The memory surfaced without warning.
Kaelen was back in the Agency headquarters. The alarm lights flickered red across the corridors, but the alarms themselves were silent, disabled from the inside by someone who knew exactly where the kill switches were hidden. He remembered the smell of smoke and blood and the strange chemical sweetness of the coolant leaking from the servers, that sharp cloying bite at the back of his throat that never quite washed out no matter how many times he coughed or drank or tried to scrub it from his tongue.
His teammates were dead.
