She wasn’t supposed to remember a world before war.
Not at three.
Not when the first bomb shattered the streets she had barely learned to walk on.
Not when survival became a skill before it ever became a choice.
By the time she was eight, the war had consumed everything.
Cities were reduced to gravesites before their governments even knew they were at war.
Children learned to fight before they learned to read.
And soldiers became currency.
Her parents didn’t hesitate when the draft came.
Most families refused. Some resisted. Others bargained for time.
But hers?
They saw the money.
They took the deal.
And at eight, she was handed over to a war that never should have had a place for her.
She fought, survived, adapted.
Not because she wanted to.
Because she had no choice.
And when the war finally swallowed the last remnants of the world, she stood at its end.
A survivor.
A soldier.
A ghost.
But survival wasn’t enough.
She wanted to undo it.
So she went back.
Five years before it started.
Before the alliances twisted.
Before the first bullet was fired.
Before the world ended before it ever had a chance to save itself.
She knew what needed to change.
She knew the critical moments to stop.
She knew where history bent toward destruction—and how to sever its path.
But every time she arrived at the next critical moment, TF141 was right behind her.
Every time she moved first, they followed.
Every time she altered history, they appeared.
Every time she changed the future, they were already tracking her.
At first, she thought it was coincidence.
But now?
Now, TF141 wasn’t just appearing in all the same places.
They were watching her movements.
Tracking her pattern.
Recognizing the anomaly in their own mission reports—the unnamed operative with no record, no history, no explanation for why she was always ahead of them.
She was running out of time.
Because TF141 didn’t know a world war was coming.
They didn’t know that every move they made, every mission they took, was unknowingly pushing history toward the brink.
And if they caught her—
They would stop her before she ever had a chance to stop the war itself.
Location: Undisclosed Operations Room
Present: Price, Ghost, Soap, Gaz, Laswell, Alejandro, Rodolfo, Nikto, Farah, Roach, Kamarov, Krueger, Nikolai, Horace, Alex
Price’s voice was sharp, controlled, but laced with something more.
Suspicion.
"She’s military."
Soap exhaled slowly, arms crossed. "Had to be. No way she moves like that otherwise."
Gaz leaned forward slightly. "We pulled every angle, every report, every briefing. She’s not listed anywhere."
Alejandro tapped the table twice, a habit when frustrated. "Then who the hell trained her?"
Silence.
No one had an answer.
Laswell adjusted the display, pulling up footage from Berlin, Moscow, Dubai.
Each op—she was there first.
Each conflict—she was positioned exactly where she needed to be.
Ghost shifted beside Price, watching the screen. "She’s too polished for a freelancer."
Rodolfo murmured, "She’s operating like she knows the mission before we do."
Krueger chuckled under his breath, but there was no humor in it. "So who the hell is feeding her intel?"
Roach glanced at the maps. "Backup soldiers don’t move like that. We would’ve noticed her before she ever set foot near our team."
Horace’s voice was flat, unsettled. "Except she wasn’t there. Not before. Not in any logs."
Kamarov narrowed his eyes. "She doesn’t exist."
The realization settled between them—too calculated to be coincidence, too impossible to ignore.
She was moving in step with their mission.
Pretending to be one of their backup soldiers, blending into operations without raising alarms—except she was too good at it.
Too skilled.
Too precise.
And TF141 never trained her.
She was a ghost in their ranks, a soldier that should have been recognized, documented, tracked— but was nowhere.