.

“Bayt huna,” he said, indicating an imaginary house in front of him. “Inside, ahl… family.” He brought his hand up, drew the roof again. “They are poor. Qalil ta’am… little food.”

He pinched his fingers together, showing a small amount.

He could feel how rough it sounded, how far his words were from anything a teacher or imam would approve. But it didn’t matter. The bare bones of the story were enough: a poor family, a traveller at their door, the choice between keeping what little they had or sharing it.

Rasha’s eyes slid sideways, toward the high window again.

The car outside had gone quiet; the engine note sat at a low hum now, as if someone had turned the key halfway back but not fully to off. He could hear the faint scrape of boots on gravel, the metallic jingle of something—keys, belt fittings. A man spoke, voice irritated. Another answered, shorter.

Her shoulders tightened.

“Hey,” Nails whispered, raising his finger slightly higher, as if to remind even the voices outside to lower themselves. “Stay with us, love. Don’t go shouting.”

Ivy let his own volume drop a notch, forcing her to lean on the words to hear them.

He traced another gesture in the air—picking up an invisible bowl, holding it close.

“The family…” he said, pausing to find the phrase. “Yafakkar… they think. They have small food. If they give to daif…” He gestured to his imaginary traveller, “hum… they hungry.”

He brought his hand back to his own stomach, flattening his palm against his vest, then made a small, comical face, cheeks hollowing, as if starving.

Rasha watched, the corner of her mouth twitching—whether in confusion or unwilling amusement, he couldn’t tell.

“But,” Ivy went on, tapping his temple, “they remember… the Prophet said…” He didn’t try to quote; he wouldn’t risk it. He summarised instead, in a clumsy mix of English and Arabic. “Allāh loves… the one who give… rahma… mercy. The one who open door… give food… give ma’.”

He mimed opening his glazed-invisible door again, then offering the bowl outward, then the cup of water.

He let the rhythm of his words lengthen, softening the edges, stretching the syllables slightly the way his mother had when she wanted a story to lull and calm rather than excite.

“Yiftaḥu al-bāb,” he said. They open the door. His fingers curled, pulling the imaginary knob. “Yudkhilūn daif… they bring the guest inside. Yaj‘alūn hu, huna.” He tapped the air at his own side. Make him here.

As he spoke, Rasha’s breathing synced, almost unconsciously, to his cadence. Her grip on the bottle had stopped fluctuating; the plastic no longer crinkled. Her eyes were still bright, still wary, but they were on his hands, his mouth, not glued to the door or the window.

Outside, the vehicle’s engine note lifted again, then began to fade as the driver shifted gears. Tyres reversed over gravel, the sound of stones crunching sharper for a moment, then the hum receded along the street. A door slammed again, this time further away. Someone called out, the words thin and indistinct. The annex walls absorbed the worst of it.

“Vehicle pulling off,” Nails murmured, more to his own nerves than anyone else’s.

Rasha’s shoulders dropped a fraction.

Only then did she move.

It was a small motion, tiny enough that if Ivy had blinked, he might have missed it. She shifted her weight onto one foot and, without taking the bottle away from her chest, extended the index finger of her free hand toward the high window.

Just a point.

Toward the rectangle of light, toward whatever lay beyond it—street, courtyard, road. It could have meant a dozen things.

Warning: someone comes by there.
Route: you can go that way.
Threat: I could shout out of that, and everyone would hear.

Her expression gave away nothing clear. There was no wide-eyed urgency, no smile, no frown. Just a steady, probing look.

Ivy’s stomach clenched.

For one beat, the story faltered. His hand hung in mid-gesture, halfway between offering his invisible bowl and smoothing the air. The engine noise outside was mostly gone now, but the ghost of it stayed in his ears, the sense that danger had driven past but might circle back at any moment.

He followed the line of her finger with his eyes, up to the window, then back to her face.

“Shubbāk,” he said softly. Window. A word he’d picked up from relatives talking about who was watching who through which panes in their old neighbourhood. “Naam… shubbāk.”

He had no idea what she meant.

If she was helping, pointing out a blind spot in the patrol pattern, then he ought to be grateful—and he would be a fool not to take the information and shape it into an exit route in his head. If she was betraying them, marking the easiest way to expose them to the outside world, then he was, in this moment, gesturing at his own hanging point.

The uncertainty pressed at his chest like another weight added to his kit.

He managed a small nod anyway, acknowledging the point without committing to a meaning.

“Shubbāk,” he repeated, then forced his hand back into motion, back into the shape of the story. “The guest… he sit near window, maybe. Family give him food… ma’…”

He mimed passing the bowl again, then lifted his invisible cup, mirroring her real one. His voice slipped back into that gentler cadence, smoothing over the hitch where panic had wanted to enter.

“Outside,” he added, gesturing vaguely toward the wall where the street lay, “harb… war. Khatar.” Danger. He gave the words a little weight, letting them fall like stones. Then he touched the floor between them with his fingertips. “Inside… rahma… bayt… āmin.”

Rasha’s finger dropped from the window.

She adjusted her grip on the bottle instead, its plastic cool against her palm, and kept her eyes on his.

Whether the point at the window had been a warning, an offer, or a threat, she let it go—for now—in favour of the story of a doorstep host and an obligation uneasy with the world outside.

Nails watched the window, then her, then Ivy.

The look he gave Ivy—behind the mesh and goggles, eyes narrowed in a way that was half impressed, half deeply concerned—carried a whole conversation.

I didn’t know you could spin fairy tales.
I hope to God they’re enough.
And I really, really hope that point at the window was a favour, not a promise.

Ivy didn’t answer the look.

He kept talking, kept his hands moving, buying quiet with each syllable, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that one eleven-year-old girl now held, with a gesture, the power to bend their entire operation toward safety or disaster.

---

The stairwell’s noise folded in on itself, then broke.

For the last thirty seconds, the fight had been a series of controlled bursts and ragged replies, sound ricocheting off concrete, the air thick with dust and the acrid tang of propellant. Now, in the narrow wedge between the top step and the upper door, everything condensed into the moment where the plan either worked or came apart.

Ash’s palm flattened briefly on Kite’s shoulder.

It was almost nothing—just a small, firm press and a squeeze, two fingers tapping once. But in their shorthand, it was a signed order and a blessing both.

Go.

Kite didn’t think, he executed.

The fire door gave under Ash’s earlier pressure with a groan that was more vibration than sound; the latch was already half-free. Kite shouldered it the rest of the way open, catching it with his hand so it didn’t slam and ruin whatever surprise they had left.

The gap widened on a strip of flickering fluorescent light and scuffed tile.

He burst through, low and fast, a blur of mottled kit and black rifle, boots biting into a different texture—the smoother drag of corridor floor instead of gritty concrete steps. He cut left on instinct and plan, hugging the wall so tight his shoulder scraped peeling paint, weapon up and already seeking targets.

The corridor was narrower than he’d hoped, wider than he’d feared: two men abreast if they were friendly, or one man and a lot of trouble if they weren’t.

Immediately ahead: a doorway standing open on the left, office interior dim and cluttered. On the right, five meters up, another door half ajar with a paper sign taped crookedly to it. Further down, the corridor kinked slightly to the left, disappearing around a corner.

He caught a flash of blue shirt and brown trousers halfway down the hall—an Iraqi policeman pivoting toward him, AK halfway to his shoulder, eyes wide, face slack with the half-second lag between seeing something and understanding it.

Kite’s sights found the man’s chest before the rest caught up.

Two controlled shots, centre mass, tight group. The rifle jerked, muzzle flash flaring bright white in the too-bright corridor, brass bouncing off the wall with high metallic ticks. The policeman slammed backward into the wall, slid down, weapon clattering from his hands.

“Contact front, one down,” Kite snapped.

Behind him, Mick was a shadow a heartbeat later.

He exploded through the door in Kite’s wake, pivoting hard the other way to take the right-hand sector. His bulk filled the doorway for a moment, then smoothed into the wall opposite Kite’s, weapon up, muzzle covering the corridor’s far end and the gap between the doors.

“Right clear short,” he barked. “Corner still dirty.”

Ash came up onto the landing just long enough to check Mantis’ position below.

“Mantis, last look,” he called down. “Then up and out.”

“On it,” her voice came back, thin with the distance and compressed by the net.

She took a final upward shot through her overhead gap, more to keep the flanking group pinned than with any expectation of a hit. The rounds thudded into concrete; someone above swore and scrambled away, the sound of boots on thin flooring suddenly more distant.

“Overhead bought themselves somewhere else to be,” she reported. “Coming up.”

She broke from her pipe nest, boots snagging briefly on the uneven floor before finding the stair. She took the steps two at a time, body low, one hand gliding along the rail for balance, rifle tucked to her shoulder and angled down in case anyone had decided to get brave and follow from below.

Ash turned away from the stair mouth and pushed through the door after Mick, the fire door tapping softly against his shoulder as it swung and then settled mostly closed behind them. He planted one boot on the corridor tile and felt the difference immediately—the slight tack of walked-in dust, the give of an uneven tile here and there. Under the fluorescent strips, the world was harsh and flat; his NVGs flickered and he flipped them up, letting his unaided eyes take over in the man-made light.

The sound changed with the environment.

The basement had been all echo and muffled thunder, every shot bouncing forever in concrete caverns. The corridor was tighter, but the surfaces were different—painted plaster, glass panes in doorways, thin wooden frames. Gunfire in here cracked sharp and direct; voices carried in a straighter line.

And there were more of them now.

From somewhere above, feet pounded on another set of stairs, the din clearer than before. A voice shouted in Arabic, the cadence unmistakably that of someone calling down a question: *What’s going on?* Somewhere further along the corridor, a phone rang once, twice, then stopped abruptly, either answered or abandoned.

The building was waking up.

“Right, this is it,” Ash said, voice a notch lower but no less sure. “We break them or they bring mates.”

As if on cue, a door halfway down on the right—barely visible past Mick’s shoulder—flung open. An Iraqi officer in shirt sleeves leaned out, pistol in hand, face creased in confusion and anger. He was still forming his first word when Mick’s rifle swung and spat once.

The man’s chest snapped backward, shirt front blooming dark as he collapsed into the room he’d just stepped from. The door bounced against his body and half-closed again, leaving his legs jutting into the corridor.

“Door right, one down,” Mick reported, already shifting his aim back down the hall, covering deeper angles.

Kite advanced a meter, sliding, never crossing directly in front of Mick’s muzzle. The corridor’s left-hand office door gaped open near him; he cast a quick glance inside without overcommitting—two desks, one chair overturned, papers scattered, a fan turning lazily overhead. Empty of threats for the heartbeat he had to spare. He moved on, boots whispering.

“Ash, movement at the end,” Kite hissed. “Shadow on the kink.”

Ash saw it too—just a flicker of motion at the bend in the corridor, someone yanking back from the corner after catching sight of the aftermath of Kite’s first two rounds. Another voice shouted, higher-pitched, panicked. A hand thrust a rifle muzzle around the corner and fired blindly, rounds chewing up plaster halfway down the wall and showering them with white dust.

“Covering!” Kite snapped.

He dropped, almost sitting into a half-kneel, and sent a short, brutal burst at the corner edge. The rounds punched into the wall just where a head would appear if someone tried to lean out properly. Chips flew, the plaster edge cracking.

The blind fire from the corner veered away, then stopped.

Behind them, Mantis hit the top of the stairs like a thrown knife, one boot scraping as she cut her momentum and slid into cover behind the half-shut fire door. She took one second to orient—quick sweep of left and right, register bodies down, friendly backs, hostile uniforms—and then snapped into a slot just behind Ash, angling her rifle past his shoulder toward the far bend.

“I’ve got high on that corner,” she said. “If they poke the top half of a head, I’ll redecorate the wall with it.”

“Music to my ears,” Mick muttered.

Another voice barked from up the corridor—this one deeper, more controlled. The tone was command, not question. It cut across the others in Arabic, an order that sounded a lot like “Hold your fire, wait!” followed by a rapid string of instructions. Boots thudded on tile—men shifting, taking positions around the bend.

Ash’s jaw tightened.

He could feel the groove of the enemy’s rhythm trying to reassert itself: panic, pause, command, coordinated response. If they let that settle, they’d be trading shots in this hallway for as long as the commander upstairs could feed men into it. Every round fired, every body dropped, was another chance for a stray shout or a panicked radio call to break out of the building and into the wider situation they were all trying to lie about.

“This is our hinge,” he said softly over the net. “We break it now.”

He stepped forward, putting his shoulder almost level with Kite’s, staying just far enough back not to crowd the younger man’s weapon. His own rifle slid up into the pocket of his shoulder, muzzle steady on the corridor’s far bend.

“Listen,” he added. “They’re settling. Don’t let them.”

He raised his hand slightly—two fingers extended, then closed into a point, a tiny, decisive gesture.

Surge.

“Kite, drive it,” he said. “Mick, you’re his shadow. Mantis, you’re the lid. On my mark we push to that kink and own it. No stopping in the doorway, no questions, no speeches.”

He counted down under his breath.

“Three… two… one.”

“Move,” he snapped.

Kite came off his knee like he’d been fired from a compressed spring.

He went forward in a half-crouch, rifle steady, head just low enough that the bulk of his plate carrier, not his face, would be what first met any incoming fire. He ate up the distance to the corridor’s bend in three strides, the edges of his vision full of door frames and smeared notices, his focus narrowed to the slice of air where an enemy muzzle might appear.

Mick stayed almost on top of him, offset half a shoulder width to the right so they weren’t lined up, his own barrel covering a slightly higher band.

As they hit the last meter before the corner, the defenders made their play.

A rifle snapped out around the bend, this time aimed, not blind—its muzzle already spitting as the shooter leaned with it, cheek welded to the stock. The first round cracked past Kite’s ear close enough that he felt the pressure wave slap the side of his head. Bits of plaster stung his cheek.

He didn’t flinch.

He pivoted into the corner, bringing his rifle up in a tight, brutal swing, and let muscle memory dictate what his eye barely had time to see: the slope of a helmet, the flash of eyes, the dark pupil of a muzzle. He squeezed, felt the weapon kick back into his shoulder.

His first two rounds took the shooter in the neck and upper chest, the man’s momentum collapsing sideways into the wall. The man’s rifle clattered as it fell, its last shot going harmlessly into the ceiling.

Behind that first man, jammed into the narrow space of the intersecting corridor, another Iraqi was half-rising from a crouch, eyes wide, trying to bring his AK up from waist to chest. His mouth was open on a shout that never turned into anything coherent.

Mick’s fire took that one—one, two rounds to the sternum, then a third as the man staggered, more reflex than necessity.

“Two down at the corner,” Mick called.

“Push through!” Ash barked.

They didn’t pause to admire their work.

Kite stepped over the first body, boot skidding briefly on blood slicking the tile, then finding purchase on bare floor. His rifle tracked the secondary corridor now, sweeping for movement. It was shorter, ending in a closed door twenty meters down. Another open doorway on the left showed nothing but stacked chairs and a leaning mop. To the right, halfway down, a darker gap hinted at stairs going up—a fresh route for trouble.

“Left corridor clear short, stairs right,” Kite said, breath tight but controlled. “No visible movement.”

“Good,” Ash said. “We own this corner now. That’s our hinge.”

Behind them, Mantis slid into position at the original corridor’s kink, taking the high arc. She took one quick glance into the new corridor to register what Kite had just described, then turned her focus back toward the direction they’d come from—just in case someone from deeper in the station decided to rush them from behind.

Upstairs, the building complained.

More voices now, above and further along; doors opening and closing; a sharper bark of a radio, this one sounding more official than the mumbled chatter they’d heard before. Someone was calling for confirmation—names, statuses, locations. A woman’s voice, distant, shouted something about the phones not working properly.

The station was coming properly awake.

Ash felt the urgency lance through him.

“Right,” he said, not wasting time on poetry. “We’re out of the basement, we’ve broken their rhythm, and the whole bloody building knows something’s wrong. We keep it fast from here or we lose the whole play.”

Kite’s chest heaved once; he checked his magazine with a quick, practised glance and click.

“Then let’s not give them time to write a new script,” he said.

They pushed again, deeper into the hallway, the echoing chaos of the basement now behind them, traded for a more immediate, intimate kind of danger—a corridor full of waking men, ringing phones, and the thin skin of a deception operation stretched tight over everything.

---

Rasha spoke again.

The words came out different this time—not the runaway tumble from earlier, not the tight, clipped little volleys of anger she’d been firing at him. She shaped them slowly, as if she’d made a decision: if these men were too foolish to understand, then she would make her meaning so simple that even a fool could not miss it.

“Imran,” she said first—his name now firmly hers, rounded by her accent. Then a string of Arabic, each word spaced with deliberate care.

He caught almost none of it.

Just one, lodged in the middle like a stone in sand.

“Baba.”

It hit him harder than the concrete dust in his eye.

Could have been a name. Could have been a title. Could have been nothing more than “my father,” the way every kid in every language said it. Her tone didn’t narrow it down: there was a little lift at the end, a question. The rest of the sentence—*Baba… huna? Baba… yiji?*—slid past him, too fast, too bound to a grammar he didn’t own anymore.

His stomach turned.

If she was asking where her father was, if he was all right, if these strange armed men had anything to do with the fact he wasn’t here—he had nothing to give her. If Baba was a policeman who should have been on this floor and was currently lying somewhere in the station because of his troop’s plan, then the ground he was standing on was even worse than he already knew.

He hated not knowing.

It wasn’t like mishearing a shopkeeper or fumbling a holiday phrasebook; it wasn’t embarrassing, it was dangerous. There was a living, breathing child in front of him, pushing a word like *Baba* across the gap, and he didn’t know whether he was stepping on something fragile or ignoring a flare.

His throat felt tight.

He heard himself say it before he decided to.

“Muslim,” he repeated, softly.

The word didn’t land the way it had the first time. Back then, it had been an emergency tool, blunt but effective, jammed between her fear and the worst possible outcomes. Now it sounded thin in his own ears, like a note held too long, out of tune.

There was too much pressure behind it: his parents’ voices, mosque sermons he’d sat through as a kid, the way he’d quietly edged himself out of the faith without ever saying the word “no” out loud. Standing here, using that word as a shield in front of a girl whose whole life had been bent by wars men justified with religion—it felt less like camouflage and more like theft.

Rasha’s eyes narrowed a fraction at the repetition.

She’d heard the strain, if not the reason for it. Children were good at hearing cracks.

Ivy felt the lie wobble between them.

He couldn’t take it back. If he tried to explain now—*Well, it’s complicated actually*—he’d lose whatever thin strand of steadiness she had left. So he did the only thing he could think of that didn’t taste completely hollow.

He buried the identity in the story.

“Muslim,” he said again, quieter, like a preface rather than a claim. He tapped his chest once, but then his hand moved, palm flattening, fingers spreading, reaching for shape instead of label. “Our deen…”

He let the word hang, then rolled straight into what he could stand behind.

He lifted his hand over his head, fingers meeting in that familiar roof shape, then slowly lowered it, spreading his palms down as if laying a blanket over something small and fragile.

“In our deen,” he said, switching into the hybrid cadence he’d found earlier, “Rasul—Prophet—he say… when you are qawi…” He curled his hand into a fist, arm flexing to show strength. “Strong. And you see… da‘if.” He opened his hand, flattening it, hovering it low in the air: small, vulnerable. “You must… tahmi. Protect. Not hit. Not shout.”

The Arabic slid out rough, knocked-about, but the contour was there.

He pointed gently at her, not jabbing, just indicating. “Saghira,” he said. Small. His palm hovered in the air between them, as if resting on the crown of an invisible smaller head. Then he flipped his hand, indicating himself, gear, rifle. “Ana… qawi. Strong.”

He let the horror of that sit inside his chest, not in his voice.

“Qawi must…” He searched for the word and felt genuine relief when it surfaced. “Yumsik nafs.” Hold himself. He mimed someone grabbing their own wrist, pulling their arm back. “Not hurt da‘if. This… sunnah.” Habit of the Prophet. He hoped that was the right word.

He didn’t try to quote anything. He would not put half-remembered scripture in her mouth. He kept it to simple, morally-shaped sentences, the kind you could say in any mosque without being thrown out.

“In story,” he went on, tying himself back to the desert guest he’d started conjuring, “family… hungry. They have little.” He pinched his fingers again. “Guest more hungry. He tired. They…” He mimed dividing food, spreading his hands to show sharing, then touching his chest. “They keep small for them. Give big to him. Why?”

He tapped his temple once, mixing in English without apology now. “Because Allah see. Allah not… impressed”—he grimaced—“with strong man who keep all for self and let weak… cry.”

He didn’t know if that was doctrinally spotless.

He knew it was something he believed, even stripped of the religion that had first taught it to him. That counted for more right now than accuracy.

Rasha watched his hands as much as his mouth, as if she could decode his sincerity from the movement.

She said *Baba* again, more softly this time, and another line of Arabic, gesturing with the hand that held the bottle—toward the main building, toward the estate beyond the annex, maybe toward the entire city. Her eyes shone with something that wasn’t just fear now. There was a rawness there, the kind that came when you talked about someone you missed so much it hurt.

He couldn’t parse the content, but he heard what was underneath:

If you are strong and we are small—
If your story is true—
Where is that for us?

He wanted to answer.

He wanted to say: I don’t know where your father is. I don’t know if he is complicit, or a victim, or somewhere between. I don’t know if my friends are hurting men who matter to you. I know only that I am here, and I am trying very, very hard not to make your day worse than it already is.

All of that would be useless noise to her.

So he distilled it.

He brought his hand back to his chest and left the word *Muslim* out this time.

“Imran,” he said, quietly. “Ivy.” He tapped himself twice. “I am qawi, yes. Strong.” He lifted the rifle a fraction, then immediately eased it down again, showing restraint in gesture. “But…” He touched the empty air just in front of her shoulder, stopping short of contact. “Huna… in this place… la ḍarar. No harm.”

He spread his hands, palms open, showing her the empty, universal shape of *I am trying*.

Behind him, Nails watched his face.

This wasn’t the jagged, wide-eyed strain he’d seen on blokes under incoming rounds, or in the seconds after something exploded too close. This was different. It sat in the tightness around Ivy’s mouth, in the way his eyes didn’t quite settle, drifting between the girl and his own internal ledger.

Nails recognised some of it; he’d had his own nights staring at ceilings, wondering which stories they told themselves were lies and which bits were salvageable.

He’d never seen Ivy like this, though—digging around in the back cupboards of his childhood for something to hold up between himself and the damage they might be doing without meaning to.

Rasha’s brow furrowed again, but it wasn’t the furious knot from earlier. It was the puzzled crease of someone trying to match a word to a feeling.

She repeated a fragment after him, testing it on her tongue: “Yumsik… nafs.”

She mimed grabbing her own wrist, as he had, pulling it back. Her gaze flicked, just once, to his rifle, then to her own hand. The question was clear enough even without vocabulary: *This too? You hold this back?*

Ivy nodded, feeling the weight of that in his bones.

“Na‘am,” he said. Yes. “Akthar shay… especially this.”

He touched the stock, then drew his hand away from it like it was hot.

He did not add the truth that hovered behind it: that if someone stormed through that annex door right now, shouting and armed, there would be very little restraint left. That the duty of shelter and protection the story spoke of would extend to his team first, because if he let them die, the whole elaborate lie in the city would crack open and swallow far more people than just one girl and her father.

Instead, he kept to the bit that felt clean.

He opened his palm to her again, as if setting the words there for her to keep.

“Rahma,” he said softly. Mercy. “Shelter. Hima…” He groped for the term his mother had used for sanctuary and let it go when it wouldn’t come. “Bayt,” he said instead. House. “Huna… you are not dushman.” Enemy. Another word pulled from old TV bulletins.

He forced himself to meet her eyes, to let her see the conflict instead of smoothing it away.

“Outside…” he gestured vaguely, taking in the estate, the city, the whole war. “Harb. Shiddah… hard. Many lies.” He tapped his chest once, acknowledging his own. “Huna… I try… haq.” Truth. He winced at his own hubris and pushed through anyway. “Little. Small. Bas… small true is still… true.”

Rasha’s lips pressed together, a small, serious line.

She said something in response, slow again, measured—another of those sentences built as if for a child or a foreign uncle. He caught only snatches—*Baba… bayt… Allah… shuuf*—but the last word was clear enough: sees.

He didn’t know if it was a threat or a reassurance.

Maybe both.

Nails watched the exchange in silence.

He could see the veins standing out along Ivy’s neck, the faint tremor at the corner of his jaw when he said *Muslim* and then visibly chose not to lean on it again. He understood that this was costing his mate more than ammunition would. Bullets were simple. This was… not.

He couldn’t offer much in the way of help. So he did the one thing he could.

He firmed his stance at the doorway, eyes and rifle still covering the corridor, and let Ivy have the space to do something he was slowly starting to realise very few of them could: hold both the mission and one small human being in his hands at the same time without dropping either.

The strain on Ivy’s face was not from being shot at.

It was from trying to make a lie carry a truth big enough for a frightened girl to stand on, in a building where nothing else around her deserved the word.

---

For a few seconds, the corridor belonged to them.

Not comfortably, not securely, but in the brittle, provisional way a storm-front “belongs” to the barometer that saw it coming first. The two dead Iraqis at the kink were still sliding into their final positions against the walls, blood edging out in slow, dark haloes on the tile.

Kite, Mick, Ash, Mantis turned the space into a diagram.

“Check left,” Ash snapped.

Kite moved first, hugging the wall as he slid forward, muzzle tracking the open door he’d only glanced into before. He pivoted just enough to cut a slice of the office interior into his sight picture. Two desks, chairs, a crooked calendar, a fan turning sluggishly overhead. No movement, no second door, no bodies.

“Left one clear,” he said, voice tight.

Mick, still on the right-hand wall, crabbed sideways to the door where he’d just shot the shirt-sleeved officer. He stepped in a fraction, boot nudging the man’s legs aside, rifle sweeping the room beyond. Filing cabinets, a cheap metal wardrobe, a corkboard bristling with pins. No one standing, no one breathing except the man on the floor.

“Right one clear,” he confirmed. “Just my friend in there.”

Mantis stayed at the bend, taking up the rear-guard properly now. She knelt just behind the threshold where corridor met corridor, her rifle resting in the pocket of her shoulder, barrel covering the longer line they hadn’t pushed down yet. If anything moved in that direction—friend or foe—she’d see it first.

“Ash,” she said, voice low. “Upstairs is getting louder.”

They all heard it.

The radio squawk wasn’t clear; it was muffled by a floor and a ceiling, scrambled by distance. But it was unmistakable. Somewhere above them, a handset was spitting clipped bursts of Arabic—call signs, locations, questions, the static-smeared shape of a man asking: *What’s happening down there? Why aren’t you answering?*

Between transmissions, heavier boots thudded across the level above—rushing feet, a door slamming, someone barking orders with a different timbre than the local station chief. A different unit maybe, or someone from district HQ who’d happened to be in the building.

Kite swallowed.

“Radio’s moving,” he murmured. “That’s not just some bored desk-jockey checking in.”

“No,” Ash agreed quietly.

For a moment, the team held their momentary strongpoint: Kite and Mick braced in their opposing doorways, Mantis anchoring the kink, Ash in the middle, taking in the angles. It was, on a map, a decent temporary position. Cover, fields of fire, clear lanes.

It would kill them if they stayed in it.

Mick caught Ash’s eye across the corridor.

The look he gave him carried more information than a paragraph on the net could. There was no panic in it, no argument. Just the ugly arithmetic laid bare: we don’t know how many are left in this building, but we know they can talk to each other, and we just made a lot of noise. If we sit here congratulating ourselves on a tidy corner, they will fix us in place. Once we’re pinned, all it takes is one heavier truck outside, one PKM at a stair head, one bright spark deciding to lock the front doors and call it in to brigade.

We’ll be a little SAS problem set in someone else’s great big war plan.

Ash didn’t look away.

He felt the truth of it in his bones. The corridor, the stairwell, the station—all of it was geometry and time. They’d solved the geometry in this little slice. Time was about to solve them if they didn’t move.

He nodded once, that same small, definitive movement he’d used at the stair mouth. A signature.

Message received.

He tapped his earpiece with a knuckle, then spoke, calm but with the fat cut out of every word.

“Listen in. This isn’t a hold point. This is a hinge. Our job is simple from here: move, seize, silence.”

He lifted his hand, drawing an invisible line forward down the corridor, then chopping it at an imaginary doorway ahead—their objective, whatever form it took.

“Then vanish if we can,” he added, “or hold if we absolutely must. No middle ground. We do not sit here and wait for a bigger hammer.”

His voice stayed level, but the words carried iron.

Kite blew out a breath he didn’t quite realise he’d been holding.

“Copy,” he said, quietly. “No camping.”

Mantis’s mouth twitched behind her veil.

“Good,” she said. “Wasn’t bringing a tent anyway.”

Above them, the radio squawked again, sharper now. A different voice cut in over the other one, more clipped, impatient. Someone up there was asking why the basement unit wasn’t responding, why two extensions on this floor were ringing out. A name was barked twice, louder the second time.

The sound crawled down the walls.

Ash let it harden his resolve.

“We keep moving,” he said. “Short checks only. Any closed door we don’t need for the objective, we leave shut and pray they leave it that way. Anyone we see with a weapon who isn’t on our payroll goes down. If they throw hands up and we’ve got the seconds to care, we shout. If not, we’re ghosts. Tracking?”

Three quiet affirmatives came back over the net.

“Good,” he said. “Then let’s go earn our vanishing act.”

---

It was such a small movement that, at first, Ivy thought he’d imagined it.

Rasha’s shoulders rose on a breath, held for a long second, then dropped. Her knees bent—carefully, as if she were testing whether gravity still worked—and she lowered herself down onto the cool tile.

She didn’t slump.

She sat.

It was deliberate, tidy, the way a child might sit when told to wait in a hallway outside a headmaster’s office: back straight, legs folded to the side, skirt tugged under her knees so her skin wouldn’t touch the floor. She set the water bottle down beside her with ceremonious care, its plastic base making a soft, hollow sound against the tile, then folded her hands in her lap.

She wasn’t surrendering.

She was choosing stillness like it was armour.

Ivy felt his throat tighten.

Every briefing he’d ever sat through about close-quarters work emphasised movement: standing, kneeling, prone; stepping off the line; dynamic entries; folding a room under your arcs of fire until it was yours. Nobody had ever talked about what to do when the room contained an eleven-year-old girl who decided, with terrifying calm, to simply sit down and not add to the chaos.

His rifle was still in his hands, still pointed obliquely at the floor. The muzzle hovered in that ugly, meaningful space where a slight adjustment would put it on her, a slightly different adjustment would put it on the door behind her, and a decision he hadn’t had to make yet would decide which.

He let it drop another degree.

Not enough that any instructor watching would have called him lazy or complacent. The barrel still sat in his hands with purpose; his finger stayed indexed along the receiver. But his shoulders unhooked from the tight, leaning-forward posture of the man about to pounce. The line of his spine softened. The angle of the stock in his shoulder relaxed.

From predator to presence.

Nails clocked it instantly.

He didn’t say anything—not at first. He kept his body half-turned toward the corridor, rifle covering the outer doorway, eyes flicking between the empty space beyond and the girl now seated on the tile. But a little of the bristling edge went out of his stance. The tension that had been bunched between his shoulder blades settled a notch lower.

“Okay,” he said under his breath, more to the air than to either of them. “Okay, that’s… better.”

Rasha sat very straight, hands laced together, knuckles pale against the faded fabric of her dress.

Up close, Ivy could see how thin she was—how her elbows were all angles, how her collarbones stood out just a little more than they should. There was a faint sheen in her eyes now that hadn’t been there before, a glassiness that threatened but hadn’t yet broken into tears.

She was holding them back. Hard.

Her chin lifted a fraction, a gesture of pride, stubbornness, or sheer determination not to let the day crack her open completely. Her bare toes curled and uncurled against the cool tile, nails pale crescents in the dim light.

The annex felt different.

A minute ago, it had been a potential kill box: entry point, fallback route, choke in the estate’s geometry. Every line of their bodies had been tuned to that: where to stand, where to aim, how to move if everything went wrong.

Now, with one small human sitting on the floor like she was waiting for a bus that might never come, the space shifted.

It was still a battlespace in every technical sense—two armed men, radios in their ears, a larger operation running in cables and frequencies all around them. But the immediate air lost some of its metallic taste.

For a fragile moment, it felt like what it technically was: a side room in an occupied building, with a child who had chosen, with all the agency she had left, to be still because stillness was the safest thing she could think of.

Ivy swallowed.

He moved a half-step closer, not to loom, but to bring himself down to a height where he wasn’t towering over her.

He bent his knees slightly, dropping into a shallow crouch. The armour complained at the change in angle; straps dug into his shoulders. He ignored it. His rifle stayed low, angled off to the side, ready but no longer the loudest thing about him.

“Okay,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “We sit, we wait.”

He didn’t try to make her stand. He didn’t tell her to move somewhere “safer” or out of the line of fire. The truth was there weren’t many safer options, and anything that involved him physically dragging her around a corner would crack the thin glass of trust he’d managed to blow into shape.

So he let her choose her own ground.

He matched it as best he could.

Rasha glanced up at him—just once, quick—and then at his rifle, tracking the angle, registering that it wasn’t quite as ready to bite as it had been.

Her lips pressed together, trembled, pressed again. She tipped her head back very slightly, eyes fixed on a spot just above his shoulder, as if staring at a crack in the plaster would keep everything inside her from spilling out.

Ivy recognised that, too.

He’d seen it in lads a decade older than her, sitting on the back ramp of a Chinook after a long patrol, staring very hard at nothing so they wouldn’t have to say something.

“Intī… okay?” he asked quietly. The word came out half-formed; his accent mangled it. He knew it wasn’t the right question—how could she be “okay” in any meaningful way—but he didn’t have better vocabulary.

She shrugged, a tiny, lopsided movement.

It wasn’t yes. It wasn’t no.

It was more like: this is what I can do.

A little silence settled in around them.

Behind Ivy, the estate murmured. A door closed somewhere with a hollow thump. A male voice laughed briefly, out in the main building, unaware that anything was happening in the annex. Somewhere deeper in the complex, a radio crackled and fell quiet. The war beyond the walls went on ticking over—orders, broadcasts, manoeuvres.

In here, the biggest sounds were smaller: the faint creak of Nails adjusting his stance, the soft crackle of plastic when Rasha’s fingers shifted on the bottle, the shallow, controlled breaths of a man trying very hard to keep his voice from shaking in a language he barely spoke.

Nails glanced over his shoulder, properly now, taking in the tableau: the girl on the floor, straight-backed and stubborn; Ivy in a half-crouch, rifle lowered, face drawn tight with a kind of effort that had nothing to do with muscles.

“Didn’t sign up for this bit, did you,” Nails said, tone light but eyes serious.

“Didn’t read the small print properly,” Ivy replied, just as soft.

He kept his eyes on Rasha.

What they were doing now—this quiet, brittle kindness—wasn’t in the op order. It wouldn’t show up in the after-action review except, maybe, as a single line about “non-combatant encountered, settled, no compromise.” It wouldn’t change the fact that elsewhere in Kuwait, their own side was moving pieces on a board that counted her only as a number in a census or a blurry face on foreign news footage.

But here, in this annex, it was tactical.

Everything was.

The way he’d loosened her bottle cap without letting it crack. The way he’d chosen which lies to tell and which truths to carve down into shapes he could live with. The way he held his rifle now, not quite ready to kill the child in front of him, absolutely ready to kill anything that threatened her or his team from outside.

Every gesture was a choice about what lived in this room for the next sixty seconds: panic, screaming, gunfire—or a kid on a tile floor trying not to cry while two strangers pretended, very hard, that they could keep the world out for a little bit longer.

That was the cost of this kind of war, Ivy thought, not in slogans but in the ache behind his breastbone.

You didn’t get to switch off. You didn’t get clean lines between compassion and calculation. You learned to use stories as suppressive fire, water bottles as tools for noise discipline, and a lowered rifle as a message as deliberate as a raised one.

Kindness became another tactic.

And the worst part was knowing that, long after he left Kuwait, long after this annex and this estate and even this entire operation were just lines in someone’s file, there’d be a girl who remembered the day soldiers came and one of them sat in the hallway with her and told her a broken story about a Prophet and a guest—and that even that memory would have been shaped by battle drills and deception plans written a thousand miles away.

---

They gave him paper like it was a favour.

Not the heavy, cream stock he used for official correspondence—those thick sheets embossed with the coat of arms that made even the most trivial memo feel like history. This was ordinary bond from Maha’s cupboard: pale, thin, the edges not quite square. The sort of paper no one would hesitate to stuff in a folder or leave under a coffee cup.

“Use this,” Harker said quietly, sliding the single sheet onto the blotter.

The governor’s own pen followed, placed with the same careful precision. It was familiar weight and colour—dark green barrel, gold nib—his private indulgence in a world of cheap ballpoints. Someone had taken it from its stand on the side table without his noticing.

He realised, with a faint, dislocated jolt, that they had been in his office long enough to catalogue even his stationery.

He stared at the paper, then at the pen, as if one might spontaneously refuse to cooperate with the other.

“What,” Hassan managed, his voice dry and paper-thin, “do you want me to write?”

Harker had been standing back by the bookshelves again, a piece of furniture among furniture, helmeted head barely breaking the line of spines and gilt titles. Now he moved closer, not all the way into Hassan’s space, but enough that he could rest one gloved hand lightly on the corner of the desk.

He did not lower his weapon; it hung at his chest, muzzle dipped, sling taut. Close enough that a slight shift of shoulder could bring it level.

“Nothing dramatic,” he said. His voice had the same maddening calm it had carried all afternoon. “A note. Something that would sit in your files and make sense to anyone who found it later.”

“Found,” Hassan echoed. His tongue felt too big in his mouth. “By whom?”

Harker’s eyes, pale above the dark cloth, flicked to him and away again, as if the question were incidental.

“By whoever goes through all this when it’s over,” he said. “Your people. My people. Historians. Take your pick.” He shrugged infinitesimally. “It needs to look like you were doing your job. Right up to the end.”

Hassan’s laugh came out as a cracked exhale.

“Doing my job,” he repeated. “Is that what we call this?”

Harker didn’t bite. He reached into a thigh pocket and produced a smaller sheet—a folded, dog-eared scrap of paper. He unfolded it once, twice, and laid it next to the blank page. On it, in neat block letters, someone had written three short bullet points.

“Keep it short,” Harker said, tapping the scrap with a knuckle. “Date it for today. Reference ongoing coordination with the Ministry of Interior. Something about maintaining order, preparation for civil contingencies if the situation escalates.”

His gloved finger shifted to the next line.

“Mention that you’re instructing district heads to review their evacuation plans and civil defence drills. No detail. Just enough to sound like responsible government.”

He paused.

“And then something bland about your confidence in the leadership and the resolve of the people. No rhetoric. No poetry. Just… reassurance.” His eyes slid to Hassan again. “You know how to do that.”

Hassan looked from the scrap of English words to the blank Arabic expanse beside it.

“You want me to forge my own… record,” he said. “To prove, later, that I was the loyal dog at the gate.”

Harker’s gaze did not soften.

“I want anyone who reads your files,” he said, “to believe that this building was functioning normally until the very last moment. That you were busy with plans and briefings, not staring dumbly out of the window wondering where all the ships had gone.”

His tone stayed even, matter-of-fact.

“It helps us,” he added, after a beat. “It might help you. It certainly keeps your staff alive as long as they look like they were just doing their jobs.”

Outside the office, a phone rang in the outer room—shrill, insistent. Another answered it, the clipped cadence of Maha’s voice sliding into the familiar script of “The Governor is busy, can I take a message.” Keys clacked. Somewhere further down the corridor, a door thumped on its swollen frame. The faint stutter of a dot-matrix printer started and became the office’s thin, electronic whine.

The palace kept breathing.

Inside the office, the air felt thin.

Hassan reached for the pen. His hand shook as it closed around the barrel—just enough to betray him to himself. The gold clip clicked faintly against his wedding ring as he lifted it, a domestic sound grotesquely misplaced.

He set the nib to the paper.

For a moment nothing came.

The page stared back at him, blank, expectant. He could feel Harker’s attention on the tiny contact point where metal met pulp, as intent as any surveillance camera lens.

He chose the date by rote, writing the numerals in the upper right corner in a hand that tried to be steady.

20 January 1991.

His fingers cramped around the pen.

He knew, abstractly, that somewhere out there, clocks were being watched as intently as the ink here. Deadlines ticking toward expiry. Ultimatums ageing into justification. The radio broadcast he’d listened to that morning—hands folded, staff watching his face—had been full of phrases about “final chances” and “unfortunate consequences.”

He wrote the date anyway, like a man signing his own medical chart.

Below it, he began the formula he’d used a thousand times.

“To: Heads of District Administration…”

The words flowed in Arabic, long-familiar bureaucratic phrases. The pen tracked them onto the paper in a line that wavered almost imperceptibly. His hand knew the motions even if his soul resisted. This was muscle memory: the way to address the local authorities, the way to sound urgent but not panicked, authoritative but not hysterical.

Next to him, the English bullet points sat like an x-ray of the letter he was writing. Coordination. Contingencies. Confidence.

“You will write it better than I could,” Harker said softly. It was not flattery. It sounded like a plain acknowledgement of someone else’s skill set. “It should sound like you. Not like me.”

Hassan almost told him to do it himself.

To take the pen, to scrawl his foreign letters on the page, and to see whether anyone in Baghdad believed an alien hand pretending to be their man in Kuwait. But he didn’t. Because he knew exactly how it would look if he refused.

Complicity had its own geometry. Refusal was an angle bullets flowed toward.

He wrote.

“Further to my previous directives regarding maintenance of public order and essential services under emergency conditions,” he scribbled, translating the English prompts into the florid officialese expected by his superiors, “you are instructed to conduct an immediate review of civil defence measures within your districts.”

His hand trembled on *immediate*, the tail of the letter curling slightly where it should have been straight.

He pressed the pen harder, as if he could bully his own muscles into obedience.

Harker watched.

Not his face, not his shoulders—the ink.

His gaze followed the line as it grew, each loop, each flourish. It was, in its way, another kind of signal: pressure, speed, the occasional tiny blot where the nib lingered a fraction of a second too long. If the governor’s hand grew too wild, if he snapped halfway through, if he scrawled something suicidal—an appeal, a warning, a name—Harker would see it there first, before anyone in the State Security building got the chance.

“Keep it dry,” Harker murmured. “No slogans.”

“I know,” Hassan said under his breath. “This is not my first piece of theatre.”

He moved on to the next sentence.

“You will confirm the readiness of your local facilities to provide shelter to civilians in the event of air raids or other hostile actions,” he wrote. “Particular attention is to be given to hospitals, schools, and major apartment blocks.”

The word “shelter” snagged at him.

He remembered, with a sudden, piercing clarity, his own children at that age—his eldest daughter clutching her exercise books as she’d headed off to school, his son sulking as he’d been dragged to Friday prayers. They were gone now, grown and scattered, living their lives mostly beyond his reach. He did not know, at this exact moment, if they were under someone else’s bombs, if his signatures had made them safer or painted their city into someone’s crosshairs.

His hand juddered.

The nib left a tiny blot of ink at the end of “hospitals,” a dark tear in the neat line.

He swallowed and circled it once with his thumb, smudging it slightly so it looked more like carelessness than emotional tremor.

Behind him, a phone rang again in the outer office. Voices rose and fell, the usual murmurs of complaints and petitions. Somebody laughed—a brief, incredulous sound—then cleared their throat and tried to sound serious again.

Life went on in the palace.

Inside the room, Hassan’s world contracted to the rectangle of paper and the presence of a foreign soldier watching his handwriting as if it were another type of waveform on a screen.

He wrote the third paragraph—Harker’s “confidence” requirement—last.

“Despite the current pressures being exerted on our nation by foreign propaganda and military deployments,” he penned, “I remain confident in the guidance of the Leadership and in the steadfastness of the people of Kuwait. Our duty is to ensure that, whatever storms may pass over us, the administration continues to function calmly and effectively.”

The hypocrisy of it scraped his teeth.

Calmly and effectively.

He looked at the black circle of the rifle barrel in the corner of his vision, the man by the door as still and silent as ever. He thought of Maha outside, fielding calls from Baghdad, from local officials, from worried heads of charitable committees, her pen scratching on paper as she took notes like this one would be, assuming he lived long enough to have it filed.

Calmly and effectively.

His hand shook more openly now. He forced himself to finish the sentence, to add the closing line.

“You will report your findings to this office by the end of the day.”

He set a full stop.

The pen hovered.

For half a heartbeat, he considered adding something—one extra phrase, a subtle mark that might tell some future reader that this had been written under duress. A slip of phrasing, a peculiar choice of word that only his closest staff would recognise as out of character. A seed of doubt.

Harker’s voice came, soft but very close.

“That’s enough.”

Not harsh. Not threatening. Just final.

Hassan exhaled, a small, defeated sound.

He added his name.

Not the full ornamental version with all its flourishes—“His Excellency Governor Hassan Salman al-Rashid, Representative of the Revolutionary Command Council in Kuwait”—just the functional signature he used on most internal memos: his given name and family name, the elegant swoop that tied the two together. The script wobbled at the start, then steadied, as if his hand had accepted the inevitable once more.

He set the pen down.

Harker’s gloved fingers came into his peripheral vision, pinching the top corner of the paper.

“May I?” he asked, as if courtesy were still a relevant currency in this room.

Hassan gave a jerky nod.

The Major lifted the sheet carefully, holding it by the edges to avoid smearing the still-drying ink. He turned it slightly toward the light, scanning the lines. His eyes moved steadily, taking in the date, the address, the content. At the bottom, he paused, gaze resting a moment on the signature.

He gave a single, satisfied nod.

“This will do,” he said.

He folded the paper once, neatly, crisply, then again, until it was the size of a small envelope. He did not pocket it. Instead, he moved to one of the file trays on the edge of the governor’s desk—the one marked “Outgoing / to be signed” in Maha’s tidy handwriting.

He slipped the folded memo halfway under a small stack of other documents already waiting there: a petition from a merchant, an internal budget request, a vellum-coloured briefing. From above, it looked like any other piece of paperwork temporarily homeless in an office.

“Leave it for your secretary to ‘find’ when she clears your desk,” Harker said. “Or for whomever ends up doing the post-mortem.”

Hassan flinched at the phrase.

“Post-mortem,” he repeated.

“On the administration,” Harker said, as if clarifying the scope of the autopsy. “On the occupation. On however you want to style it.”

He stepped back again, reabsorbing himself into the corner near the bookshelves. Pinner, still behind the curtain, glanced down at his jammer for a heartbeat, then up again. The man at the door remained motionless, weapon a black underscore at the edge of Hassan’s vision.

The governor looked at the “Outgoing” tray.

The folded note sat there, no different to the others, its surface unremarkable. Somewhere inside it, his hand tremor was recorded in ink: slight wavering on the date, the smudged blot by “hospitals,” the subtle flattening of his usual loops.

It would sit there until Maha came in at the end of the day—if there was an end of the day—or until some investigator with a box and a list walked through his office, emptying drawers into labelled containers.

He had just provided evidence against himself. Evidence for whichever narrative won.

Outside the office, the sounds went on.

A typist laughed at something in the corridor, quickly stifling it. Two men argued in low voices about fuel deliveries. A guard’s boots marched past, heels clicking. Telephones rang and were answered with the same weary greeting: “Office of the Governor.”

The palace continued being what it was: a working building in a city on the edge of war.

Inside, Hassan sat in the chair he’d occupied for years, behind the desk that had been his domain, surrounded by portraits and wood and leather that proclaimed his status. The carpet under his shoes was thick, the curtains heavy, the air-conditioned cool.

He had never felt more contained.

No bars. No shackles. No locked cell door.

The cage was the room itself.

The phone in front of him, the pen at his elbow, the “Outgoing” tray with its folded evidence, the list of calls he was still expected to make. His own routines, his own habits, all turned inward and locked around him by the presence of four men with guns who barely needed to move to keep him there.

He realised, with a sick little bloom of understanding, that this was the most humiliating part.

Not that foreigners had invaded his office.

That they had done it so quietly, so professionally, that from the outside, nothing looked wrong. That his own staff might pass within metres of his door all afternoon and never realise their Governor was under guard. That his signature, his voice, his handwritten memo, would be used later as proof that he had carried on faithfully until “liberation” came.

He pressed his palms flat on the blotter to stop them shaking.

“Another call?” he asked, his voice surprisingly even.

Harker nodded once.

“Yes, Governor,” he said. “Another call.”

Outside, in the hall, someone knocked lightly on the frosted glass panel and called through, deferentially, “Excellency? When you are free, there is a matter from the Ministry—”

Hassan’s eyes flicked to the muzzle by the door.

It did not move.

“We are not free,” he said quietly, more to himself than to anyone else.

Then he picked up the phone again.

---

They hit the end of the corridor like a wave that had finally found its wall.

The target access point was exactly where Intel’s sketch said it would be: a squat, institutional door set back a little from the main run, frame deeper than the others, hinges on the inside. The paint was a sickly, bureaucratic beige, scuffed at boot height, edges shiny with hundreds of hands. A metal plate bolted at eye level carried a stencilled sign in Arabic, the letters chipped and dark with age.

Kite’s brain translated it on the fly, enough to get the gist.

RECORDS / DETENTION – AUTHORIZED STAFF ONLY.

“Jackpot,” he muttered.

He reached for the handle without thinking, gloved fingers closing around the cool metal, and gave it a sharp twist.

Nothing.

The handle moved a centimetre, hit resistance, and bounced back. The door flexed in the frame with a dull thud, then settled.

“Locked,” Kite said. “Properly.”

Mick slid in on the opposite side of the frame, pressing his back into the wall so his body plugged as much of the approach as possible. His rifle stayed up, covering the corridor behind Kite.

“Of course it is,” he said dryly. “Why would today be easy.”

Ash came up behind them, boots whispering on the tiles. He glanced at the sign, then at the door, taking in hinges, latch, the faint line of light at the bottom that said there was a gap but not much of one. He put his palm flat against the panel, feeling for flex.

Solid. Reinforced, but not a vault. A determined man with the right tools could open it. The question was whether they had the time.

Behind them, Mantis held at the last corner, covering their rear. Her rifle was trained back toward the kink they’d just cleared and beyond, where the station’s front half lay. Her ears were tracking everything else.

The building was properly loud now.

Above them, footsteps thundered across the floor—a cluster of heavy boots moving in something like formation, not the casual drift of local cops. They were heading for a stairwell, the cadence of their steps clattering down from overhead and echoing along the corridor in sharp, overlapping patterns.

A radio squawked again upstairs, this time clearer, closer to some vent or open stairwell. A voice snapped something clipped: call signs, orders, *stay in position, wait for my command*.

“Reinforcements,” Mantis said. “At least eight, maybe more. Sounds like they’re hitting the opposite stair first.”

Kite put his shoulder into the door and shoved once, just to be sure.

It gave him nothing except a faint shudder and the complaint of old hinges.

“No joy,” he grunted. “Bolt’s seated.”

He looked back at Ash, already knowing what the options were and not liking any of them.

They could try to find another access point—another door, another corridor, some air duct that didn’t exist outside of movies. That would cost minutes they didn’t have. The footsteps above sounded like they were already on the move; every second they spent dithering was another second the building’s defenders had to box them in.

They could abort, fall back to the stairwell, try to melt away through the basement and out into the street. But that meant walking their route in reverse through a station that now knew something was wrong. It also meant walking away from the objective, and Ash’s orders hadn’t had much room in them for that sort of improvisation.

Or they could open the door.

“Talk to me,” Mick said quietly, eyes still on the corridor. “We’ve got about thirty seconds before whoever that is upstairs starts picking doors at random.”

Ash’s jaw flexed.

He ran through the calculations: noise, shock, overpressure, frag, structural risk, mission risk. They’d already had a firefight. The subtle part of the deception was gone on this floor; anyone within two blocks would have heard gunfire. One more hard noise inside the station wouldn’t change the narrative much. What mattered now was time.

Speed over neatness.

He dipped his head once, decision settling into place with that familiar, grim click.

“We breach,” he said. “Right here, right now.”

“On it,” Mick replied, already moving.

He slung his rifle across his chest in one practiced motion and went to his belt, fingers finding the pouch that held their breaching kit. He pulled out a flat, pre-rigged strip charge, coiled like a stiff ribbon, with adhesive squares already stuck to the underside. It was ugly and simple—nothing fancy, nothing that would impress a demo instructor—but it was designed for exactly this: doors that wanted to be in the way.

Ash stepped back half a pace, giving him space.

“Kite, cover long,” he said. “Mantis, rear and up. If anyone opens a door on us, you lean in first and ask questions later.”

“Copy,” Mantis replied.

Kite rotated, angling his rifle back down the corridor they had just advanced along, sights hovering over doorways and the distant stair mouth. He could hear the footfalls above too, the thunder growing louder as the reinforcements found the stair on the far side of the building and started down.

Mick slapped the charge onto the door in three quick motions—one pad at the latch level, two more climbing the frame in a rough inverted L. His fingers pressed each square hard into the paint, feeling for adhesion.

“Short hose,” he muttered. “Minimal, keep the overpressure down.”

He thumbed the igniter wire, checked connections with the sort of speed that came only from habit drilled to the bone.

Ash watched his hands, not because he doubted Mick, but because once they triggered this, there would be no going back.

“Back off to hard cover,” Ash said. “Sound and blast only. No frag. We don’t want to turn the target into mince.”

Mick gave a tight nod. The charge they used wouldn’t throw shrapnel, just push—the kind of door-killer that intimidated hinges and bolts rather than tearing walls down.

Above them, the boots hit the halfway landing on the other stairwell.

The sound came through the walls in a sudden flurry: heavy footfalls, a shouted command, the hollow clatter of kit. One man’s voice—authoritative, impatient—rose above the others, telling them to hold at the stair head until they knew what they were stepping into.

“Timing’s now or never,” Mantis warned.

Ash keyed the net.

“All call, blast in five,” he said. “Button up.”

They didn’t need to be told twice.

Kite dropped to one knee behind the jut of wall near the door, turning his face away and tucking his chin into his collar. Mick moved to the opposite side, hunkering down into the doorframe of the cleared office, shoulder pressed into plaster. Mantis flattened even more at the corridor bend, using the corner as both cover and brace, one hand clamping her helmet down.

Ash took the middle, one step back from the line of the door, body angled, rifle cradled into his chest with one arm while the other hand snapped the igniter.

He counted under his breath.

“Three… two…”

On “one” he closed his eyes and opened his mouth slightly, teeth unclenched—small habits that saved eardrums and sinuses.

The charge went off with a concussion that was more felt than heard.

In the confined space of the corridor, the blast was a solid punch of air. The panel bucked, a deep, bassy thump rolling through the walls. The lock area bulged inward, paint shattering into flakes; the frame spat splinters and flakes of concrete. The shock wave slapped into Ash’s chest and rattled his ribs; the pressure change squeezed his eardrums until the world turned briefly into a high, whining hiss.

The door didn’t quite fly off its hinges, but it staggered back, twisted, one edge torn from the frame. It hung canted, bottom still touching the floor, top tipped inward into the room beyond, leaving a sharp-edged gap big enough for a man to go through if he didn’t mind getting scraped.

For a heartbeat, the blast’s echo filled everything.

It roared down the corridor, up the stairwells, into the ducting, bouncing off glass and metal and bone. Together with the gunfire that had already marked this floor, it smeared all other sound into a single, bewildering bang.

“GO!” Ash barked.

The order rode the tail-end of the blast like a second charge.

Kite was up and moving before the dust had finished billowing. He hit the compromised door at an angle, grabbing the bent edge with one hand, dragging it open just enough for his body to slip through. Metal scraped tile with a scream. He ducked under the tilted top, stepping into the grey haze of the records/custody access like a man stepping through a curtain.

Inside, the light was dimmer—a couple of strip tubes flickering overhead, one buzzing with a blue-white halo around its ends. The room opened into a short corridor lined on one side with metal shelving and filing cabinets, the far end branching into a proper custody corridor: a row of barred doors, a squat desk, a radio set, a wall chart still showing last month’s duty rota.

And two men.

One was behind the desk, half-risen from his chair, eyes blown wide, right hand frozen on the radio handset, left hand on the top drawer of the desk where a pistol might live. The other was nearer, just off to Kite’s right—a corporal in rumpled fatigues who’d clearly been heading for the door when the charge went off. He was mid-step, off balance, mouth open on a curse.

Kite didn’t think.

He pivoted, rifle snapping to the nearer threat first. One round, centre chest, the man folding mid-stride, shoulder slamming the wall, legs crumpling. Kite rode the recoil, shifted aim, took the second man before he could get the handset fully to his mouth.

Two more controlled shots. One caught the guard high in the chest; the other hit the radio itself, shattering plastic, sending a burst of white noise and sparks into the air.

“Two down,” Kite snapped. “Radio trashed.”

Mick was right behind him.

He shouldered through the door gap, planting a boot on the buckled panel to kick it out of his way, and swung his weapon past Kite’s shoulder, clearing the far corners: shelving, file cabinets, the dark mouths of the holding cells down the custody corridor. No movement, no glint of another muzzle, just the static hiss of the wounded radio and the settling patter of dust.

“Left and right clear short!” he called.

Ash came in next, ducking under the warped door edge, lungs still tight from the blast. He cast one swift look around, taking in the layout, the bodies, the smoking ruin of the radio.

“Good work,” he said, all business. “Mantis, in.”

She flowed through the gap in a low crouch, flipping her NVGs back down for a second to cut through the dust haze, then up again in the harsher interior light. Her weapon tracked the holding cells—bars, bunks, shadows. A pair of wide eyes stared back at her from one of the cells, a detainee pressed against the bars, hands white-knuckled around the steel.

“Eyes on non-combatant,” she reported. “Cell three. No immediate threat.”

“Leave him,” Ash said. Their mission wasn’t prisoner extraction today—not in this building, not in this city. “We’re here for the room.”

He jerked his chin at the bank of filing cabinets and the shelf of logbooks along the wall.

This was the access point Intel had flagged: the place where movements were recorded, names written, orders filed. Take it, wreck it, or use it, depending on the wider plan.

Above them, the blast had clearly thrown the reinforcements into disarray.

The thunder of boots on the far stairwell stuttered, broke into a confused shuffle. Voices rose, overlapping—men shouting questions, someone calling down to another level to find out what had just exploded, someone else insisting on a perimeter before they charged into whatever mess was now below.

Echo did its work.

To the men upstairs, the gunfire and blast smeared together into something indistinct. Had a boiler gone? A grenade? An accident? Were their own men fighting intruders, or had someone panicked and discharged a weapon in a confined space?

The uncertainty bought Ash ten, maybe fifteen seconds where no one upstairs knew which direction to run in.

He had no intention of wasting them.

“All right,” he said, snapping his attention back to his own small world. “We’ve cracked the door. Kite, strip anything with call signs and patrol routes from that desk. Mantis, give me eyes and ears on the cell corridor; if anyone with a weapon comes through that far door, you drop them. Mick—”

He looked at his sergeant, and the unspoken part of the order moved between them like electricity.

Mick nodded once. “Copy. Once we’ve got what we need, we either disappear or dig in. No sightseeing.”

Ash took a breath that tasted of cordite, dust, and somebody else’s stale paperwork.

The building above them was still moving—boots, voices, radios—but for this sliver of time, confusion was on their side.

They’d forced the door at the hinge moment.

Now they had to decide, very quickly, whether this room would be the place they vanished from, or the place they chose to hold.

---

Rasha’s voice, when it came again, was almost delicate.

Not timid—there was nothing timid in her—but pared down. A single, careful question balanced on the edge of a breath. She picked each word like she was choosing tiles for a game she could not afford to lose.

“Imran,” she said. His name, the way she’d decided to shape it, anchoring what came next. Then a small string of Arabic, four, maybe five words, spaced evenly:

Something about *ba‘dīn*—later. Something that might have been *tirkīnī huna*—leave me here. Or maybe he was forcing those syllables onto it because he already knew what she was really asking.

Are you going to leave me here.

He didn’t understand the sentence.

He understood the question.

It was in the way her eyes held his, finally not flicking to the door or the window. It was in the particular tilt of her chin, not defiant, not pleading, just… searching. In the way her hands rested in her lap, fingers knotted together as if she were physically holding herself still while she waited for the answer.

He felt the shape of it land on his chest like another piece of kit.

He could have lied.

He could have said *la* or *naam* or any word that would translate, crudely, into reassurance. “We will take you,” or “We will send someone,” or “You will be safe here.” He could have spun a sentence out of half-remembered vocabulary, thick with promise.

He didn’t have the right to.

He did not know how this day ended—for her, for him, for any of them. He knew only his next few minutes and the rough outline of the operation that sat over all of it like a weather system.

Somewhere down in the city, someone else’s clock was ticking, and his part in that was to keep this building quiet enough to suit the story. That story might include getting out without leaving loose ends. It might not. They lived in the maybes.

Language wouldn’t save him here.

So he didn’t use it.

Slowly, making sure she could see each movement, Ivy took his left hand off the rifle. He flattened it, palm open, fingers together. He brought it in and laid it over the centre of his chest, just above the edge of his vest plates.

He pressed it there, hard enough that he could feel the thud of his own heart against the glove.

For a second he left it like that.

This is me. This is what I have.

Rasha’s eyes tracked the motion, forehead creasing.

Then he peeled his hand away.

He turned the palm outward, fingers still spread, and pushed it forward and slightly to the side, as if smoothing the air ahead of him. The gesture carried distance in it, and direction—not “go away,” but “over there.” Away from this annex, this hallway, this moment.

He kept his gaze on hers as he did it.

There was no flourish, no theatricality. Just a quiet, stubborn intent: there is a “later” that is not here. I am thinking of it. I cannot promise it, but I am pushing toward it.

He repeated the sequence: hand to heart, a firm press, then outward, the palm carrying the invisible weight of “soon” as far as he dared push it without lying with his mouth.

Heart.

Out.

Away.

He didn’t try to tack words to it. He knew if he opened his mouth, something would come out that sounded too like a promise.

Rasha watched every millimetre.

Her gaze flicked once to his hand as it left his chest, then back to his face. She was measuring, the way she had measured everything else: weapons, accents, hesitation, the angle of the rifle, the tremor in his voice when he’d said *Muslim*.

She saw the lie still lodged on his tongue. She had heard it every time he’d wielded that word as shield and key. But she also saw something else now: the strain around his eyes, the small flinch he hadn’t quite hidden when she said *Baba*, the quiet desperation in the way he kept pushing the story of mercy between them like a thin blanket against a storm.

She understood, maybe, that he was doing the worst kind of magic: trying to conjure safety out of decisions he didn’t control.

Her shoulders lifted in a shallow, careful breath.

Then she nodded. Once.

It wasn’t trust.

She wasn’t handing him that. Her eyes remained guarded, mouth still drawn in that thin, straight line. The nod was more like a transaction: I see what you are trying to do. I will take what I can from it.

What she took wasn’t his promise.

It was the calm he offered with it.

Calm was a resource. Like water, like food, like batteried torchlight in an outage. If she could borrow some from him now, sit in it like a pool of shade, she would. Even if she expected it to vanish the moment he walked out of the annex.

Her fingers, resting in her lap, unclenched slightly. The bottle at her side tipped with the shift of her leg and rolled a few centimetres, then settled. She caught it absently and set it upright again.

“Ṭayyib,” she murmured. Okay, of a sort.

Nails watched the exchange in silence.

He caught enough from the body language to read the question and the answer. He’d seen that hand-to-heart gesture before, in villages and on roadside stops from one end of the region to the other, offered by men who couldn’t share ten words between them but still needed to say, *I mean this*.

He didn’t interrupt. Not here, not now.

Instead, he let himself sink a fraction deeper into his own corner by the door, rifle steady on the gap that led out to the rest of the building. His ears tuned themselves to the soundscape again—the estate’s breathing.

A faint clatter from the main house: someone dropping a file, muttered curses. A phone ringing two rooms over, picked up on the second chime. Distant engine noise again, this time further away—traffic on a road that had nothing to do with them. Somewhere, a dog barked once, then stopped.

Inside the annex, there was the small, steady sound of Rasha’s breath, the soft creak of fabric as she adjusted the set of her shoulders, the tiny click of Ivy’s kit as he resettled his stance.

Ivy didn’t move his hand for a moment after the gesture.

He left it hovering half-out, then let it fall back to the fore-end of his rifle, fingers curling around the familiar weight. The weapon came up a degree, back into proper ready. The posture of shepherd and predator overlapped again; there wasn’t space here to separate them.

He drew in a slow breath through his nose, tasting dust and detergent and faint, old cooking in the air. Somewhere in his mouth, the word *Muslim* still sat, heavy and unresolved, a tool he’d used and hated using.

Between him and the girl on the tile sat another word: *rahma*, mercy, its shape fragile and stubborn.

He had built a thin curtain out of it in this room—stories half-remembered, gestures clumsy but sincere, water and lowered barrels. It hung there now, wavering in the currents of the wider operation.

It wouldn’t stop bullets. It wouldn’t stop orders from men who didn’t know either of their names.

But it did this: it turned an annex, briefly, from a clean sweep problem in a mission plan into a place where a frightened child could sit, hands in her lap, and not scream.

Outside, the occupation shifted and murmured, engines and boots and radios grinding on.

Inside, the two SAS men listened—to the building, to the estate, to the ticking clock of someone else’s war—while a girl who did not trust them sat very still and accepted, for now, the only currency they could offer that felt even partly honest.

Calm.