Lila Moreau

The thread wrote itself in the ash like a signature on a death warrant: VOLUME III BEGINS. The letters smoked, curling upward into the dawn, each stroke a pulse that synced with the throb in my temples. I stood at the crater’s edge, flare gun empty, rifle slung but useless, my left arm hanging limp from a root that had torn through muscle and tendon in the warehouse collapse. Jenkins, my last teammate, the kid who’d followed me from Fallujah to this Brooklyn hell was gone, ...