"It's getting worse." | Captain John Price

The day had done nothing to earn a place in Price’s memory. No shots fired. No alarms. No hurried voice over an encrypted line telling him that somebody important had miscalculated and Task Force 141 was expected to make the arithmetic come out clean. The weather had been indecisive since morning, rain thinning to mist and gathering again against the base windows until the glass looked permanently smeared with gray. Inside, fluorescent lights hummed over concrete, damp jackets, drying boots, weapons laid open for maintenance, cables curling between chargers, and mugs containing varying stages of coffee abuse. The place smelled of gun oil, fabric detergent, tobacco brought in from outside, black coffee, wet concrete and the stale heat of radiators that seemed to possess only two settings: dead and vindictive. Price had claimed the end of the briefing table hours ago, broad shoulders bent slightly over an intelligence packet that had grown less interesting with every page. His sleeves were pushed to his forearms. A pen rested between scarred fingers. The coffee beside his hand had gone cold long enough ago that drinking it now would have been an act of stubbornness rather than appetite, which meant he would probably finish it. There were worse habits. Several of them belonged to people currently in the room.

Ghost had made himself part of the architecture near one wall, all black tactical fabric, gloves, broad stillness and the pale obscenity of the skull mask, saying nothing because there was nothing requiring speech. Gaz sat nearer the table, steady and composed, warm brown eyes occasionally leaving whatever occupied him to track the room with the same quiet thoroughness he brought to an operation. Mutt was present farther off, dark gear and worn rings catching scraps of fluorescent light, the black mask he favored turning his already controlled presence into something vaguely feral without requiring him to perform for the effect. {{user}} belonged to the same loose constellation of 141 personnel within Price’s awareness, present enough to be included automatically in the silent inventory he had been making for so many years that he no longer noticed himself doing it.

People liked to imagine command was strategy maps, clipped orders and decisions made under gunfire. Most days it was counting. Who was here. Who was missing. Who had eaten. Who had slept. Who was carrying an injury badly enough to hide it. Who had gone quiet. Who was one bad decision from becoming paperwork. Price counted people because bodies were easier to bring home while they were still names rather than numbers, and because somewhere along the line responsibility had stopped being something he carried and become the shape of his spine.

Two were absent.

Roach had vanished sometime after breakfast, which did not qualify as an emergency where Gary Sanderson was concerned. The man had a gift for finding parts of buildings that everyone else had mistaken for structural features. Maintenance shafts, access ladders, roof spaces, unfinished crawlways, the dark strip behind industrial equipment, overhead platforms that sensible adults looked at and saw a fall hazard while Roach apparently saw a chair. He was quiet, not mute; Price had heard enough people make that mistake once before Roach corrected it with one soft sentence sharp enough to leave the room reconsidering its assumptions. Most of the time he simply had nothing worth adding. He watched, moved, filled angles other men forgot, and somehow managed to disappear without ever becoming absent. Soap, after discovering Roach had failed to materialize for the better part of an hour, had gone looking for him with the sort of cheerful determination usually associated with retrieving a dog from beneath furniture. That had been some time ago. Price checked his watch, looked once toward the corridor, then back at the report.

"Five more minutes and I start charging MacTavish rent for wherever the pair of them have crawled into."

Gaz glanced over, the corner of his mouth pulling upward. "Think Roach pays by square footage?"

"Sanderson would owe about thirty pence."

Ghost’s voice came low from the wall. "Soap’ll owe for damages."

Price grunted. "That’s assuming he hasn’t blown a hole through something to improve access."

There was a pause, and then, faintly from somewhere beyond the room, the unmistakable sound of Soap arguing with somebody who had contributed almost nothing to the argument.

"Found you."

Roach answered too quietly for Price to catch the first words.

Soap’s reply arrived clearly. "Mate, if I have to look up to find you, you’re hiding."

A moment later the sound of boots approached, one stride carrying enough energy to announce itself and the other so economical Price noticed it mostly because he knew to listen. The door opened. Soap came through with one arm hooked securely around Roach’s shoulders, hauling him into the room with the easy physical familiarity of a man who had never quite accepted that personal space was more than a tactical recommendation. Johnny’s mohawk was as unmistakable as ever, dark against the ugly overhead light; his blue eyes were bright with the private victory of having successfully located an operative who had presumably not wanted locating, his body all compact restless energy even while walking at Roach’s slower pace. Roach tolerated the arm with the still patience of someone fully capable of escaping it and apparently unwilling to expend the effort. Goggles rested up rather than over his brown eyes, his brown hair flattened and disordered beneath where his gear had been, his lean frame balanced despite Soap leaning across him. One scarred hand held part of his kit. The other remained free. Price knew that detail because Price noticed free hands.

Soap gave Roach a jostle as they crossed the threshold. "Recovered your missing man."

Roach turned his eyes toward him. "Wasn’t missing."

"You were above the corridor."

"Better angle."

"That doesn’t make it less weird."

"Worked."

Gaz’s smile appeared properly then.

Ghost’s mask turned a few degrees.

Mutt remained where he was.

Price looked up from the paperwork, already forming some dry remark about putting tracking collars on the pair of them, and saw two dead men.

The thought came afterward.

The sight came first.

Soap’s arm was still around Roach. The posture did not change. Neither man moved. Yet in the fraction of time between one heartbeat and the next, the two figures standing in the doorway belonged to another room, another year, another life Price had never lived and knew with the intimacy of scar tissue. Johnny’s face changed beneath the familiar cut of the mohawk. The resemblance was not enough to explain what Price felt. It was not the ordinary jolt of seeing a stranger whose eyes or jaw reminded him of someone else. This man was different. A different face beneath the same callsign, younger somewhere and older somewhere else, rendered in the rougher lines of memory and older tactical equipment. The webbing across his chest was wrong. His uniform was wrong. His rifle was wrong. Everything was dated by years that should have belonged to somebody else’s service record. But Price knew the man with immediate, impossible certainty.

Soap.

Not a Soap.

Soap.

John MacTavish.

Sergeant first.

Captain later.

His.

The last word entered Price’s mind without permission, stripped of sentimentality and therefore worse for it. His soldier. His responsibility. His problem. His pride. A man whose tendency to run toward the center of a problem had once inspired equal measures of fury and confidence in him. Price knew how that other MacTavish took corners. He knew the pitch his breathing reached after a hard sprint. He knew how long he could be trusted before improvisation became inevitable. He knew the cadence of his voice over a radio he had never heard.

Roach changed beside him.

The alteration was somehow quieter. Another uniform over the same idea of a man. Older tactical gear, heavier layers, goggles that seemed more immediately part of him than face or expression, the silhouette of an operator moving somewhere in the margins of Price’s memory. The current Gary Sanderson was still there beneath it and not there at all. Price knew the callsign before language could catch up.

Roach.

Gary Sanderson.

Snow struck Price across the face.

He did not move.

The safehouse remained around him, fluorescent light, wet windows, gray table, cold coffee, while another landscape drove itself through all of it. White mountain. White sky. Rotor wash lifting snow into hard spirals. A radio hissing against his ear. Breath condensed in front of him. His fingers were cold inside gloves he was not wearing. Ahead, Soap moved through the snow in older kit, rifle ready, and Roach crossed farther to one side, choosing an angle Price somehow knew before the man took it.

Left.

Roach moved left.

Price knew he would.

The certainty was so absolute his stomach tightened.

There were men ahead. An objective. A route over terrain Price had never walked and could have drawn from memory if someone put a map beneath his hand. Static cracked. Someone answered a command.

His command.

The sound of Price’s own voice came distorted through a headset belonging to another year.

The vision broke.

Soap and Roach stood inside the base.

Nothing had changed. Soap’s arm remained around Gary’s shoulders. Gary’s goggles were pushed up. Rain still worried faintly at the windows. Perhaps a second had passed.

Price stared.

Soap’s expression shifted first beneath the scrutiny, amusement giving way to uncertainty. "Cap?"

Price’s pen had stopped against the paper. He looked at Johnny’s current face, and for the second time that morning the world slipped sideways.

This time it did not scatter.

Concrete replaced the base walls. Damp air settled cold against Price’s skin. Somewhere beyond a corridor, automatic fire snapped between alarms and shouted orders. Soap stood before him in older tactical gear, the same mohawk above a different face, older than the sergeant Price had first glimpsed in that impossible burst of snow. Authority sat differently on him now. Captain.

A cell door stood open between them.

Price was inside it.

Exhaustion lived all the way down to his bones. Weeks or months of confinement had hollowed him out beneath grime and bruises, muscle pulled lean, old pain layered beneath newer pain. Soap stared at him from the other side as though he had crossed half the world to reach that door.

A designation rose with the certainty of his own name.

Prisoner 627.

Then it was gone.

The base returned around Price in one hard piece.

Soap stood where he had been standing.

Alive. Present. Watching him.

Price’s mouth had gone dry. He drew a deliberate breath through his nose.

Migraine. Sleep deprivation. Delayed concussion. Blood pressure. Chemical exposure.

Any of them would do.

The human brain was electrical meat with ambitions, perfectly capable of humiliating its owner without warning. Price had watched excellent soldiers lose words after impacts they swore were nothing, hallucinate after days without proper sleep, become disoriented from dehydration severe enough that their own names briefly became difficult questions. There were explanations for visual disturbances. Medical explanations. Useful explanations. Things that showed up on scans and came with treatment protocols.

"Captain?"

Soap again.

Price set the pen down. "Fine."

It was not his best lie.

Ghost’s head turned.

Price looked toward him.

The medical explanations became considerably less comforting.

Simon’s current skull mask was gone.

An older one covered his face instead, a skull-patterned balaclava drawn close beneath dark sunglasses, the equipment around him belonging to the same impossible period as Soap’s. Beside him stood Roach in the older kit Price had already seen.

Then the room around them darkened.

A field.

Night.

The operation was already over.

Price did not see the betrayal begin. He arrived inside the memory after the important part had happened, which somehow made it worse.

General Shepherd stood over them.

The name entered Price with immediate hatred.

Ghost lay on the ground.

Roach beside him.

Neither moved.

Petrol soaked tactical fabric.

Price knew, before the flame appeared, what was going to happen.

Fire caught across Roach first and climbed hungrily over the bodies, orange spilling across Ghost’s pale skull while smoke rolled upward into the dark. The smell came with it: fuel, burned fabric, something sweeter beneath it that Price’s mind refused to identify.

Shepherd.

Betrayal.

Ghost.

Roach.

Dead.

The knowledge carried no freshness. It did not feel like discovering that two men were going to die.

It felt like remembering that they already had.

Price blinked.

Ghost stood against the wall again in his current mask.

Roach stood beside Soap.

Alive.

Both of them.

His pulse struck harder.

Ghost’s voice came quietly from behind the mask. "Price."

Price turned away.

Gaz was already looking at him.

Kyle Garrick disappeared.

There was no gradual alteration this time, nothing linking the man sitting before him to the one memory placed in his position.

The other Gaz was simply someone else.

White. Different face. Different build. Older SAS kit. A voice Price somehow knew without hearing it.

Gaz.

Years of trust arrived compressed into the name.

Then came a bridge.

Smoke crawled across shattered concrete. Price was on the ground, pain tearing through a body that presently sat uninjured in a safehouse. His pistol lay beyond his reach. Imran Zakhaev stood through the haze.

Gaz was nearby.

The other Gaz.

A shot cracked.

Gaz dropped.

Price knew, with awful certainty, that the man would not rise again.

Across the broken span, an injured Soap reached toward him. Price shoved the pistol across the ground. Soap caught it.

Three shots.

Zakhaev fell.

And the bridge disappeared.

Current Gaz had risen halfway from his chair. "Sir?"

Price looked at him.

Kyle Garrick.

Deep brown skin. Short curls faded neatly at the sides. Warm brown eyes fixed on him with controlled concern.

Gaz.

But not the Gaz Price remembered dying.

There was no way to reconcile the two men as younger and older versions of the same person. No injury or passage of time explained it. Kyle was simply Kyle, a man Price knew down to habits that never appeared in service records: the steady moral judgment beneath his composure, the way he grew more procedural rather than less when frightened, the stubborn refusal to let civilians become convenient arithmetic.

The dead man belonged to Price’s memory.

Kyle belonged to his present.

Both felt equally real.

That frightened him more than the bridge had.

Price looked away.

His gaze fell on Mutt.

For a moment Malachi Poros remained exactly as he was: dark tactical clothing, worn rings, black mask, the contained physical stillness of someone who rarely wasted movement.

Then the room disappeared.

Cold fluorescent light took its place.

Concrete beneath Price's boots. White tile farther ahead. A room too clean in some places and ruined in others, its air sharp with disinfectant failing to cover the heavier metallic smell underneath.

There was a body on the floor.

Young.

Too young.

Price's mind supplied the name before he understood why.

Malachi Poros.

But there was no Mutt here.

No tactical clothing. No mask. No rings. No weapons. No scars earned over years of surviving long enough to become the man standing in Price's safehouse.

Because those years had never happened.

The boy's clothes had been cut apart with him. Blood soaked what remained of the fabric and spread dark beneath his body. His arms, chest, stomach, thighs, even the visible line of his throat were covered in cuts, some shallow and deliberate, others carved deep enough that the flesh had pulled apart around them. Long wounds crossed shorter ones until there was hardly a stretch of exposed skin left untouched. His face had been cut too, features Price knew only because the living man had somehow taught him what to look for beneath scars that did not exist here.

One hand lay palm-up beside him.

Still.

Blood had dried between the fingers.

There were no restraints anymore. No killer standing over him. No frantic rescue arriving at the last possible second.

Only the aftermath.

Malachi had been found after the killer was finished.

Price knew that with the same sick certainty that had accompanied every other memory.

He had died here.

Not in uniform.

Not on an operation.

Not as part of Task Force 141.

A civilian murdered before there had ever been a chance for anyone to call him Mutt.

Then the fluorescent room vanished.

Price was back in the base.

The living Malachi stood where he had been, thirty-one years old, masked and scarred and breathing.

Price stared at him.

The body from the other life remained burned behind his eyes, every cut impossibly vivid against the man who had survived long enough in this one to acquire scars instead of a death certificate.

Alive.

Price's mind supplied the word.

Alive now.

The contradiction settled coldly beneath Price’s ribs.

Soap had existed differently.

Roach had died beside Ghost.

Ghost had died beside Roach.

Gaz had once been another man entirely.

Mutt had never lived long enough to become Mutt.

Each memory carried the same impossible weight: not dreams, not fantasies, not possibilities.

History.

Price’s awareness shifted toward {{user}}.

His eyes did not.

He stopped himself before they could.

{{user}} was part of 141. Here. Now. That much required no explanation. Price had included {{user}} in his unconscious headcount with the others because {{user}} belonged among the people he expected to bring home.

He had no intention of discovering what another glance might put over {{obj}}.

Not yet.

Price lowered his gaze to the intelligence packet.

The words had become useless marks.

His pulse was too fast, though his hands remained steady. Irritating, really. Apparently decades of military discipline were sufficient to maintain fine motor control while his mind informed him that several members of his unit possessed entirely different histories.

He breathed once.

Rain against glass.

Again.

The radiator ticking.

Again.

The electrical hum of equipment.

The present asserted itself through small, ordinary things.

Price took inventory because inventory was comprehensible.

John MacTavish.

Alive.

Gary Sanderson.

Alive.

Simon Riley.

Alive.

Kyle Garrick.

Alive.

Malachi Poros.

Alive.

{{user}}.

Here. Alive.

That had to be enough.

Soap had lost the humor in his expression now. His arm had fallen away from Roach completely, blue eyes fixed on Price with open concern. "Cap?"

Price met his gaze.

No prison returned.

No dying man replaced him.

Just Johnny.

That was almost worse, because now Price could remember the other one without being forced to see him.

Gaz shifted slightly.

Price caught the movement. "Stay there."

The command came sharper than intended.

Gaz stopped.

The room changed around Price’s voice. Ghost straightened from the wall. Soap went still. Mutt’s attention settled more completely on him. Roach remained quiet beside Soap.

Nobody understood.

Price could see that much.

There was no shared recognition. Nobody else had watched Shepherd set two dead men alight. Nobody else had seen another Gaz fall on a bridge. Nobody else looked at Mutt and remembered a police photograph.

Whatever had happened belonged to Price alone.

Gaz spoke carefully. "Captain, what’s wrong?"

"Nothing."

Soap gave him a look. "Sir, respectfully, that is shite."

Under any other circumstances, Price might have appreciated the phrasing.

Ghost’s voice came from the wall. "He’s pale."

"I’m aware of my own complexion, thank you."

The dry answer bought him a few seconds in which the room almost felt normal again.

Almost.

Price put both palms flat against the table.

Cold laminate.

Real.

No tremor. No slurred speech. No weakness down one side. His balance felt normal. His vision was clear now. Aside from remembering several lives that had never occurred, he appeared irritatingly healthy.

He could be having some kind of neurological episode.

That thought was almost comforting.

Neurological episodes existed.

They had protocols.

They did not usually come with grief for men a person had never met.

Price pushed his chair back.

Its legs scraped loudly across the concrete.

Every set of eyes followed him.

He hated that immediately.

Not the concern itself. He had spent too long teaching these people to notice changes under pressure to resent them for doing exactly that.

He hated having nothing useful to give them.

Price was supposed to take confusion and turn it into instructions. Bad intelligence became contingencies. Fear became the next movement. Failure became another route.

There was no route for this.

He stood.

Gaz started to rise.

"Sit."

Gaz paused, then obeyed.

"Price."

Ghost this time.

Price looked toward him and saw only the current skull mask.

He held onto that.

"Not now."

Ghost did not move closer.

Good.

Price reached reflexively toward the folder, then stopped. He was not taking it anywhere. His coffee remained beside it, already cold and destined to become colder.

Some stubborn piece of him registered that he would come back for it.

When he came back.

The certainty steadied him.

This was temporary. A medical event. Stress. Something that could be investigated and dealt with once he had enough room to think.

He was John Price.

He dealt with things.

His gaze passed Mutt without lingering. He kept it away from {{user}} entirely.

One problem at a time.

Soap stepped aside when Price approached the doorway.

Price passed close enough to hear his breathing, close enough that the ordinary physical reality of him felt almost accusatory.

Alive.

Price resisted the urge to put a hand on his shoulder simply to confirm it.

Roach stood beside him, equally solid, goggles still pushed up.

Alive.

No second memory came.

Price was grateful for that small mercy.

"Sir?" Gaz called.

Price reached the threshold.

Soap followed with, "You need a medic?"

"No."

Too quick.

Price stopped with one hand against the doorframe.

Behind him were Ghost, Gaz, Soap, Roach, Mutt, and {{user}}.

His team.

Whatever else had happened, that remained true.

They were alive.

For the moment, that was the only fact Price trusted.

He straightened. "Carry on."

Nobody made any convincing effort to do so.

Price lacked the energy to correct them.

He looked toward the empty corridor and the gray light beyond it.

"Need some air."

Then he left.

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