“Rat-a-tat-tat!” “Boom!” Gunfire and grenade blasts thundered through the skeletal remains of a long-abandoned construction site, followed by panicked screams from somewhere deeper inside the unfinished building.
A heavily armed U.S.
Navy SEAL assault team advanced through the concrete structure with practiced precision, clearing one position after another as they pushed toward their objective.
Every man on the team had years of combat experience, and tonight’s mission was simple on paper: rescue an American mother and her young daughter who had been kidnapped and brought to this compound.
“Eleven o’clock, Orion!
Cover me!” James shouted from behind a concrete support column.
The broad-shouldered SEAL broke from cover the instant suppressing fire began, charging several yards while firing controlled bursts from his rifle.
Three armed men appeared ahead of him, and James dropped all three before they could properly raise their weapons.
The man covering him was Orion Locke, thirty years old and built like someone who had spent half his life preparing for war.
He stood nearly six-foot-three, with a rugged face, close-cropped dark hair, and a powerful frame that stretched the limits of his combat uniform.
Even while crouched behind cover with his rifle shouldered, there was something imposing about him, the kind of presence earned after twelve years in the military rather than built inside a gym.
The moment James called out the direction, Orion swung his rifle toward the eleven-o’clock position.
Two hostile machine gunners were positioned near the stairwell, and Orion immediately pinned them down, giving James the opening he needed to advance.
The maneuver was practically instinctive; after countless operations and training exercises together, every member of the team knew exactly where the others would move without needing lengthy commands.
Unfortunately, no amount of training could remove chaos from a battlefield.
James had barely cleared the next section when a wooden door several yards behind him suddenly flew open.
An armed gunman burst into the hallway with an AK-pattern rifle and opened fire before anyone could react.
Several rounds slammed into James’s body armor, but one struck above the protection and tore through the side of his neck.
“James!” Orion roared as his teammate collapsed.
Blood rushed through Orion’s head, wiping away years of discipline for one terrible instant.
He spun toward the attacker and held down the trigger, pouring the remainder of his magazine into the gunman until the man dropped against the doorway.
The rifle fire continued for only seconds, but the 5.56 rounds punched through the attacker and tore into the thin wooden door behind him.
Then everything became strangely quiet.
Orion’s breathing was still heavy when he noticed something dark spreading beneath the door.
At first he thought it belonged to the gunman, but the pool continued creeping across the dusty concrete from the room beyond.
A terrible feeling settled into his stomach as he stepped forward and slowly pushed the damaged door open.
Two civilians were huddled together inside the cramped room.
The older woman had collapsed against the wall with her arms wrapped protectively around a little blonde girl who looked no older than six.
Both were covered in blood, their bodies riddled with wounds from the rounds that had passed through the door.
The little girl still held a bloodstained Barbie doll tightly against her chest, but her once-pretty face had been destroyed by several bullet wounds.
Orion froze.
They were the hostages.
He had killed them.
James’s body lay only yards away, yet Orion suddenly heard nothing around him—not the shouting of his teammates, not the gunfire elsewhere in the building, not even his own breathing.
His eyes remained fixed on the little girl as crushing silence swallowed everything around him.
He had seen countless corpses during twelve years of combat, but something about that tiny body and the doll trapped against her chest refused to let him look away.
Then the little girl’s eyes snapped open.
They were completely black.
Her ruined face slowly turned toward Orion, and something cold and hateful seemed to stare through him from behind those unnatural eyes.
It was no longer the expression of a dead child but something filled with pure malice, like one of the vengeful spirits from the horror movies his mother used to hate watching.
“Hah!” Orion Locke shot upright on a filthy mattress, his entire body drenched in sweat.
His right hand had already grabbed the handgun beside him while his left closed around the combat knife he kept beneath his pillow, and his bloodshot eyes swept across the room for threats before his mind fully caught up with reality.
Only after recognizing the cracked walls, broken windows, and rusted equipment around him did he slowly lower both weapons.
“That damn dream again.” Orion rubbed both hands across his face and sat on the edge of the mattress, exhaustion weighing heavily on him.
Six months had passed since the failed hostage rescue, but the nightmare had followed him almost every night since.
He had survived firefights, explosions, ambushes, and operations most civilians would never hear about, yet a dead little girl had somehow become the one enemy he could never escape.
The military investigation after the operation had been brutal.
Orion had faced court-martial proceedings for the accidental deaths of both hostages, and although his commanding officer—a Navy captain who had known him for years—had fought hard on his behalf, the victims’ family had enough influence to ensure the matter would not quietly disappear.
After twelve years of service, Orion Locke was ultimately forced out of the Navy.
Strangely, he never resented the decision.
Whatever the circumstances had been, he was the man who had fired those rounds, and two innocent people had died because of them.
Orion could accept punishment for that.
What he couldn’t accept was the nightmare.
Every time Orion managed to sleep, he returned to that unfinished building.
He saw James die, watched the gunman step through the doorway, emptied his magazine, and then discovered the mother and daughter behind the door.
No matter how the dream began, it always ended with that dead girl opening those completely black eyes and staring directly at him.
Six months without proper sleep was enough to break almost anyone.
Even Orion’s discipline had begun wearing thin, leaving him irritable, exhausted, and constantly alert.
Eventually he went to a psychologist, who found no physical explanation for the nightmares and concluded that Orion was suffering from severe guilt related to the accidental deaths of the hostages.
Orion had nearly laughed when he heard that diagnosis.
He had spent twelve years fighting wars and covert operations in places most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
Hundreds of people had died because of him over the years, some unquestionably guilty and others caught in situations where the difference between enemy and civilian became dangerously blurred.
Orion knew exactly what kind of man he had become, and he had never considered himself particularly compassionate, so the idea that one accidental killing had suddenly awakened some overwhelming conscience inside him sounded ridiculous.
Unfortunately, Orion didn’t have a better explanation.
The alternative was believing that the dead girl had somehow followed him home, and he wasn’t desperate enough to start believing in ghosts simply because he kept having nightmares.
He therefore cooperated with the psychologist and attended several months of therapy, but nothing changed.
Eventually, his savings began disappearing faster than his nightmares did.
With therapy accomplishing almost nothing and his wallet steadily shrinking, Orion finally stopped going.
He packed some basic equipment and decided to spend several weeks traveling through the South and hiking through the wilderness near the places where he had grown up.
Maybe isolation, fresh air, and distance from military life would accomplish what months of therapy had failed to do.
That decision had brought him to the abandoned roadside gas station where he had spent the previous night.
Orion climbed off the battered mattress and walked into a tiny restroom at the back of the building.
Dust covered the cracked mirror above the sink, and he wiped it away with his sleeve until his reflection became visible.
A handsome but worn-looking man stared back at him, with dark circles beneath his eyes and several days of stubble covering his jaw.
“Thirty years,” Orion muttered.
He stared at himself for several seconds before letting out a quiet sigh.
There was something about Orion Locke that no military psychologist, commanding officer, or government investigator had ever discovered.
He wasn’t originally from this world.
Thirty years earlier, Orion had been reborn here with the memories of another life on a world that had also been called Earth.
In that previous life, he had been nobody special—just an ordinary office employee whose greatest talents involved spreadsheets, paperwork, and surviving endless meetings.
He hadn’t been a scientist, engineer, soldier, doctor, or financial genius, so none of the miraculous knowledge possessed by fictional reincarnators had followed him into his new life.
The differences between the two worlds had quickly crushed whatever fantasies he might have had about using future knowledge to become rich.
History was different, countries and political boundaries didn’t perfectly match what he remembered, and countless pieces of culture he had once taken for granted either didn’t exist or had developed differently.
There were familiar cities, brands, movies, and people mixed together with things he had never encountered before, creating a world that felt recognizable without ever being completely predictable.
So Orion had done the only thing available to him.
He lived normally.
He was born to a struggling single mother in rural Louisiana and grew up understanding exactly how little money they had.
Because he possessed an adult mind beneath a child’s face, Orion rarely caused trouble, studied hard, and did everything possible to make his mother’s life easier.
His plan had been painfully ordinary: graduate high school, earn scholarships, attend a decent college, find a stable white-collar career, and give his mother the comfortable life she had never been able to afford.
Then, during Orion’s senior year, everything collapsed.
At eighteen, he learned that his mother was suffering from end-stage kidney failure.
Treatment costs quickly climbed into tens of thousands of dollars, an impossible amount for a teenager from a family with no savings and no relatives wealthy enough to help.
Orion tried borrowing money wherever he could, but even the sort of people willing to make dangerous loans wanted someone with income or property they could actually collect from.
Desperate, Orion eventually found a military recruiting notice offering a $15,000 enlistment bonus for qualifying recruits in selected specialties.
Fifteen thousand dollars might as well have been a million to him.
Orion had exercised seriously for years because staying healthy was cheaper than getting sick, and that habit suddenly became the only advantage he possessed.
He passed the physical requirements, signed the enlistment papers, and took the bonus without hesitation.
For the first time in months, he thought he had found a way to save his mother.
He hadn’t.
The money paid for treatment, but it only bought her another two weeks.
After her funeral, something inside Orion changed.
The careful young man who had spent his entire childhood planning for a peaceful future suddenly had no family waiting for him, no college dream worth chasing, and no reason to fear what might happen tomorrow.
He threw himself into military life instead, volunteered for increasingly dangerous assignments, and eventually earned his way into special operations.
That was when Orion Locke began accumulating blood on his hands.
It was also when he discovered that this strange world had given him something his previous life never had.
A special ability.