The detonation hit before the sound reached him. Kick had been crouched at the second-floor window, running a patch on the building across the street through his tablet's surveillance feed. The drone was up, circling lazy and high, giving him a clean angle on the rooftop where the target's security detail had set up their overwatch. He'd tagged three shooters, a radio operator, and a spotter who kept lifting his binoculars to the southeast. All of it logged, all of it clean. He was about to call it in when the wall to his left decided to stop being a wall.

The RPG struck the exterior two meters down and one meter over from his position. The charge punched through the stucco and concrete like it was wet cardboard, and the blast wave followed a half-second later. The overpressure hit Kick before the shrapnel did. It picked him up and threw him across the room in a tumbling mess of limbs and gear, and his helmet caught the corner of a support beam on the way down. The crack that traveled through the Kevlar shell sounded like a branch snapping. The crack that traveled through his skull was quieter. Worse.

He landed face-down on a bed of pulverized concrete and broken glass. His rifle was somewhere else. His tablet was somewhere else. His awareness was somewhere else entirely, floating in a gray space where up and down had stopped meaning anything.

The first thing that came back was sound. A thick, pulsing whine that filled his skull from ear to ear. Then pain, arriving in stages. His shoulder, where the blast had wrenched the sling tight enough to bruise deep into the muscle. His back, where fragments of masonry had punched through his jacket and left shallow, burning cuts. And his head. His head was a separate thing, a distant, throbbing mass of pressure that sat behind his left eye and above his ear and pulsed with his heartbeat. Each pulse pushed a wave of nausea through his gut.

Kick opened his eyes. The room was full of dust lit by the ragged hole in the wall where sunlight cut through in a slanted column. He could see shapes. Furniture, or what used to be furniture. The shelf he'd been next to was gone, reduced to kindling and splinters. The window frame hung in a jagged mouth of broken wood. Outside, something was burning. He could smell it mixing with the chalky dust.

"Okay," he said out loud. His voice sounded wrong. Thick. Like he was talking through a mouthful of cotton. "Okay. That's... that's a thing."

He got one foot under him. Then the other. He stood, swaying, the floor felt like it was breathing beneath him, rising and falling in slow, uneven rolls. He reached for the wall and missed it by six inches. His hand closed on air. He corrected, leaned further, and his palm finally found the surface. He pressed his weight against it and felt the wall give slightly under his shoulder. Not structurally. Just the surface layer, crumbling under pressure.

His rifle. Where was his rifle? He looked down. The sling was tangled around his left arm, the weapon hanging at an awkward angle against his hip. The stock was cracked but intact. The magazine was seated. He didn't remember dropping it or picking it back up. He didn't remember standing up, either, though he was clearly standing now. The gap in his memory was a blank, smooth patch, like a page torn out of a book. The edges were there. The middle was gone.

He'd been at the window. Running the drone feed. Three shooters on the roof. A radio operator. A spotter watching the southeast. Then the wall had come in, and then he was on the floor, and now he was standing. The between was empty.

"Kick." A voice. The voice was coming from his right. He turned, and the turn took too long, the room rotated with him and kept going for a beat after he stopped. He blinked hard, twice, and his vision tried to resolve itself into a single image instead of the two overlapping ones it was offering.

{{user}}. They were crouched behind an overturned table near the doorway, rifle up, scanning the hall beyond. Their mouth was moving. He could see it, but the words arrived muffled and distant, like they were being spoken from the far end of a long pipe.

"I'm good," Kick said. He waved a hand. The hand felt heavy and slow, "I'm good. Just got dinged." The last word came out wrong. Dinged turned into digned, his tongue refusing to cooperate with the consonant. He swallowed. The dust in his throat made it worse.

{{user}} said something. He caught fragments. Move, maybe. Out, maybe. The rest dissolved into the whine.

"Radio's dead." He reached for the PTT on his chest rig and keyed it. Nothing. He keyed it again. Nothing. Had he already tried this? He couldn't remember. The thought sat in front of him, half-formed, then drifted away like smoke. He looked at the radio. The housing was cracked along one side. When had that happened? The blast, probably. Or the fall. Or the beam. The sequence of events kept rearranging itself every time he tried to pin it down.

He took a step away from the wall. His left leg didn't extend properly. It folded slightly at the knee, and he stumbled forward, catching himself on the edge of a broken chair. The metal leg scraped against the floor and the sound was too loud, too sharp, drilling into the side of his head like a hot needle. He flinched.

"Still functional," he said. The words came out loose and runny, syllables bleeding together. "Functionality's solid. Good to go." He wasn't sure who he was talking to. {{user}}, maybe. Himself, maybe. The room, maybe. The room felt like it was listening.

He looked at the doorway. Beyond it, a hallway stretched into shadow. He knew this building. They'd entered from the south, through the courtyard. Cleared the ground floor, came up the eastern stairwell. Second floor, second room from the left. He knew this.

Except he didn't. The knowledge was there, but it felt like something he'd read in a report rather than something he'd done. The courtyard. Had he been in the courtyard? There was a dog. A dog barking. That was real. But when? Before the breach? During? After?

He pressed his palm against his temple. His glove came away wet. He looked at the blood, bright red against the dark fabric, and felt a strange, detached curiosity. That was a lot of blood. Or maybe it wasn't. Head wounds bled a lot. Everyone knew that. He knew that. He'd told other people that. But looking at it now, the red spreading across his fingertip, he couldn't make himself care the way he should have.

"Where's the rest of the team?" he asked. His voice was quieter now. The bravado was leaking out of it, replaced by something flatter, more uncertain. "I had... there was a feed. The drone was up. I had angles on the roof." He looked at the window. The drone was gone. He hadn't brought it inside.

"I... Something's wrong," he said. The admission cost him something. He could feel it in his chest, a tight, unwilling pull.

He looked at {{user}}. The face was familiar. He knew this person. He knew them. But for a long, terrible moment, the connection between the face and the name floated just out of reach, like a word on the tip of his tongue that refused to surface. He could see the shape of it. The outline. The color of their eyes, the way they held their weapon, the set of their jaw. All of it was recognizable. None of it resolved into a name.

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