“Lucas,” Desmond breathed. He’d found him! The screen in the operations room filled with the body of his child. At twenty-one, Lucas couldn’t be called a child anymore, but seeing him, even now, a confident, dedicated soldier, Desmond could still feel the weight of Lucas as an infant in his arms as he’d rocked him in the middle of the night. When it felt like he and that bright-eyed baby were the only two people in the world.

  “Sir?” Abner prompted, awaiting orders to relay to the team on the ground. Fucking Abner could give him a fucking second.

‍ ‍I found him, Desmond imagined telling Susan. Relief would sweep across her round face, the way it had when Lucas was five and they found him at a crowded football stadium, after twenty-seven agonizing minutes.

When an official approached them holding Lucas by the hand, Desmond let Susan embrace Lucas first. Standing there watching their reunion, seeing Lucas’s tear-streaked cheeks peeking out over his mom’s shoulder as she held him, guilt filled Desmond so completely that he trembled with it. It replaced all the blood in his body with expanders, stretching against his skin, more guilt than any human could contain.

His fault. He’d lost Lucas. He didn’t pay enough attention. He’d been trained in situational awareness and yet he’d lazily missed the critical moment where Lucas, entranced by a passing cotton candy cart, followed, just far enough to lose sight of his dad. To not remember the direction from which he’d come.

“Awaiting orders. Over,” a harsh voice crackled over the speaker, filling the room with static and heavy breathing that cut off abruptly. “Terminate? Please advise. Over.” They hadn’t expected to find Lucas on this mission, otherwise Desmond would never be in the position he’s in now—deciding whether to give the order to terminate his son.

At least Susan had passed long before he lost Lucas this second time. Far from a reunion, Lucas appearing on the screen in the middle of a live op was just another loss. The man he saw on the screen had Lucas’s body. He looked at the world through Susan’s small round eyes, peering out from Susan’s round face, over Desmond’s high, protruding cheekbones and pointed nose.

But Desmond could see that this wasn’t Lucas. Lucas’s resting facial expression didn’t look quite that way, with his bottom lip a little to the left. The same way that foreigners of the same race look a little bit different so that you know, even without hearing them speak, that they speak a foreign language, Desmond could see tiny manifestations of the rook inside Lucas.

Abner shifted uncomfortably next to Desmond. Desmond could feel the tension palpable among the handful of senior officers present. They silently waited for Desmond to give the order to kill his own son.

His fault. He had told Lucas bedtime stories about military heroes. He’d passed on admiration for the sacrifice soldiers make to protect their communities. He’d been proud when Lucas took up those same ideals, so proud, that he’d given up his status running live ops to become an instructor at Hartling Integration Military Academy at the same time Lucas passed through the Main Gate as a candidate.

Stoic and disciplined, Desmond had been an exacting father, and Lucas had risen to every expectation. Desmond had basically mapped out the life trajectory that led Lucas to the op that day, where rooks defeated him so completely, leaving him alive but taking his selfhood. It felt like Desmond had served Lucas up to the rooks, naked and restrained.

Desmond had even structured the mission. He’d assigned roles and choreographed the building’s infiltration, but he hadn’t been running the op live. Thank God. He wouldn’t have survived seeing what happened after rooks overpowered Lucas’s special ops unit. Just hearing about it broke him.

Most Hartling Integration military would rather die than turn rook, Lucas included. If Lucas could voice a preference right now, he’d beg his father to kill him. To end the humiliation of his body being possessed by the very enemy he’d made the ultimate sacrifice to fight against. And to prevent his body from perpetuating the violation by raping a fellow solider to infect another with the same fate.

A career solider, Desmond steadily rose in rank in New Earth’s infantry due to his penchant for telling direct, hard truths to everyone, even senior ranking officers—a quality that made him unpopular among peers. He never allowed emotion, entanglement or self-interest to cloud his tactical judgment, or anyone else’s.

This wasn’t even a judgment call; the right tactical answer here was to terminate. Ironic that the man who built his self-identity around making the right military move no matter the sacrifice would be faced with this ultimate test of resolve.

“It isn’t Lucas,” Abner murmured softly. “Lucas is gone, Desmond.” Abner’s use of Desmond’s first name chafed. Younger men didn’t have a clue what it took to remain in service for more than twenty years. Desmond had fought in the fourth Ionian uprising. He’d provided security for the summit where they signed the treaty that transformed the five planets in their solar system from independent civilizations warring over territory and resources to a unified conglomeration: the Hartling Integration. The HI insignia on Abner’s chest is partly thanks to Desmond.

  More than that, the substance of Abner’s comment infuriated him. How dare Abner presume that some basic mental health training qualified Abner to offer advice to anyone in this impossible position?

Uncertainty gnawed at his gut. It isn’t Lucas, but their knowledge about rooks increased every day. In the seven years since they discovered the malignant presence of Roving Occupant Organisms and they quarantined New Earth from the other four planets in the Hartling Integration, they learned rooks were transmitted through sexual intercourse, and now they knew women were immune. They learned rooks could hop into animals, temporarily possessing them, but now they knew killing the animal didn’t kill the rook. It simply forced it back into its human host body. What if he killed Lucas only to find months or years later that there is a way to get him back?

“Stand down,” Desmond declared.

“Des—,” Abner started at the same time that Desmond heard the soldier on comms relay the order to the field.

“I am the ranking officer and I gave an order,” Desmond barked, shutting down Abner’s challenge.

“Roger,” the voice from the field replied. “Standing down. Over.”

A father first. For all of his beliefs and all of his actions, the friends he’d lost, the disappointment he’d caused in Susan—all of it flipped on its head. A father first. Repercussions be damned. If Lucas had a chance, even a remote chance, Desmond would give it to him.

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