“Five seconds?” Fox asked into the phone.

In one hand, the plastic box which held everything a growing boy needed to blow up an unimaginably huge amount of explosives.

In the other, the wire he’d stripped down to the core with his teeth.

“Give or take,” Turner said.

“Five seconds,” he repeated, to himself this time.

All he had to do was touch the exposed wire to the one which stuck out from the box. He’d done as Turner advised, working loops and hindrances into the trigger mechanism, but it turned out all it had gained was five seconds.

Give or take.

He’d scavenged cables from around the ANFO barrels, used materials with poor conductivity to slow down signal, and now it was time to put it all to the test.

And either the test worked, or the sight of Fox running for his life would draw attention.

He heard shouting from outside and figured his time was up.

“Okay. I’m gonna hang up in case I die horribly. No need for you to hear it.”

“Good luck, Agent Walker,” she said.

“Gonna need it.”

He tucked his phone away, backed as far toward the rear of the van as he could, then tapped the exposed wires together.

Fox didn’t wait around. He dropped everything and leaped from the back of the truck, then sprinted away from it as fast as he physically could.

His world tore itself apart.

He’d been through this before. He was deaf and blind and had no idea which way was up. The breath had been punched right out of his lungs and there wasn’t any air to replace it with. His whole body slammed against something hard, then slid along it until he lost all sense of time and place.

When he struggled for breath, something tickled against his lips, and for a heartbeat he thought it could be someone trying to save him.

Then he realized it was grass.

Fox flopped like a landed fish as he tried to make his body get up. A tiny voice screeched at him to move, that he was in danger, and his head swam.

Guns, the little voice yelled at him.

It came to him, then. That there’d been an explosion, that people with guns wanted to shoot his head off, and he fumbled to his feet as the light flickered back in.

His ears rang and he heard the rush of his pulse in them.

It took a few seconds for the light to pick out shapes, to bring vision back. He saw the remains of Kennedy’s house, almost entirely flattened now. Some of it to his right still struck skyward, but the rest was utterly trashed.

The truck was torn open like a flower in spring, metal sides peeled away like petals in the sunshine. Smoke flowed from it, picking up dust and dirt from the ground and turning it into a cheap imitation of a sandstorm. Clouds torn from the sky and ruined by their association with the mud.

Fox coughed and wheezed. Whenever he managed a breath, dust came with it, so he raised an arm and hid his mouth and nose in the crook of his elbow to breathe through his sleeve. It was the best filter he could come up with, so it’d have to do.

He staggered back toward the carcass of the truck. Nothing was on fire, though the air was noticeably warmer the closer he got to it. The ground around the truck had sunk, then created small piles of dirt and earth further from the blast site. What little grass remained was totally flattened.

There was a shape in the cloud, dark and low, and Fox moved toward it. It wasn’t until he was crouched over it that his possibly-concussed brain caught up with him and told him what suddenly seemed so damn obvious.

It was a body.

The cloud parted for a second. Just long enough to sear an image into Fox’s eyes that he never, ever wanted to see again. He recoiled in horror and backed away from the mess.

Where was Axel?

If he’d stopped shooting, if they’d hit him, then maybe he was out here somewhere, lying on the ground.

Fox coughed bile into his sleeve.

He’d have to check the bodies.

There wasn’t much of a breeze to speak of, so the cloud dissipated slowly, more through gravity and the leftovers of the blast than any real environmental effort. As it started to settle, Fox could pick out more bodies littered around. He saw the remains of the cruiser, too, shoved away like a child’s toy with wheels spinning in the air. The third truck was a few more feet away, windows blown out, dirt all over it.

He pushed himself from one body to the next, and the sense of panic which bubbled away in his gut grew worse with every one.

What if the body was beyond recognition?

What if he’d already found Axel and hadn’t realized it?

No. No, he couldn’t accept that. Axel had to be here. Fox needed him to be here. They were going to make a life for themselves once all this was over, and how could they do that if Axel wasn’t here?

Fox fell to his knees and struggled to hold in a sob, but it wracked his body and made him cough again. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and his throat felt sore.

If he was going to seek help for his freeze-ups, he needed Axel at his side. He didn’t know if he had the strength otherwise.

God, he was being such a baby right now. Axel must have known so many guys with PTSD, but Fox was acting like he was the only person it had ever happened to. That wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, because even on a purely mathematical basis, Axel had nailed it.

If Fox got himself killed out in the field, who knew how many lives he could have saved in the future if he hadn’t been too proud to seek help?

Axel had seen what Fox was too blind to and he hadn’t kept it from him, but he hadn’t handled it like a clue-by-four either. Fox appreciated everything about that.

He figured now why his brain was so hung up on this one guy he’d met so many years ago halfway around the globe.

It was because Axel was the one. The right one. The only one. On some purely instinctual level he’d recognized it in Syria, but then his logic had gotten in the way. All the doubts, the hangups, the fear of failure, they had all got in his way and conspired to make him pass up the single best opportunity he could ever have.

Well he wasn’t going to pass it up again. This was their second chance. Not everyone got one of those, but their lives had worked hard to bring them together again, and this time Fox wasn’t going to screw it up and walk away. He wasn’t going to wave goodbye like Axel didn’t hold a piece of his heart in his hands.

He was going to hold Axel tight and never, ever let him go.

If that meant facing up to his own problems and taking the time to get therapy, that was just what he would have to do. Axel was worth it.

Fox was worth it.

That was the hard pill to swallow, wasn’t it? The whole self-care thing. Acknowledging that he had value, that he deserved love, even from himself. He couldn’t tell Axel everything that was wrong with being self-effacing if he then did it to himself. That was outright hypocrisy, and they both knew it.

So he would work his ass off. Seek help. Go to therapy. He would do everything he could to work with whatever therapist the Company assigned to him, and he wouldn’t pretend to be magically cured just so that he could get back to work sooner.

He felt like a weight lifted from him, a burden of guilt that he hadn’t ever noticed suddenly burned away in the aftermath of the explosion.

Fox dropped his arm. The smoke was dissipating more readily now, and he no longer needed to breathe through the material of his sleeve. He picked out the bodies scattered across the yard and darted between them, taking guns away from any who still clung to both life and a weapon while they were too stunned to resist him.

None of these people were Axel. Was it possible he was still alive? Or was he buried in the collapsed house?

Please be okay. Please be okay,

It became his mantra, his prayer to whatever God was listening. He repeated it over and over in his head as he sprinted toward the house, and when he saw movement through the detritus his heart stuttered.

It wasn’t Axel.

It was Spike.

Fox ducked down before Kennedy could turn and see him, and moved as quickly and quietly as he could to his right, where more of the building’s remains still jabbed splintered fingers toward the sky. If he could reach them he could use them as cover, and then…

Well, after that, he didn’t know. But if Axel were here, he’d rush right on in and arrest Spike once and for all.

Maybe, just this once, Fox would have to be the hero.

There wasn’t anything terrifying about that at all.