One Breath at a Time
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
STAGING AREA — 0530
The convoy formed up in the gray half-light before dawn—just two vehicles, nose to tail, engines idling, exhaust hanging low in air that hadn’t warmed up yet. Gabriella found her assigned vehicle—lead Humvee, Broderick’s call sign stenciled on the bumper—and climbed into the back seat behind the driver, settling her aid bag between her boots where she could reach it without looking.
“You’re the new doc?” The Marine in the seat beside her was young—younger than Reyes, younger than most of them, with the kind of face that hadn’t quite finished becoming a man’s face yet. PFC, by his collar. He had a SAW across his lap and was checking the same magazine for the third time since she’d sat down.
“HM2 Stoica.”
“Cortez.” He didn’t offer a hand—both of his were occupied—but he nodded at her, friendly enough. “Heard about Delgado. That you?”
“That was me.”
“Damn.” He looked at her with something between curiosity and the kind of reverence young Marines reserved for things that sounded like movies. “They said you opened him up. Like, all the way.”
“That’s the procedure, yes.”
“And he’s gonna be okay?”
“He’s stable. Flew out to Fallujah Surgical an hour ago.” She checked the strap on her bag, more out of habit than need. “He’ll probably make it home with a hell of a scar and a story nobody will believe.”
Cortez grinned, and for a moment he looked even younger. “That’s wild, Doc. That’s actually wild.”
Up front, Broderick swung into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut without looking back, already talking into his radio. Gabriella caught fragments—two-vehicle element, probe route, report any contact—and the flat efficiency of his voice told her this was a briefing he’d given before, or received before, enough times that the words had worn smooth.
“What’s the tasking?” Cortez asked, leaning forward slightly.
“Probe,” Broderick said, not turning around. “Battalion wants to know what’s still out there past the line RCT-1 pushed yesterday. Two vehicles, forward to the next intersection, see what shoots at us, report back. If nothing shoots at us, that’s information too.”
“And if something does?”
“Then we’ve done our job and we go home.” Broderick said it like a man reciting a fact he found mildly amusing. “Either way, Cortez, somebody’s gotta drive up the street first. Today that’s us.”
Cortez didn’t say anything to that, but Gabriella saw the look that passed between him and Ainsley in the rearview mirror—not quite a glance, more a held breath—and understood, in the way she’d come to understand most things about this unit, that somebody’s gotta drive up the street first was not a sentence anyone particularly enjoyed hearing applied to themselves, however it was dressed up.
The second Humvee—Delacroix’s vehicle—pulled into position behind them, and the convoy lurched into motion, rolling out through the wire and onto the road that led toward the city.
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