The message arrives after dark, which is deliberate because nothing strategic ever comes in daylight anymore, and I am sitting at the small desk in our room with damp hair falling down my back while I go over the patrol shifts for the third time, checking timestamps that I already memorized this morning because repetition keeps my mind from racing ahead of itself.
The knock on the door is soft, but the tension behind it is not.
Rachel steps in without waiting for an invitation, and the look on her face tells me this is not routine.
“They responded,” she says quietly.
I close the folder and stand, because sitting feels wrong when the ground is shifting.
“To what?” I ask, even though I already know.
“To exposure,” she replies.
Of course they did.
The outside group has been watching o
