Tears rolled down Sam’s face. A sob ripped its way out of her. She nodded. “Yes.”

Then she opened herself to him, opened herself as wide as she could, let him see who she was.

His eyes went wide as he drank her in, a confusion of images and memories and sensations. Above it all she sent her feelings for him, her admiration, her trust, her tenderness, the thing that might have been love.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them there were tears there too. A drop of blood from her cuts dripped from her face onto his. He looked at her, with those wide, amazed eyes, so surprised now to find out how right he’d been about her.

“Sam… Sam… Get them back. Get them back.”

She nodded, weeping. She would. She’d get them back.

He coughed, and blood came up, and she could feel his regret, his regret at not seeing the future, his regret that she’d never opened herself to him before.

“I wish I’d known you,” he whispered. And his mind was fluttering, faltering, on the edge of that sudden decoherence into darkness that she’d felt before.

“You did,” she pleaded with him. “You did know me. You did.”

But he was gone before the words left her lips.

She knelt there, next to Jake, weeping. She closed his still-staring eyes. Her blood and tears fell on his face to mix with his.

I wish I’d shown you, she told herself. I wish I’d trusted you. I wish I’d opened up to you.

I’m sorry, she sent him. I’m so so sorry.

But there was no one there to hear her.

A sound snapped her back to reality. She turned, and the soldier she’d disabled inside the house was there, yards away, a long length of metal pipe in his hand, running at her, swinging it like a baseball bat with lethal, superhuman force.

She was on her feet in an instant. Her left forearm shot up at blurring speed to block the swinging pipe. Pain ripped through her as her bullet-wounded muscles strained to heave her arm up. Then the whole arm went numb as it collided with the deadly pipe. But by then she was forward, inside his guard, and her right fist snapped out in a lightning-fast punch that crushed the man’s nose and snapped his head back in a violent whiplash motion.

The pipe dropped from the man’s hand, clattered on the gravel. It was bent thirty degrees where it had collided with her arm. The man tottered, took one step back, and then collapsed, semiconscious.

Sam stepped over him, patted him down. A search of his pockets brought up a phone, a wallet with cash, credit and ID, and a spare clip of ammo.

She reloaded the pistol, dismissed the ID as a fake, and shoved the rest in her own pockets.