I turn my head to the left, watching a tall, thin man walk towards me. This guy is new around here. Desmond. He’s the field medic for the Rangers, and we were introduced after I got shot.

“Got yourself shot, did you?” he had asked me.

Long, shaggy hair fell to his shoulders, matted into dreadlocks. A dull green bandana was tied around his forehead, setting off a weathered, middle-aged face and unkempt beard.

“Yeah,” I gritted out, wincing with pain.

“Well, let’s see what we can do about that.” He took a long look at the wound, probing and investigating and opening up his medical bag. “You’re a lucky lady. Bullet went clean through. If it would have hit a major organ you could be dead right now. That’d be a buzz kill.”

Yeah. Because I’d be dead.

“You’re lucky,” he repeated, setting to work. Cleaning it, closing it. Some medical stuff I wasn’t really aware of. At that point I was more than a bit delusional and exhausted after surviving the ambush.

“You’ll live,” he said simply. “It could have been worse.”

Yeah, yeah.

And now he walks up to me, checking my condition. I’ve improved rapidly since he initially treated the injury, and besides some intense soreness, I don’t have anything to complain about. He was right. It could have been worse.

“Status report?” he says, grinning wryly.

“Alive and somewhat operational.”

“Good to hear. Let’s check and make sure those stitches are good…” He does a quick recheck of the wound, nods, and looks me in the eye. “You bounce back quick.”

“Thanks,” I smile.

Chris says nothing, but the worry lines around his eyes relax a little.

“Stay gold, kid,” Desmond says.

He’s so full of wisdom.

I bite my lip, turning back to Chris. Focusing on the situation at hand.

“How could my dad just leave me?” I whisper, frustrated. Hurt. Confused.

Ticked off.

“He has a militia to command,” Chris replies, helping me to my feet. “Your dad couldn’t just abandon them and run after you.”

“Oh, that’s nice. He finally finds me and then dumps me when I’m bleeding to death,” I say. “What a great guy.”

Chris rolls his eyes.

We’re slowly starting to move again, tracking our way up the side of the hill, away from the foothills. Because I was unconscious and delirious when we fled the ambush, I have no memory of how we arrived in the forest. We must have ditched our vehicles at some point, because the last thing I recall is being pulled out of the cab of a pickup…and then I saw my father’s face…and the next thing I know, I’m waking up in the middle of the mountains.

“That’s not how I meant it, and you know it,” he answers, keeping one arm under my shoulders to steady me. “He’ll meet up with us as soon as we reach the RV point with the others.”

I nod.

I’m not an idiot. I know this is how warfare works. You look after your men first, and then you worry about emotions and relationships. But still. That doesn’t ease the sting of knowing that my father was this close and he took off.

Such is the way of war, I suppose.

Maybe Chris senses my discomfort, because he presses a quick kiss against my temple, whispering, “Let it go. Focus your energy on staying in the game. He’ll be back. He’s just doing his job.”

“Right, right.”

We continue to move stealthily through the woods, moving towards our emergency rendezvous point little by little. It’s a pain in the butt to try to walk uphill when you’re recovering from an injury like I am. What usually wouldn’t make you break a sweat becomes a challenge.

I struggle along, sweating with the effort. My clothes are heavy and itchy. After several hours, I stop and place my hands on my knees, breathing hard.

“It’s okay,” I murmur, “I’ll just stay here. Take a nap…”

Words of a true warrior, I know.

But I do need to rest. I may bounce back quickly, but I’m still human.

Flashes of the ambush flit through my mind:

Screaming, crying, blood, detonations. Kamaneva, a wicked expression on her face right before she shot me. Harry Lydell, smug as he watched everything go down. As his betrayal lured good people to their deaths. The numbing punch of being hit by a bullet. Me telling Chris I loved him, because let’s face it — I thought we were going to die. And then my father…a short glimpse of his face before the world went black and I fell into the no-go zone of unconsciousness.

I exhale sharply.

I don’t want to think about that right now. I have to stay focused. I have to stay alive. The rendezvous point isn’t too far from here, and once we reach it, we can rest and figure out what we’re going to do. We can’t go back to basecamp… Harry Lydell blabbed the location to Omega. What are we going to do with our militia?

Set up tents next to the creek and start prospecting for gold?

Not a foolproof strategy.

I glance at Derek and Sophia, moving a couple hundred feet ahead of our platoon. They’re keeping low to the ground, quiet. Scouting far enough ahead to warn us of any impending danger that our scouts might have missed — not that that’s a likely scenario, because our scouts are awesome. It’s merely a precaution. The rest of our group is silent, pensive. Exhausted but trudging onward, because we’re almost there.

I curl my fingers against the palms of my hands, watching Sophia walk. Her head is bent, her lips are pursed. Her face is emotionless. Steely. Others are moving with a reserved, hollow expression on their faces. Some appear angry, some appear frightened.

It’s what you can expect in the aftermath of what we’ve been through.

Up ahead, our scouts walk towards us, slipping out of the dark undergrowth of the forest. They appear out of nowhere, like shadows. It would be frightening if they weren’t on our side. One of the scouts exchanges a few words with Chris, and he signals to Sophia and Derek.

We must be there.

I tilt my head. Chris stops, a deep sigh escaping his lips.

“Finally,” he mutters.

At the top of the slope, a familiar face is peering at me.

“Cassidy, are you okay?” Isabel says.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I answer.

And that’s the truth. For now.

I’m lying with my head propped up against a bedroll, my feet on Chris’s lap. Isabel, twelve years old, blonde and blue-eyed, is combing the hair away from my face. “I thought for sure you were dead,” she says, braiding some of my strands together. “I was so worried. Everybody was.”

“Well… we’re all okay,” I say.

Lie. Some of us aren’t okay. Some of us are dead.

The rendezvous point is a high spot on the side of a mountain, hidden by a massive rock cliff. The other half is a steep, brushy slope. The one we just climbed up. We can see the enemy approaching long before they get here. A definite plus. We’ve been storing ammunition and supplies here for months. I’d hoped we’d never have to use it.

“Good to see you made it out alive,” says a familiar, gravelly voice.

Alexander Ramos. He’s limping towards us, a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. But he’s still walking and talking, so that’s a good sign.

“You too,” Chris replies, swapping handshakes. “Thanks for getting my family here safely.”

Chris’s parents barely escaped the basecamp after the ambush. While I was unconscious, our platoons returned to the camp and evacuated the women and children there. We separated our platoons into two sections to avoid detection, and the Young family went with Alexander’s group. Chris wanted them to reach the rendezvous point as soon as possible — even before we did — so he sent them ahead with Alexander.

“Cassidy,” Alexander nods. “I heard you got shot.”

“You heard right.”

“Well.” He pauses. “Stay alive.”