THE GHOSTS WE CARRY

The cold stars watched them, indifferent witnesses to the tremor in Anze's voice as the words clawed their way out. "April fourteenth," he said, the name of the date hanging in the frigid air like frozen breath. "Five years ago. Tibetan Plateau. Operation White Ghost." He didn't look at Xu, his gaze fixed on the void where the Milky Way bled into the blackness of the gorge. "High-altitude insertion. Monastery fortress. Ambush." The sentences were terse, stripped bare, each one a stone dropped into the deep well of memory. "Hawk went down first. Sniper round. Didn't make a sound." His knuckles whitened on the cold armrest. "Lei took shrapnel to the femoral artery. Bleeding out in my arms while Ox laid down cover fire." He swallowed hard, the sound raw in the silence. "Evac grounded by a storm. Held position in a kill zone. Watched the light go out of his eyes." The final sentence was a whisper, almost lost to the wind sighing through the pines. "My squad. My responsibility."

Xu stood motionless beside him, the warmth of her presence a quiet counterpoint to the icy despair radiating from him. She didn't reach out, didn't offer empty words. She simply listened, her silence a profound acceptance of the horror he laid bare. The trust in that silence, the lack of demand, loosened something tight and rusted shut inside him. He felt a flicker of relief, sharp and unexpected, that the weight wasn't entirely his to carry in this moment. He took a slow, shuddering breath, the mountain air scraping his lungs. "Command scrubbed the mission after that debrief," he continued, his voice gaining a sliver of steadiness. "Wrote off Hawk and Lei as acceptable losses. Called the target too fortified." A bitter edge crept in. "Acceptable." He finally turned his head, just enough to see Xu's profile in the starlight, her eyes fixed on him, wide and dark with understanding, not pity. "Ox and I… we weren't done. Couldn't leave it like that."

Xu's voice was soft, a gentle probe into the darkness. "The man you went after… he got away?" The question wasn't accusatory; it was a bridge thrown across the chasm of his story.

Anze shook his head, a sharp, negative jerk. "He died. Eventually." He looked back at the stars, the vast indifference of the cosmos mirroring the hollow victory he was about to describe. "Command wouldn't greenlight another op. Too risky. Too much heat after the first failure." He paused, gathering the fractured pieces of the memory. "Ox and I… we stayed in. But the Third Squad was ghosts. So we rebuilt it." He named them, the replacements who became brothers and sisters forged in different fires. "Zhang Wei – 'Ox' – stayed. My vice-captain. Solid as bedrock, carried the weight of survival like another pack." He listed them with a soldier's economy: "Luo Ying – 'Shadow'. Demolitions savant, could turn a toothpick and chewing gum into a crater. Married to Zhòng Tiěshān – 'Iron Mountain'. Man could bench press a yak and had a dry wit that cut deeper than his combat knife. Wēn Ruòshuǐ – 'Needle'. Medic with hands like a concert pianist and a stare that could freeze hell over. Chén Mò – 'Static'. Tech wizard, could hack a satellite with a potato battery, though you'd likely get electrocuted standing near him." He managed a ghost of a wry twist on his lips. "We weren't the Snow Leopards anymore. We were the Broken Arrows. Lethal, unpredictable." They ran covert ops for two more years – hostage rescues in jungles, asset retrievals from crumbling dictatorships. They were good. Scary good. But the monastery festered in his mind, an unhealed wound beneath the scar tissue. "We got tasked with other targets, other fires," Anze said, his voice dropping lower. "But that one… that one was mine. Unfinished."

Xu shifted slightly, the old wood of the railing creaking under her hand. "You went back." It wasn't a question. It was the inevitable conclusion written in the lines of tension on his face, in the way his hand still gripped the chair arm like a lifeline.

"Intel finally pinpointed him," Anze confirmed, the words flat, devoid of triumph. "Not in the monastery. Moved to a private compound nestled in a glacial valley. Isolated. Fortified. A hundred guards, minimum. Modern tech. Kill zones everywhere." He took another sip of the cold coffee, the bitterness mirroring the taste in his mouth. "Command said no. Again. Too hot. Too many unknowns. Risked another White Ghost." He set the mug down with deliberate care. "Sent the Broken Arrows to extract a diplomat's kid from Somalia instead." He looked directly at Xu now, his eyes reflecting the cold starlight, holding a darkness deeper than the night. "I went AWOL. Packed my own kit. Left Ox a note saying I was checking a lead. Solo recon." The lie tasted like ash. "Recon turned into a one-man war."

He described the approach, the biting cold a familiar enemy. Scaling sheer ice cliffs under cover of darkness, fingers numb inside gloves, breath pluming white in the black air. Neutralizing perimeter sensors Static had taught him to bypass – not disable, mimic, making them scream 'all clear' while he slipped past. The first sentry died silently, a garrote whisper-thin piano wire biting deep before the man could blink, eased down onto the snow like a sleeping child. Knife work followed in the shadowed alleys between prefab guard huts – quick, brutal thrusts to the brainstem or heart, muffled gurgles lost in the wind. He moved like the ghost they'd called him, a shadow detaching from deeper shadows. Ten down before the first alarm sounded – a tripwire he hadn't seen, connected not to a bell, but to a bank of stadium-grade floodlights that bathed the central compound yard in blinding white light.

Chaos erupted. Shouted orders in guttural Tibetan dialects. Muzzle flashes sparked like angry fireflies from guard towers, walkways, bunker slits. Rounds cracked past his head, kicked up geysers of ice and rock chips near his boots. Anze became pure, brutal motion. He used the light against them, firing from the dazzling edge of its beam, vanishing back into the relative darkness before return fire could pinpoint him. He sprinted, zig-zagging, towards the nearest cover – a heavy generator housing. Rounds sparked and whined off the metal. He felt the searing kiss of one graze his upper arm, another tear through the fabric of his parka over his ribs, leaving a burning line but not penetrating. He returned fire, controlled double-taps from his suppressed rifle, seeing figures crumple from walkways, slump behind sandbags. He tossed a grenade Shadow had modified – less bang, more blinding flash and ear-splitting shriek. In the disorienting aftermath, he broke cover, charging low towards the main building – a low, sprawling structure of stone and reinforced concrete.

He blew the heavy lock with a shaped charge smaller than his palm, the *crump* deafening in the confined entranceway. Inside was bedlam. Guards poured from doorways, firing wildly in the dim emergency lighting. Anze moved like a dancer of death. He used corners for cover, firing around them, dropping men as they rounded blindly. He used their bodies as shields for a few precious seconds, feeling impacts thud into dead weight. A guard lunged from a side corridor with a bayonet. Anze sidestepped, grabbed the rifle barrel, yanked the man off balance, and drove his combat knife up under the chin, through the palate, into the brain. Wrenching it free in a spray of crimson, he spun to meet the next. Close quarters became a nightmare of fists, knives, gun butts. He broke a jaw with a savage elbow strike, felt bone crunch. Took a hard kick to the thigh that sent waves of numbness down his leg. He shot a man point-blank in the face, the suppressed *thwip* barely audible over the shouts and groans. He was a whirlwind of controlled violence, every movement economical, lethal, driven by a cold fury that had simmered for years.

He fought his way deeper, room by blood-slicked room, following the mental blueprint Static had hacked months prior. The target's inner sanctum was a vault-like door at the end of a narrow corridor. Two final guards, elite security, bigger, faster, better armored. They met him with disciplined fire, forcing him back. Anze took a grazing shot to the temple, a line of fire that sent stars across his vision and blood sheeting down the side of his face. He dropped a flashbang. In the disorientation, he charged. One guard he shot through the gap under his raised arm. The other he engaged hand-to-hand – a brutal exchange of blocks, strikes, and grapples. The man was strong, skilled. He landed a hammer blow to Anze's kidney that stole his breath. Anze hooked the man's leg, swept it, and as he fell, drove his knee down onto the exposed throat with all his weight. He felt the cartilage crush, the horrible wet gasp silenced. Gasping, vision swimming, blood dripping into his eye, Anze placed the breaching charge on the vault door. The explosion blew it inwards.

The inner room was opulent, warm, a stark contrast to the icy carnage outside. Silk rugs, a roaring fire, the smell of expensive incense. The target, a thin man with cold eyes, sat behind a massive desk, a ceremonial dagger in his hand, not a gun. He spoke in accented Mandarin. "Captain Li. The ghost who walks. I expected… an army." Anze didn't hesitate. He didn't want speeches. He didn't want surrender. He raised his pistol, the suppressor a dark eye. The man's eyes widened slightly. "For Lei. For Hawk," Anze rasped, his voice raw from smoke and exertion. Two shots. Center mass. The man jerked back, the dagger clattering to the floor, blood blooming dark on his silk robe. He slumped forward onto the desk, dead. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the crackle of the fire and Anze's own ragged breathing. It was done. And it felt like nothing. Empty. Hollow. A hundred men dead, a fortress breached, a target eliminated. All it bought was silence and the coppery taste of blood in his mouth.

He limped out the way he came, stepping over bodies, through smoke and the stench of cordite and death. The compound was eerily quiet now. He made it outside, into the biting wind. The cold hit his wounds like knives. He triggered his emergency beacon. Ox found him hours later, half-frozen, leaning against a rock, his parka stiff with frozen blood, his face a mask of crimson from the head wound. "Damn fool, Anchor," was all Ox said, his voice thick with relief and anger as he hauled him up. No extraction team. Just Ox, disobeying orders, coming after his Captain. They walked out together, through the snow, carrying the weight of the dead – the old ghosts and the new ones Anze had just created.

The silence on the Mòfáng terrace stretched, filled now with the ghosts of gunfire and the echo of that hollow victory. Anze finally looked at Xu. Her face was pale in the starlight, her eyes holding the reflection of the horror he'd described, but also a deep, unwavering stillness. There were no tears, no gasps of shock, no platitudes. Just understanding. The weight hadn't vanished, but sharing its shape, its terrible contours, made it somehow less isolating. "That's why I left," he finished, his voice a rough whisper. "The killing… it wasn't fixing anything. Just digging the hole deeper." He looked out at the sleeping village, the soft lights of Yúnzhī Cūn a fragile constellation against the dark mountainside. "Built the Soul's Path instead. Seems… cleaner."

Xu reached out then, not to touch him, but to gently take the stone-cold coffee mug from his white-knuckled grip. Her fingers brushed his, a fleeting warmth. "Cleaner," she repeated softly, the word hanging in the air, a quiet acknowledgment of the path he'd chosen since, the path that led her here, to this terrace, under these same indifferent stars. The first faint hint of grey was lightening the eastern horizon, outlining the jagged peaks. Dawn was coming, washing the stars away, one by one. The ghosts would retreat with the darkness, for now. They stood together in the growing light, survivors of different wars, silent witnesses to the slow, persistent turn of the world towards day.