The one who told me you were a good man.”

Commander Hayes was already on his feet.

Because it meant that the danger was not only outside the walls of wherever we were sheltering — it was that our own protection had been compromised, that one of the uniforms we had trusted belonged to the other side.

Hayes moved with the flat, fast calm of a man who has been ambushed before and lived, and gave the orders that a situation like that requires, and I will not detail them, because they are his trade and not my story.

What matters is what I felt, watching him: not panic, but a strange steadiness, because I was surrounded, in that moment, by people who had spent their lives learning to stand between the vulnerable and harm, and who were now standing between it and me.

Chapter 16 — The Dark