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WELCOME TO PARADISE / PROLOGUEEchoes in the Green
The jungle never shuts up -- until it does.
Sergeant Malik knew that silence better than his own heartbeat. One second: insects whining, leaves ticking like rain on tin, frogs coughing from puddles they'd die in by dawn. Next second: nothing. The entire green throat swallowed its voice.
"Eco-Six, Hammer Lead," Malik said, voice low under his helmet. "Status on Spencer and Connor?"
A fat ribbon of static chewed his reply in half. The squad stood frozen on the trail -- eight men and women in graphite plate, rifles out, helmets washed in HUD glow. Sweat ran inside armor and made everyone smell like old pennies.
Comms clicked back, a shred of clarity threading the hiss. "--hear you, Hammer. Spencer and Connor... are dark."
Dark. Both teams. Not lost. Not late. Dark.
"Fucking comms," Torres muttered behind him. "Fucking Grit Company."
"Button it," Malik snapped, but there was no heat in it. He felt the same thing -- a hot copper coin melting on his tongue.
Two years. Two years he'd had this squad together. Two years of bad coffee and worse briefings and the slow warm thing that happened when eight people learned how to breathe around each other. They'd come through the Raptor Conflict with six of the eight they started with. They'd come through Zone 4. They'd come through the ridge push at Kemper's Wall, where Singh had prayed out loud for the first time in his life and nobody had laughed. Malik knew the sound each of their boots made on gravel. Knew which of them snored. Knew Skye carried a folded photograph in her chest pocket that she never showed anyone and nobody ever asked.
He wasn't losing them here. Not in some unmarked green spot on a map nobody had drawn.
"Move," he said.
They moved. The jungle closed around them, a hundred angles of trunk and vine and glossy leaves holding shadow. Red scan-lines pulsed out from helmet cams, picking out heat signatures that weren't there and ignoring the ones that were. Their tech was good. Not good enough.
The trail kinked. The silence got heavier, like wet wool hung over a cage.
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