Part 2: The Ghost from the Past..
He crossed the room and stopped directly in front of her.
“Say something.”
Nothing.
So he pushed harder.
He pointed toward the dartboard and turned it into a spectacle.
“Three darts,” Thorn announced loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Hit the bullseye or get out.”
She looked at the dartboard once.
Then calmly said, “It’s misaligned.”
That should have been meaningless.
But somehow the room still went quiet.
Thorn adjusted the board aggressively and stepped aside.
“Fine,” he snapped. “Throw.”
She moved forward without hesitation.
No warm-up.
No visible effort.
Three throws.
Three perfect groupings stacked so tightly they barely looked real.
The room cracked psychologically before anyone even reacted physically.
Then the door opened.
Colonel Vance entered.
And suddenly the atmosphere shifted again, heavy enough to feel in my chest.
“That’s enough,” Vance said sharply.
Then he looked directly at the woman.
“Welcome back, Maya Jurek.”
The name hit differently.
Not like a stranger’s name.
Like a classified file accidentally spoken out loud.
A Navy Chief linked to operations nobody discussed openly.
I watched Thorn’s confidence collapse in real time.
But Maya barely acknowledged him.
She was staring at the dartboard instead.
Studying it carefully.
Then she finally spoke.
“There’s external monitoring.”
A red dot appeared.
Slow. Controlled.
Scanning us.
Vance didn’t react like a man surprised.
He reacted like a man late to his own problem.
And I realized then—
This wasn’t an argument.
It was an activation.
And we had just been turned on.
The moment Maya mentioned “external monitoring,” Colonel Vance didn’t deny it—that’s what made everything worse. The dartboard wasn’t a game. It was a trigger. And someone just lit the fuse while we were still standing inside the room.
PART 2
The laser dot didn’t just sit there—it moved.
Slow. Intentional. Measuring.
I stepped sideways instinctively, scanning the dim corners of Crow’s Nest. Marines were still frozen, caught between disbelief and instinct. Thorn hadn’t spoken since Maya’s throws. That alone told me something was seriously wrong.
Colonel Vance didn’t even look surprised.
That was worse.
“Maya,” Vance said calmly, “confirm sector.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the dartboard. “Elevated position. West balcony. One observer. Possibly two.”
My pulse spiked.
“This was a controlled demonstration?” I asked.
