Ethan looked at the man across the table.
“Three years ago, you erased my team because you said exposure would endanger survivors and families. I accepted it because I believed one of my men died buying the rest of us time. If you’re about to tell me you hid something else behind that reason, you are going to look me in the face when you do it.”
The suited man slowly withdrew his hand.
“I need to make a call.”
He left the room.
Ethan sat.
His hands were shaking now.
The commanding officer poured a glass of water and placed it beside him.
Ethan did not touch it.
“You knew me,” he said.
The officer leaned against the table.
“At the ceremony?”
“You paused before the fifth name.”
The officer looked away.
“I knew there were irregularities in the unit history. I did not know the full operation.”
“But you recognized me.”
“I recognized your face from an old personnel image that no longer links to an active record.”
Ethan closed his eyes.
That hurt more than he expected.
Proof that fragments of him survived everywhere, disconnected enough that no one was allowed to assemble them into a person.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I was standing in front of families at a memorial and had no authority to improvise classified history.”
Ethan opened his eyes.
“Fair.”
It was the first fair answer he had received that day.
The suited man returned forty minutes later with authorization for a limited read-in.
The families were kept outside. The room emptied except for Ethan, the commanding officer, the legal officer, and the man from the compartmented program.
The folder opened again.
The first pages were familiar enough to make Ethan’s stomach turn.
Maps.
Timelines.
Movement windows.
Then casualty notes.
Then an extraction summary he had never seen.
He read the first paragraph.
Stopped.
Read it again.
“No.”
The suited man said nothing.
Ethan’s finger followed a line across the page.
The sixth operator had not been recovered with the main team.
That part he knew.
What he did not know was that a separate surveillance element detected movement near the burn site fourteen hours later.
A rescue team found one man alive.
Severe burns.
Smoke injury.
Multiple fractures.
No identification on his body.
The extraction had been handled through a different compartment because the sixth operator’s presence on the mission itself was protected by a separate program.
Ethan pushed the page away.
