See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9: The Door
Megan had stopped tracking hours by the twelfth night in the new room, the bare bulb overhead giving her nothing to judge time by beyond her own exhaustion, so when the gunfire started, she had no way of knowing it was just past two in the morning, no way of knowing anything except that the sound was close, closer than anything she’d heard since the field outside Karbala, and that it was different from the sporadic firing she’d grown used to hearing at a distance from this compound and the last one.
She pressed herself into the corner of the room out of instinct, knees to her chest, and listened to the world outside the concrete walls come apart. Shouting in Arabic, sharp and panicked in a register she hadn’t heard from her captors before. Return fire, then more of it, then something that sounded like an explosion close enough that dust sifted down from the ceiling and the bare bulb swung once on its wire before steadying. She had no way to know if this was rescue or simply a rival faction, a raid unrelated to her entirely, and some cold part of her mind — the same part that had gotten her through eleven days of captivity — refused to let hope take hold before she had reason to trust it.
The door to her room burst inward with a violence that made her flinch back against the wall, and for one suspended half-second, every instinct in her body screamed that this was another threat, another version of Hassan or Abu Talib come to finish whatever the transfer had interrupted.
Then she saw them.
Two men in dark gear, helmets, weapons up but not pointed at her, moving with a controlled economy of motion that had nothing in common with the men who’d held her — and one of them, broad-shouldered, dropped his weapon to a low ready and put both hands up, open, visible, the universal language of I am not a threat to you, even as his eyes swept the room behind her for anyone who might be.
“Lieutenant Meyers.” His voice was low, steady, pitched to cut through the chaos outside without adding to it. “Lieutenant Meyers, my name is Chief Petrosky, United States Navy. We’re here to take you home.”
She stared at him, and something in her chest that had been clenched tight for twelve days refused to unclench all at once, some residual suspicion insisting this was a trick, a new cruelty Abu Talib had devised, and she heard herself say, in a voice that came out smaller and more broken than she wanted it to, “Prove it.”
Petrosky didn’t flinch at the demand. “Karbala, March twenty-fourth. Your gunner was Chief Warrant Officer Daniel Ruiz. Your unit’s the Eleventh Aviation Regiment.” He crouched slowly, closing some of the distance between them without rushing her, keeping his hands visible the whole way. “Your CO says you’re the best pilot in your company. Says the men who fly with you would follow you into anything.” A beat. “We’re here to bring you back to them.”
The details did what nothing else in the room could have done — landed as proof in a way that pure kindness alone wouldn’t have, detailed enough that no one holding her would have bothered constructing them as a lie. Something in her gave way, not collapse, exactly, but a controlled release, the way pressure bled off a system finally allowed to stop holding.
“Ruiz didn’t make it,” she said, because it was the only thing that mattered enough to say first.
“I know,” Petrosky said, gently. “We’re bringing him home too.”
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