Page 39 of Ember Rising

I’m the only one who lived, and everything I do is in their honor.

“If you want to take a sleep shift, you should do it here,” I offer.

“I’m fine, but you need sleep.”

“No, I’m good.”

Even in the dark, I know what look she’s giving me—the furrowed-brow okay, motherfucker, let’s fight about it one. She surprises me, though.

“Okay, we’ll keep going,” she says. “My feet don’t even hurt and the wet socks aren’t really bugging me.”

Her tone tells me she’s full of shit, but the one thing we have in common is stubbornness. If she thinks I’ll be the first one to admit I need sleep, she’s wrong.

“Yeah, same,” I say. “But we’ll have to stop at some point to dry our socks so we don’t get trench foot.”

“We could do that here and you can get some sleep, too.”

My pride answers without any input from my brain. “Nah, let’s get in a few more hours.”

I lead the way, wishing for some of the night vision equipment I used to take for granted—or, even better, my squad members.

We did an op in Asia once, and things went bad, so we had to pivot. That meant more than a week of trudging through thick, deep swampland. We couldn’t start fires and we had to strictly ration the water we had. Every one of us was admitted to the hospital once we got out.

Failure wasn’t an option, though. Not then, and not now. Not ever.

I’m the last surviving member of SEAL Team Three. I’ll rest when the job is done.

13

“Really? You think I need an anger management class? They can call it ‘mindset management’, but I know what it is. So now not only am I wasting valuable time waiting on this new partner to get here, I’m getting lectures on impulse control every day. A man who makes quick decisions is decisive, but a woman who does is a loose cannon?” Decoded message from ILF undercover operative Nightingale to ILF handler Hiro Tanaka

Evander

Six Years Ago

The knot in my stomach loosens just a little when I walk into our squad meeting room and find Theo.

He’s sitting in a chair, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. The world is ending, so there’s an endless list of reasons he could be sitting that way.

“Hey,” I say.

“Don’t come any closer.” His words are tense and measured; he’s in pain.

Fuck. We can’t lose another member of our team. Especially not Theo. He’s our leader. Every day of the past couple of weeks, things have gotten progressively worse, but Theo’s our squad’s backbone. A virus that seems to have taken the entire world by surprise is killing people faster than anything science has ever seen before.

For a couple of days, countries scrambled to lay blame. Why, I don’t know. As someone with a fairly high security clearance, I know the US had gotten zero intelligence about this virus when it hit. Our CIA thinks it started here, but no one really knows.

It didn’t take long for fault to become a moot point. By the time airline travel was stopped, the virus already had enough of a foothold to spread its deadly tentacles into every crevice of the globe.

Finally, the entire world agrees on something: we’re fucked.

“I’ve got it,” Theo says.

Time slows. Not Theo. He’s invincible to me.

My younger brother Isaiah is one of the Marines who was immediately sent into quarantine when the virus came. He’s the only family I have left, and he’s safe. I’ve lost half of my eight-member SEAL squad, though. There hasn’t been time to process it because we’re trying to save enough people to keep the government intact.

“You’re sure?” I ask.