The world tears open. Freefall snaps into controlled descent. Wind screams past my ears. The ground rushes up in a blur of shadow and stone. My chute blooms, hard and clean. I steer toward the ridge line and hit the slope in a roll that rattles my teeth.
The night swallows me whole.
Static crackles in my ear.
“Ghost-Thirteen on ground,” I whisper.
No reply.
I advance toward the last known position, shadow to shadow, ridge to ridge. The air smells like cold iron and dust. Somewhere in the distance, faint voices drift on the wind — too casual to be patrols. A camp.
Through my scope, I catch movement near a ravine. Heat signatures cluster around scattered equipment. One of the shapes is different. Restrained. Knees pulled tight. Head slumped but familiar.
Elias.
My breath goes shallow. I mark targets. Count pulses. The men around him carry rifles slung careless at their sides. They think the mountain belongs to them.
It doesn’t.
I relocate immediately. My rounds walk the perimeter with surgical calm. One by one, heat signatures vanish. The last man bolts for cover. I catch him mid-stride and cut him down.
Silence crashes back in like a held breath finally released.
I move fast now, sliding down toward the ravine. Elias lifts his head when I reach him. Blood streaks along his temple. His eyes find mine. For a moment, the entire war disappears.
“Hell of a spotter,” he rasps.
I cut him free. “You’re lucky I like dramatic entrances.”
We don’t linger. We ghost uphill, using the same shadows we always use, moving like the mountain itself shifts to hide us. A drone hum whines faintly above the clouds — searching. Blind.
By the time extraction smoke blooms in the distance, my muscles are screaming and my lungs are on fire. We reach the ridge as the rotor wash tears the dust into a frenzy.
Back at base, everything happens at once. Medics swarm Elias. Hail pulls me aside. “Your father is in containment briefing. He knows now. All of it.”
I nod. My hands shake for the first time since the mission begins.
“He wants to see you.”
The room where they hold him is smaller than the auditorium. No stage. No audience. Just a table and a man who looks like the weight of the world finally finds his spine.
“You built a weapon out of my daughter,” he says without preamble.
“They built a soldier,” I correct gently. “I chose what to become.”
He looks at me like he doesn’t know the person standing in front of him. Maybe he finally doesn’t.
“I tried to protect you,” he says.
“I know,” I reply. “But you only protected the version of me you could control.”
Silence stretches again. Different now. Not thick. Just heavy with truth.
He exhales slowly. “They feared a Ghost-Thirteen for years. I never imagined I was raising her.”
“You weren’t,” I say. “You were raising Lucia. She just learned to survive another way.”
His eyes shine with something he’s never allowed himself before. Fear. Pride. Both at once.
“You saved a man tonight,” he says quietly.
“I do it all the time,” I answer.
He shakes his head. “No. You brought him back alive. That’s different.”
When I leave the room, the corridor no longer feels like a cage. It feels like a threshold.
Elias waits for me in recovery, his head wrapped in white gauze, eyes sharp with mischief. “So,” he says, “did the general survive the revelation?”
“He’s still breathing,” I reply. “Barely.”
Elias chuckles, then winces. “Worth it?”
I think of the mountains. The ravine. The moment his eyes meet mine through blood and shadow. I think of a lifetime of secrets finally colliding.
“Yes,” I say. “For the first time… yes.”
Outside, dawn begins to creep over the base, washing steel and concrete in pale gold. For the first time in my life, I stand in the open with both of my names intact.
Lucia.
Ghost-Thirteen.
And neither of them is invisible anymore.
