Kelvin started toward me, but I stopped him with a glance.

Six years earlier, bleeding beneath an overturned patrol car, I had learned something useful: panic wastes oxygen.

I had learned it the hard way, in the worst ten minutes of my life, which happened to also be the best.

The operation had gone loud at the very end — someone inside the network had been tipped, and what was meant to be a quiet extraction turned into gunfire in a warehouse near the water.

I had the thirteen-year-old behind me when the shooting started, a girl who had been missing for four months, and I had done the only thing there was time to do, which was put my body between hers and the muzzle flash.

The round went in beneath my arm and I felt three ribs go, and then I was on the ground under the lip of an overturned car with the girl’s hands fisted in my jacket, and I had a choice to make with whatever seconds I had left.