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Out of the same hut the woman had stumbled from came the third member of the team, Darius Turin, marching out into the street with his burst rifle slung across his chest and a furious snarl plastered across his face. He saw the woman, saw Rade standing frozen before her, then, without losing stride, ripped the sidearm from his thigh holster and shot her through the back of the head.

Rade stared at her lifeless body and felt something inside him break. "Sons of bitches were playing dead until I was right on top of them,"

Turin said as he holstered his sidearm and rolled up his sleeve to expose a bullet hole in his forearm. He pulled a snap knife from his belt and used it to dig the bullet out, and, once freed of the foreign object, the wound immediately began to heal. "They're not playing now, anyway."

Maybe it was the stress, or the combat endorphins, or the unsettling feeling coursing through every fiber of his being, but Rade's focus locked on Turin. "You son of a bitch."

Turin squared up. "The hell's your problem?"

"Both of you lock it up," Sevrina said. "We still have a mission to complete, so focus and follow orders. Did anybody locate the cache yet?"

"Negative," Turin said, making a production of putting the knife away.

"Nothing on the sweep," answered Hab, the fourth and final member of the Xyphos hit team, as he appeared from around the corner of the village's only satellite station house. He was clutching a handheld frequency scanner, his short-barreled submachine gun hanging from his chest. His left eye was entirely milk-white, indicating he was still receiving video from the surveillance drone buzzing overhead, the images feeding directly into his optic nerve. The neural linkage grafted to his skull blinked rhythmically as it maintained connection to Xyphos's private satellite network, relaying their comms and location. "The waves are dead," he said. "There's nothing here."

"Not anymore," Rade added, feeling the combat endorphins recede, and the deep unsettling feeling creep back in.

Sevrina turned narrowed eyes on him. "What's with you, Ander?"

He was no stranger to killing. No stranger to following orders. It had never been his place to question the mission. Xyphos gave the commands and they executed. That was it. But something here had opened him up. Revealed the awful truth of what he was. Like there'd been only so much he could ignore, only so much he could bury and suppress before the dam broke, and now he could finally see.

All around him lay the lifeless husks of what had been people only moments ago. People with hopes and dreams and loved ones who had no idea what had been coming for them. Innocent people. Noncombatants, armed only with rudimentary government-issued weapons barely capable of protecting their meager village.

Rade felt Sevrina staring at him, waiting for an answer. "I & don't know," he said. "Nothing." He wanted to tell her that this was wrong. That what they were doing was wrong and that they maybe didn't have to do it at all. But he knew it would fall on deaf ears, and only further complicate an already unraveling situation.

Her hand gripped his shoulder. Firm, but not threatening. Her eyes grew softer, and Rade wondered if she knew how easily she pierced his armor. A smaller part of him wondered how much of that was just another of Xyphos's psychological conditioning parameters, reinforced through pheromone- induced obedience protocols.

"We have to lock it down," she said, the edge gone from her tone.

"We're not done here until we locate the cache and mark the location for the Myanmarese troops. Understood?"

"Understood," he replied, wanting nothing more than for her hand to stay where it was.

But she pulled it away and turned toward Turin. "You were point man on this one. You sure your intel is good?"

Turin finally looked up, something dangerous hiding behind his eyes. "I spent weeks grooming contacts and building a network in this goddamned country. This is what I do. The intel's good." He was doing a poor job of holding back the venom in his voice. He stared at Sevrina long enough for Rade to wonder if he should step in, but then Turin's glare shifted back to him. Like he knew what Rade was thinking. Which maybe he did, considering he was the team's advance recon specialist and reading the terrain was his field of expertise.

"Fine," Sevrina said, cutting in before things started to escalate again. "We split up, make another sweep of the village. Keep peripherals up, there may be more stragglers waiting to get the jump on us."

"I hope there are," Turin said before breaking contact and heading back toward the northwest sector.

Rade let it go. He had enough to contend with already, he could deal with Turin later. Right now he had to get a grip because whether he liked it or not, Sevrina was right. In order to get out of there they'd have to complete the mission.