CHAPTER 37: CAN’T MOURN

Could someone wake her from this bad dream?

The thought echoed faintly in Ahce’s mind as armored vehicles rolled through the fog like beasts of judgment. The Black Cross task force, an S-rank division so secretive that even Zeiren’s highest operatives whispered their name with unease, descended on the forest before she could draw a steady breath. Their arrival was soundless and absolute, like the closing of a cell door.

One moment, she was hunched over her flickering tablet, tracking the last pulse of Richard Jing’s signal amid the static of burned frequencies. The next, men in obsidian armor emerged from the smoke, faces masked, insignias gleaming faintly under the dying light. Their leader’s voice was smooth, precise, and terrifying in its calmness.

"Operation terminated. You are to stand down. Extraction protocol: immediate."

No explanations. No negotiation.

Ash and Mira obeyed like soldiers wound tight by years of discipline. Ryo packed the comms with quiet, brittle movements, his jaw clenched. Ahce, however, could barely swallow the anger clawing up her throat. She wanted to scream, to demand answers, to tear through the smoldering ruins of the forest until she found Richard, or what was left of him.

But Black Cross was not an order one questioned. They carried law, leverage, and silence like weapons. Even Zeiren, the organization she had trusted to protect the truth, did not challenge their authority.

Whatever had happened in City E7 was no longer hers to uncover. It belonged to them now, to the faceless men who swept through the world’s ugliest secrets and sealed them away forever.

On the flight back to City A, the world outside the transport’s windows looked unreal. The sky was an endless gray, the clouds heavy and indifferent.

Ahce’s hands trembled as she cycled through restricted networks, slipping through half-locked gateways and corrupted data feeds. Every file she accessed returned fragmented signals, burned transmissions, lost comm pings, and power anomalies smothered under "classified containment notices."

Cities D, L, and E7 were under sudden lockdown. New checkpoints, new banners, soldiers who didn’t wear Division colors. Too many agencies, too many hands trying to bury the same truth. Whoever had taken control wasn’t cleaning up. They were erasing the traces.

When the craft touched down, City A’s skyline glimmered in sterile perfection. Glass towers, neon signs, and the illusion of peace. But to Ahce, the lights felt cruel, mocking reminders of the world that kept spinning while hers had stopped.

Her comm vibrated endlessly, bureaucrats, handlers, hollow voices offering "commendations." She ignored them all until one message slid into her inbox, delicate as a knife wrapped in silk.

[Captain Richard Jing – Presumed Deceased.]

The words hollowed her chest. The report was clinical, every sentence sharpened to cut emotion away.

[No remains recovered.]

[Cause: classified.]

[Status: terminated with honors.]

The Division moved quickly, too quickly. A compensatory transfer to his family, condolence letters pre-written by legal teams, a state funeral wrapped in folded flags and silence. It was a performance disguised as closure. The kind of story governments gave the living when the real one was too dangerous to tell.

Only three people in the world knew the truth, that Richard Jing had not only been her closest person but her husband.

Their marriage had been secret, buried beneath duty and protocol, sealed away between missions and coded transmissions. They had signed the papers quietly, two people bound not by ceremony, but by shared defiance and fragile hope. No families, no witnesses, only two signatures on a document folded into her jacket and carried close to her heart.

Now, the world called her his widow.

A title she could not wear aloud.

A truth she could not mourn in public.

At the memorial, she stood among strangers dressed in black, her face serene, her posture immaculate. Zeiren had trained her well to be composed, calculated, and untouchable. She accepted condolences with a bow, her voice steady even as her pulse broke against her ribs.

No one saw the way her fingers trembled against the flowers she placed on the altar. No one knew she had signed the same last name that now lay carved on the marble plaque before her.

In the days that followed, grief did not soften her. It sharpened her.

Ahce moved through corridors of data and silence, her expression calm but her mind a storm. She weaponized her position at Zeiren, used her clearance like a blade. Every night, she sifted through encrypted archives, ordered cross-sector scans, and subpoenaed transport manifests under the guise of "research."

She traced every transmission that left E7 in the final forty-eight hours, every satellite pass that flickered with unusual activity. She fed algorithms her own obsessions, her own grief disguised as logic.

But the deeper she searched, the more the truth coiled away.

Black Cross had sealed everything.

Files vanished mid-transfer. Server logs came back redacted. Access keys she’d held for years suddenly expired. Even her private probes returned corrupted images torn by static, timestamp loops, and half-heard voices in dead air. Every thread she followed led to the same cold crest. A black cross on a silver field.

When she confronted Zeiren’s analysts, they shrugged helplessly.

"National security," they said. "Beyond clearance."

Translation: Don’t ask. Don’t dig.

But Ahce could not stop. Her hands remembered how Richard’s felt when he laced his fingers through hers. Her ears remembered the warmth in his laughter, the way he called her "Ace" when no one was listening. That memory became her compass. And her curse.

She did not tell Richard’s family that she knew something. She did not tell her own that she was falling apart. She did not tell her colleagues that she had begun building a shadow network, rerouting Zeiren’s discarded surveillance drones and dormant satellites, searching for what official channels refused to reveal.

Each night, she whispered to the code: Find him.

If he were alive, she would bring him back.

If he were dead, she would burn the world that took him.

Weeks bled into months before she understood the truth forming quietly inside her, the life she had built no longer fit the person she had become. The morning she walked into the school, her resignation letter already signed, the halls felt distant and strange. The children’s laughter echoed like a memory from another lifetime.

The principal tried to stop her, reminding her of her promise, her students, and her future. She only smiled faintly.

"You can’t teach hope," she said softly, "when you’ve forgotten what it looks like."

She left the building without looking back.

Outside, the wind carried the smell of rain and static, the scent of cities before a storm. Ahce tilted her face toward the horizon, where the world’s secrets slept beneath smoke and steel.

Somewhere beyond those locked zones, she believed, Richard was waiting, alive or dead, it no longer mattered. Because she would find him. And when she did, the truth would burn.