See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 3: What Remained
Pain arrived before consciousness did, a dull red wall of it that pressed in from every direction before she had any sense of where she was or what had happened to put her there.
Megan surfaced slowly, the way you surfaced from deep water when you’d gone down too far and too fast, everything blurred and ringing and wrong. Smoke stung her eyes before she managed to open them. The canopy above her had shattered, spider-webbed glass hanging in fragments from a frame bent at an angle that told her, even before her mind caught up to the rest of it, that the aircraft had come apart around her in ways that shouldn’t have let her live through it.
She tried to move and her body answered with a jolt of pain sharp enough to steal her breath — her left shoulder, wrenched wrong in the harness, and a deeper ache along her ribs that made every inhale feel like it cost something. She forced her hands to move anyway, found the harness release with fingers that didn’t feel entirely like her own, and the restraints fell away.
“Ruiz.” Her voice came out cracked, smoke-ruined. “Ruiz, talk to me.”
Nothing.
She pulled herself forward against the pain, one hand braced on the shattered edge of the canopy frame, and looked into the front seat.
The world went very quiet and very far away for a moment, the kind of quiet that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the mind refusing, for just a second, to process what the eyes had already taken in. Ruiz sat where he’d been sitting since 0430, harness still in place, and there was no mistaking — even through the haze of smoke and adrenaline and her own concussed vision — that he was gone. The impact had done to the front of the aircraft what it hadn’t quite managed to do to the back, and whatever mercy had kept her alive in her seat had made no similar arrangement for him.
“No.” The word came out of her without permission, small and useless against the enormity of what she was looking at. “No, no — Danny—”
Eleven months. You don’t flinch. A stick of gum passed without looking, some superstition of his she’d never asked about. Tacos, described in ridiculous and loving detail, once, to talk her through a hydraulics scare that had turned out to be nothing at all compared to this. See you at breakfast, Meyers.
She reached forward, some instinct that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with eleven months of trusting this man with her life demanding that she do something, check for a pulse she already knew she wouldn’t find, and her fingers had barely brushed his shoulder when the sound of gunfire somewhere close — close enough that the reports came sharp and immediate rather than distant and rolling — cut through the ringing in her ears and reminded her, brutally, that grief was a luxury the next several minutes weren’t going to allow her.
She had a sidearm. She had training. She had, according to every survival brief she’d ever sat through, a responsibility to move, to evade, to give the search and rescue package that Ruiz had called in with his last clear transmission every chance of finding her before anyone else did.
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