Ivan and Danny arrived at Main Base two days later, transferred in under orders that used the phrase "temporary reassignment pending review" without specifying whose review it actually was. I found out they'd arrived twenty minutes before they were both scheduled to sit down separately with Major Voss, which gave me exactly enough time to intercept them in the hallway outside his office and absolutely no time to actually prepare either of us for what was coming.
"You look like shit," Ivan said, pulling me into a hug so fast and so hard it nearly knocked the wind out of me, the familiar smell of gun oil and whatever cheap soap the base still stocked hitting me all at once, grounding in a way nothing had in days.
"Thanks. You too."
"We heard everything," Danny said, once Ivan let go, his usual easy grin nowhere in sight. "Or — some of it. Enough to know it's bad. Command wouldn't say much, just that Voss wanted to talk to us about your service record."
"Don't tell him anything about my ability," I said, low and fast, before either of them could ask more, glancing once toward Voss's closed office door like he might already be listening through it. "Not the real version. Whatever he asks, however he asks it — you don't know anything you haven't already heard officially. Short-range teleportation. That's it. That's all it's ever been, as far as either of you know."
Ivan's jaw tightened. "Johnathan. We've kept your secret for three years. You think we're going to hand it over to some paper-pushing major with a grudge?"
"I think Voss is good at his job, and his job is finding cracks in people who think they're solid. I just need you both to know how much this actually matters before you walk in there. He asks questions three different ways until something slips. He did it to me at a ceremony without me even realizing what he was doing until he was already gone."
Danny put a hand on my shoulder, steady in a way that reminded me suddenly, painfully, of the three of us huddled behind a garbage container watching a woman die because we hadn't been strong enough yet to save her. We'd come so far since then. It didn't always feel like it.
"We've got you," Danny said. "Same as always. You think three years of keeping this quiet just evaporates because some guy in a fancier uniform asks nicely?"
"I know you'll try. I just need you both to actually understand what's at stake, not just say the reassuring thing."
"We understand," Ivan said, quieter now, some of the bravado draining out into something more solid underneath. "We understood the second we got the transfer orders. You think we didn't put it together?"
They went in one at a time — Ivan first, at Danny's insistence, since Danny claimed he'd "rather go second and know what to expect," which fooled exactly nobody, least of all Ivan, who squeezed my shoulder once before disappearing through Voss's door with his jaw already set.
I wasn't allowed to sit in on either interview, which meant I spent the better part of two hours pacing the hallway outside Voss's office, counting floor tiles, reading the same recruitment poster on the wall so many times I could have recited it from memory, imagining every possible way it could go wrong. Danny sat on a bench against the wall, one leg bouncing, refusing to look anywhere near the door like staring at it might jinx whatever was happening on the other side of it.
"You think he's got a recorder in there?" Danny asked, at one point, apropos of nothing.
"Probably."
"You think that matters? Like — legally?"
"I don't know, Danny. I'm not a lawyer."
"You've got a lawyer now, though. Fancy. Ask her."
"I will, when this isn't currently happening."
Danny huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh, more just air escaping the tension building in his chest, and went back to staring at a point on the wall that had nothing interesting on it at all.
Ivan finally emerged looking pale and furious in equal measure.
"He knows how to ask a question three different ways until you slip," Ivan said, once we were far enough down the hall that no one would overhear. "Asked me about the warehouse mission for twenty minutes straight, then randomly pivoted to 'so what exactly does short-range teleportation look like, from an outside perspective, when you've watched it happen.' I told him it looks fast and I've never studied it closely enough to describe better than that. He didn't like the answer. Wrote something down anyway."
"What else did he ask?"
"Whether you'd ever shown any ability that seemed inconsistent with teleportation. Whether you'd ever explained the mechanics of it to me in detail. Whether I'd ever seen you use it at range instead of close quarters." Ivan's hands were shaking, just slightly, adrenaline with nowhere left to go. "He's not fishing randomly, Johnathan. He's got a specific theory. He just doesn't have proof of it yet."
Danny came out ten minutes after him, jaw tight, and confirmed roughly the same experience — circling questions, sudden pivots, an obvious hunger for any detail that didn't quite match the official record.
"He's building something," Danny said. "I don't know what yet. But he's not just chasing the warehouse anymore. He's fishing for your actual power. Asked me point blank at one point whether I thought it was possible you'd been holding back your real capabilities this whole time. I told him every soldier holds something back in a fight. He didn't seem satisfied with that either."
"You didn't confirm anything."
"Of course we didn't." Danny looked almost offended at the suggestion. "But he's smart, and he's patient, and eventually smart and patient wins against nothing but silence. You need a plan that's better than just hoping we all keep saying nothing forever."
I didn't have one yet. I didn't say that out loud.
That night, the three of us and Ash — smuggled in against every rule about visiting hours, because Emma had pulled strings I didn't ask too many questions about — sat crowded into my small room, eating cold rations and pretending for an hour that none of the last three years had happened. Ash had grown at least an inch since I'd last seen him, filling out from the workouts I'd taught him, a new confidence in the way he carried himself that made something in my chest ache with pride and guilt in equal measure.
"When are you coming back to the base?" Ash asked, halfway through a container of crackers he was demolishing at a truly impressive pace.
"When this is over," I said. "Hopefully soon."
"You said that last time too."
"I know, bud."
"Are you actually in trouble, or is it grown-up trouble that's not really trouble, like when Mark got yelled at for the generator?"
Ivan actually laughed at that, a real one, some of the tension bleeding out of the room for the first time all evening. "Kid's got a point. What kind of trouble are we talking, Johnathan? Generator trouble, or actual trouble?"
"Somewhere in between," I admitted, and Ash's face scrunched up in the particular way that meant he was working very hard to translate that into something a nine-year-old's version of the world could hold. "I did something I shouldn't have. Now some people are trying to figure out exactly how bad it was."
"Was it a bad thing, though? Like, a bad-bad thing?"
I thought about the crystal weapons still sealed in that basement, the choice I'd made to protect people instead of protecting my own record. "No. I don't think so. But I understand why it looks bad from the outside."
Ash considered this with the total seriousness only a kid could manage over a mouthful of crackers, then nodded like he'd settled the matter for good. "Okay. I believe you. Emma says I'm not allowed to say that to anyone else though."
"Smart rule," Danny said.
"When are you gonna teach me the gun stuff again?" Ash pressed on, already moving past the heavy subject with the resilience only kids seemed to keep intact this deep into the apocalypse. "You said after the last leave, and then there wasn't a next leave for a while."
"Soon as I'm allowed back on the range," I promised, and meant it, some of the weight in my chest easing at the simple, uncomplicated want in his voice — not a question about ranks or inquiries, just a kid who wanted his brother's attention.
"Emma says you're in trouble."
"Emma talks too much," I said, but there was no heat in it.
"I'm allowed to," Emma said, from where she was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, having stayed silent through most of the reunion but watching me with an intensity I recognized — the same look she'd had the day I told her about the tier four in the warehouse. "You could have told me about the weapons cache."
"I couldn't tell anyone."
"I'm not anyone."
"I know that," I said, more sharply than I meant to, and immediately regretted the edge in it. Softer: "I know that, Emma. That's not what I meant."
"Then what did you mean?"
The room went quiet for a second too long, Ivan and Danny suddenly very focused on their rations, Ash oblivious, still chewing crackers, oblivious in the specific, blessed way of a kid who hadn't yet learned to read tension in a room the way the rest of us had been forced to.
"You're right," I said finally, quiet enough that it felt like it was only for her. "I should have told you. I keep telling myself I was protecting people by keeping quiet, and maybe that's even true, but it's also just easier. Not telling you means I don't have to watch your face while I explain why I made that call. I'm sorry."
Emma's arms uncrossed, just slightly, something in her shoulders softening even as her eyes stayed fixed on mine. "I don't need you to protect me from your own decisions, Johnathan. I need you to trust me with them. There's a difference, and I think you already know that."
"I do."
"Good. Don't make me say it again."
Whatever she'd been about to say next got swallowed by a sharp knock at the door — one of the perimeter runners, out of breath, face pale in the low light of the hallway.
"Sir — sorry, Corporal — we've got contact reports coming in from the western checkpoint. Multiple armed hostiles, organized, moving fast. Command's calling it a possible large-scale incursion."
Ivan and Danny were already on their feet. Emma's hand found the hilt of the ice-formed blade she always kept sheathed at her hip. I felt the old, familiar cold drop into my stomach, the one that came right before everything got very loud very fast.
"Free faction?" I asked, already reaching for the deagles I kept within arm's reach even off duty, some habits too deep to unlearn no matter how many times command told me I was benched.
"Looks that way, Corporal. A lot more of them than we've seen hit us before. Perimeter's requesting every able body, benched or not — this isn't a drill."
I looked at Ash, small and suddenly frightened again despite how much he'd grown, and thought about Silas Kane's voice on the highway telling me this wasn't over, and understood with a sick certainty that whatever was coming through that western checkpoint, it was about to make the last three weeks of political maneuvering look very, very small by comparison. Whatever this was, it wasn't going to wait for any of us to finish being afraid first — least of all a corporal technically suspended from duty, standing in a doorway with a deagle already in each hand.