Nora killed her radio and let the silence return, because the airwaves were no longer a lifeline.
She moved down the drainage until it widened into rocks, then used stones to mask her track and break any thermal outline.
Above her, rotor wash churned treetops, and the sound told her they were landing men, not just picking her up.

She reached an abandoned shepherd trail she’d seen through her scope weeks earlier, a thin line that cut toward the river gorge.
Her calves spasmed from dehydration, but she forced a steady pace, because panic creates noise and noise creates bodies.
Every few minutes she stopped to listen, counting footsteps, counting echoes, counting how many hunters were in the hills.

At the gorge, she found what she needed: water sound, steep walls, and a route too ugly for lazy pursuers.
She slid down a shale face, braced herself with a root, and felt the report slam once against her ribs.
If she lost that sleeve, twenty-one days meant nothing, and people would die on bad assumptions.

Headlamps flickered above the ridge line, and voices called into the wind with practiced certainty.
Nora stayed low, crossed the shallow stream in icy bursts, and used the riverbed to erase her scent trail.
When she finally keyed her backup beacon—an old-school burst transmitter Cat Nolan taught her to trust—it sent only coordinates and no voice.

Thirty minutes later, a single helicopter appeared, higher than the others, holding an orbit that screamed “cautious.”
A spotlight swept once, twice, then cut off, and a calm voice on the secure channel delivered the proper authentication phrase, slow and human.
Nora replied with the matching response, and only then did she step into the open, rifle low but ready.

The pickup was fast, clean, and tense, and the crew chief didn’t ask questions until they were above the cloud deck.
Back at the forward site, investigators replayed radio logs and found Rourke’s access token used to pull the challenge phrases hours before Nora transmitted.
He tried to call it procedure, then tried to call it coincidence, until Nora placed her sealed sleeve on the table and said, “If I was the asset, who sold the buyer the receipt?”

The raid that followed used her diagrams to hit the compound’s blind corner, and it ended with zero friendly casualties.
Rourke was arrested quietly, stripped of his trident, and walked past the same training hallway where he’d tried to break her in front of everyone.
Nora returned to the Oregon coast later, not to escape the silence, but to remember she’d always belonged in it—and she’d survived the loudest betrayal of her life.

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