They planted the charges together. Grace wired the detonators and then, without ceremony, set the small device to echo toward the guard tower — not to kill, but to collapse the ladder so no reinforcements could climb down. It was a quiet violence, precise and surgical.

As dawn crested the ridgeline, they moved. The enemy, distracted by the explosion, funneled away from the tower and toward the compound in a predictable swell. Hale and Grace slipped through a seam in the chaos and, beneath the first pale light, reached friendly territory — a line of scrub and a radio humming with a frequency she’d hacked earlier that night.

She keyed the mic. Static bit the air. “Command, this is Lieutenant Morgan,” she said. “Colonel Hale is with me. Alpha team—”

Voices answered like relief. Helicopters were inbound within the hour. The massacre would not be televised. The enemy would have their narrative interrupted by the quiet fact of a colonel walking away with a lieutenant at his side.

When the choppers came, the colonel saluted with a smile that trembled. “You made a choice,” he said to her as the chopper lifted, the desert shrinking below them. “You made the right one.”

Grace watched the compound blur into a smear of earth and ember. She’d gone in alone and come out with one life more than the enemy had planned to collect. The world would call it a rescue. In the quiet of the chopper, the truth was simpler: she had refused to wait. She had drawn a line. And in the small, private ledger of what soldiers did for one another, she had paid the price and been paid back in honor.

Below, in the sand, a compound continued to burn. Above, the sun rose on a decision that would be told many ways and in many voices. Grace closed her eyes and let the air rush over her face. In the end, all that mattered was that a commander lived to tell the story — and that a lieutenant had chosen not to let the darkness win.