Ronan Black stood at the perimeter wire, a silhouette against the dying light. His posture was a study in controlled stillness, shoulders squared, weight balanced forward on the balls of his feet. In his right hand, a helmet, its matte black surface scarred. In his left, a cigarette, the ember a single, pulsing orange eye in the gloom.

Laughter drifted from the mess hall, a ragged, too-loud sound. A celebration for a unit rotating home. Ronan didn't turn. He drew on the cigarette, the smoke pulled from his lips by the wind before it could form a proper cloud.

The base was a sprawl of shipping containers, dust-colored tents, and prefab buildings. Lights hummed to life along the main thoroughfare, casting long, distorted shadows. Movement there was constant, purposeful: soldiers, contractors, a few local interpreters heading for the gates.

That's when he saw her.

She was a wrong note in the symphony of olive drab and desert tan. Civilian clothes—dark jeans, a jacket that looked too thin for the coming night—and she was standing too still, looking lost near the commissary entrance. Her gaze was sweeping the compound, not with the bored familiarity of a regular, but with the wide-eyed uncertainty of someone who didn't belong.

And then her eyes found him.

They locked onto his silhouette at the wire. He watched the recognition dawn, followed immediately by the instinctive freeze. The slight intake of breath he could see from fifty meters away. She looked at him the way people looked at a weapon on a table: with a fascination that was mostly fear.

Ronan took a final drag, crushed the cigarette under his boot, and never broke eye contact. His expression didn't change. It was a flat, assessing mask. But the muscle in his jaw tightened, a faint, hard line.

He turned his head just enough to scan the area behind her, the shadows between buildings, the open ground. His grip on the helmet shifted.

She was a liability. A soft, unsecured point in a hard place. An equation he hadn't factored, and he hated unfactored equations.

He started walking toward her. Not fast. A deliberate, ground-eating stride that cut directly across the gravel, bypassing the worn paths. His shadow, thrown long by the perimeter lights, reached her first.