One Breath at a Time
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5
0207 hours
She heard them before she saw anything—movement in the dark, deliberate, the kind of careful footsteps that meant someone who knew what they were doing, someone who wasn’t just passing through. More than one. Coming from the north end of the street, which was the direction she hadn’t been watching as carefully as she should have, because watching three directions one-handed in the dark was a different problem than watching three directions with two hands in daylight.
Gabriella went still.
Broderick was beside her, breathing, unresponsive. She got her right hand off his head wound—the bleeding had slowed enough hours ago that she’d shifted to a pressure dressing rather than direct pressure, buying her the hand back for exactly this—and found the M4 by feel, brought it across her body, muzzle toward the north end of the street.
She didn’t fire. Didn’t move. Didn’t breathe more than she had to.
The footsteps stopped.
A long silence—twenty seconds, thirty—and then a voice, low, in Arabic, saying something she didn’t have enough of the language to translate but understood well enough from the tone: something’s here, or something was here, I’m not sure.
A second voice answered. Also low. Also uncertain.
She stayed absolutely still, her right cheek against the stock of the M4, her useless left arm tucked against her body where it couldn’t move on its own and give her away, her eyes on the north end of the street where two shapes had resolved out of the darkness—barely visible, just the difference between shadow and slightly darker shadow, but there.
They stood there for what felt like a very long time.
Then the footsteps started again—moving, but not toward her. Parallel to her position, along the far side of the street, moving south, fading. She tracked them with the muzzle until she couldn’t hear them anymore, and then she kept tracking for another full minute after that, because the time to move was never the moment you thought it was safe.
Sixty rounds. Still sixty rounds. She hadn’t fired a single one.
She got her hand back on Broderick’s dressing and let herself breathe.
0241
The second contact was different.
No warning footsteps this time—just muzzle flash, sudden and close, from a doorway thirty meters up the street that she hadn’t clocked as occupied, that had been dark and still for hours. The round hit the Humvee’s wreck above her head and she was already moving, already bringing the M4 up, already returning fire before she’d consciously decided to.
She fired at the doorway—two rounds, shift left, two rounds—and the muzzle flash from the doorway stopped, but a second one opened up from somewhere to her right, higher, a second-floor window she hadn’t been watching because she’d been watching the doorway, and the round from the window hit her left shoulder.
This one she felt immediately—not the blunt impact of the thigh, not the grinding wrongness of the forearm, but something hot and immediate, a line of fire across the top of the shoulder that told her it hadn’t buried itself, that it had hit and skidded rather than gone in, which was the best possible version of being shot in the shoulder and was still, she noted distantly, extremely unpleasant.
She fired at the window. Three rounds, fast, and the muzzle flash stopped.
Then another round came from the doorway—not the same position as before, slightly left of it, someone who’d moved while she was dealing with the window—and this one grazed the same shoulder, an inch above the first wound, close enough that for a moment she genuinely couldn’t tell if she’d been hit again or if the first wound had simply gotten dramatically worse.
She dropped below the wall.
Counted. Three seconds. Five. Ten.
Silence.
She came up again, fast, scanned both positions—doorway, window—and found nothing moving. Dropped back below the wall and got her back against the concrete and ran her right hand over her left shoulder, feeling what was there.
Two wounds, both shallow—the first a deep graze that had furrowed through muscle without going in, the second shallower still, barely more than a burn across the skin. Neither was going to kill her directly. Both were bleeding.
She dressed them one-handed in the dark. It took longer than it should have and hurt more than she wanted it to, and when she was done the dressing wasn’t pretty but it was on and it was tight and it would hold.
She checked the mag. Eight rounds left in the current one. Two full mags remaining after this—forty rounds plus what was left in the chamber. Forty-eight rounds total.
She looked at Broderick. Still breathing. Still there.
“You’re going to owe me,” she said, to him, to the dark, to nobody in particular. “When this is over, Lieutenant, you are going to owe me considerably.”
He didn’t answer. She hadn’t expected him to.
The hours between 0300 and dawn were the longest of Gabriella’s life, and she had been alive for twenty-six years that had contained some long hours.
The cold deepened. Her left side had become a catalog of separate agonies—thigh, calf, forearm, shoulder, the graze above it—each one distinct, each one insisting on being noticed, and she managed them the way she managed everything now: acknowledge once, set aside, keep going. The alternative was letting them be the whole story, and they weren’t the whole story yet.
She talked to Broderick. Not continuously—her voice was something else to ration, another thing that could give away a position if the wrong ears were listening—but in the long stretches when his breathing changed, when some reflex in him seemed to pull toward consciousness without quite reaching it, she talked him back.
“Stay with me, Lieutenant.”
“Ohio. Tell me more about Ohio.”
“Your father’s hardware store. What did it smell like?”
He never answered. But his breathing steadied each time, and she told herself that counted.
Somewhere around 0400 she became aware that she was cold in a way that had stopped being uncomfortable and started being dangerous—the kind of cold that came with blood loss and hours on the ground without moving, the kind her training recognized as a problem that compounded everything else. She couldn’t do much about it. She pulled Broderick closer, because his body heat was something, and because keeping him warm was part of keeping him alive, and because it was the only option she had.
She thought about her father. Not the journal entry—she wasn’t ready for that yet, wasn’t going to reach for it until she needed it the way you needed a last reserve, something kept back not because you doubted it but because you knew exactly what it was worth and didn’t want to spend it before the moment required it.
She thought about him in images instead: the photograph her mother kept on the mantle, Cristian Stoica in his dress whites, twenty-nine years old, already gone three years by the time Gabriella had been old enough to really look at it. The smell of his tools in the garage, which her mother had never moved. The eight days, which Gabriella had not been alive for and had nonetheless spent her whole life trying to understand.
He had come back from something that should have killed him. He had written down what kept him going. And then he had gone back, because that was what he did, and a week later a sniper’s round had done what the chest wound hadn’t.
He came back, Gabriella thought, at 0430, with five wounds on her left side and forty-eight rounds left and the cold coming up through the ground beneath her. He came back from the impossible thing. He got eight days.
She could get through to dawn.
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