Page 3 of Echo: Line
"Fuck you." The words come out slurred. My tongue feels thick, clumsy.
"Wrong answer. Let's try again. Who runs Echo Ridge? Who's in command?"
Gravity shifts. I grip the armrests, metal biting into my palms. The pain helps. Something solid to focus on. I force my breathing to slow. Four count inhale, hold, four count exhale. SERE training. Anchor yourself. Find something real.
"Your team abandoned you," Kessler says. The words worm into my skull. "They left you to die. Why protect them?"
Because they didn't. Because Kane made the tactical call, and it was the right one. Because Sarah needed medical attention, and staying would have killed us all. Because that's what good operators do—they survive to fight another day.
But the drug makes certainty slippery. Doubt creeps in, insidious. What if Kessler's right? What if Kane saw an opportunity to cut loose the outsider? Kane found me in the mountains, brought me in when I had nothing. Earned my place through blood and skill, but that doesn't make you family. Just makes you useful.
"Tell me about Echo Base," Kessler says. "Location. Security protocols. Access codes."
The room tilts. Colors bleed together, sounds echo wrong. I see Kane in the snow, weapon lowered, making the tactical call. See Rourke's easy competence, Stryker's dark humor. See Sarah bleeding but holding on. Khalid, young and determined. Tommy at his screens. Willa standing her ground. The family I found after everything else burned.
"No," I manage.
"Then we'll try something else." Kessler's voice drops. "Give me Echo Ridge, and I'll make this stop. The pain. The drugs. All of it. You stay operational. You get to walk away."
The choice crystallizes, terrible and sharp. Trade everything for nothing. End the pain, betray the team. The utilitarian calculus would be simple if I was the only one who mattered. But lives aren't numbers. Echo Ridge is fighting something bigger than any individual. The Committee, corruption, the rot at the heart of the intelligence community. If they fall, that work dies with them.
And Kane—he'd never forgive betrayal bought with my comfort. He'd see it as weakness, as proof that I couldn't make the hard call. He'd be right.
"No deal," I whisper.
Kessler's expression doesn't change. "That's unfortunate. For you."
He gestures, and Hayes administers another injection. This one hits different—slower, colder, like ice spreading through my veins. My muscles go rigid. Breathing becomes difficult, each inhale a conscious effort. The edges of my vision darken.
"Stress positions next," Kessler says conversationally. "Then sleep deprivation. We have time, Mercer. Days. Weeks if necessary. Eventually, you'll tell me everything. The only question is how intact you'll be when we're finished."
The guards unstrap me from the chair. My legs give out immediately, and they catch me under the arms. They drag me to the corner of the room, force my arms above my head, and lock the cuffs to hooks in the wall. My shoulders scream. The position forces me onto my toes, calves burning within seconds.
"I'll check back in a few hours," Kessler says. "See how you're holding up."
The door closes. The lock engages. The lights stay on, bright and merciless.
I hang there, muscles trembling, mind still fuzzy from the drugs. Count seconds. Minutes. The pain builds from uncomfortable to unbearable to something beyond bearable that just exists, constant and consuming. My shoulders feel as if they are going to dislocate. The pain is intense and I scream through clenched teeth because I can't stop it.
Time becomes meaningless. Could be one hour. Could be six. The fluorescent lights never change. No windows, no day or night. Just endless brightness and pain and the sound of my own breathing, ragged and desperate.
Somewhere in the haze, I think about escape. About weaknesses in the facility. Guard rotations—I counted four different operators during transport. Electronic locks, which means power supply vulnerabilities. The camera in the corner, which means central monitoring. Someone watching, recording. Evidence.
Evidence can be useful. If I get out. When I get out.
Because I will get out. Kane is too good, too stubborn to let this stand. The team will come. Maybe not today, maybe not this week. But they'll come. I just have to survive long enough to be worth rescuing.
Faces swim through my thoughts. Unbidden, unwanted. I never let myself think about futures that don't include blood and gunfire. Never allowed the luxury of imagining something normal—someone waiting, something beyond the next op. That's not for men like me. We're tools, weapons, pointed at problems until we break or the problems disappear.
But for just a second, hanging in the dark with my shoulders on fire and chemicals eating my system from the inside, I let myself imagine it. A life where Echo Ridge wins. Where the Committee falls. Where the team gets to choose something different. Where we're not hunted.
The fantasy dissolves. Stupid. Dangerous.
The door opens. Kessler returns, pristine and calm. He studies me for a moment, then nods to someone outside. A guard enters with a tablet.
"I want to show you something," Kessler says. He holds up the screen.
It's surveillance footage. The staging facility. Multiple angles showing the firefight, the chaos, Committee operatives falling. Then the camera tracks to the tree line—tracks me chasing Kessler into the forest. The angle shifts. Shows the ambush.Shows me going down. Shows Kessler's team dragging my unconscious body to the extraction point.
