The first thing he noticed wasn’t the cannon. It was my tattoo.

The hangar was doing its usual impression of a migraine — sodium lights buzzing, A-10 hulks squatting on the concrete, hydraulic fluid in the air like a second atmosphere. I had my head inside the GAU-8’s gut, elbow-deep in metal and carbon dust, just another mechanic in coveralls that never quite came clean.

That was the whole point. Be the girl with the torque wrench, not the girl anyone remembers.

“Sergeant.”

His shadow cut across the open access panel. I didn’t have to look up to know the voice — Colonel Hargrove, base commander. Intel guy. Straight back, sharp eyes, the kind of man who still believed regulations were a religion, not a suggestion.

“Sir,” I said, tightening the last bolt.

Silence. Too long. Mechanics know the feel of a pause: this one had weight.

“Your sleeve,” he said quietly. “Roll it back down.”

I frowned, glanced at my arm — and my stomach dropped.

Solvent had soaked the cuff. The fabric had ridden up just enough to expose the inside of my forearm. Black ink. Silver lines. A raven with wings spread, one talon shattered.

His eyes locked on it like it was a live explosive.

I slid the sleeve down, slow. No use. You can’t un-see a ghost.

“Where did you get that mark?” His voice wasn’t command now. It was fear wrapped in rank.

Every sound in the hangar seemed to dull — the clank of tools, the whine of a distant turbine, somebody laughing near the tool crib. I could still hear them, but they were far away, like a radio in another room.

I met his eyes.

“Earned it,” I said.

Something in his face broke. Color drained out, leaving him the color of printer paper and old bones.

“I was at Sevastapole,” he whispered. “They said no one made it out. Swift Talon was… wiped. Officially.”

“Yeah,” I murmured. “That’s what the report says.”

He stared at me like I’d crawled out of his nightmares in grease-stained boots.

“You’re Raven Six.”

It wasn’t a question.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. He knew. The raven on my skin, the way I carried myself, the scar that ran just under my collarbone when the collar gaped — it all clicked for a man who’d spent his life connecting dots he wasn’t supposed to.

“If you’re alive,” he said slowly, “then the op… the ‘accident’… that means—”

“That it wasn’t an accident,” I finished for him. “And the man who signed off on it is wheels-up to this base at 0600 tomorrow.”

“General Rowan,” he said, like the name tasted bad.

The overhead speakers crackled with some routine flight line call, but underneath it I could hear his breathing change — shorter, sharper, a man realizing the room he’s in is not the room he thought it was.

“You understand what that insignia means,” I said, wiping my hands on a rag that would never be clean again. “Officially, my team doesn’t exist. Officially, I’m dead. Officially, Swift Talon was a tragic loss in a hostile theater.”

He shook his head, one tiny, disbelieving motion. “And unofficially?”

“Unofficially?” I stepped in closer, low enough that only he could hear. “It means someone turned a black-ops unit into collateral to protect a weapons pipeline. It means five ghosts are buried under forged signatures and sealed files. And it means you just looked at the one mistake they didn’t manage to kill.”

His jaw clenched. “Why hide here? Why now?”

I glanced at the A-10’s nose, at the cannon I’d spent a year “fixing.”

“Because tomorrow,” I said, “you’re scheduled to take this bird up for a live-fire test in front of half the brass in the state. And the men who burned my team alive? They’d love nothing more than for a ‘mechanical failure’ to take you and anyone who believes you right out of their way.”

He flinched, just once.

“You’re saying they’ll sabotage my gun and pin it on you,” he said. His voice had gone flat, dangerous. “On the ghost mechanic with the classified tattoo.”

“I’m saying they already have.” I shoved a folded scrap of paper into his hand, small enough to disappear in a fist. “You want to live through tomorrow, you follow that exactly. And you don’t tell Rowan you’ve seen me.”

He looked down at the note, then back at me.

“Why should I trust you?” he asked. “For all I know, you’re the one setting me up.”

I held his stare.

“Because if I wanted you dead, Colonel,” I said, nodding at the open cannon, “I wouldn’t be standing here warning you. I’d already be tightening the wrong bolt.”

The hangar lights flickered once, like the building itself shivered.

Outside, a C-17 roared in on approach, bringing with it the man who’d signed my team’s death sentence.

Hargrove folded the note into nothing, shoved it deep into his pocket, and swallowed hard.

“If this is a five-year conspiracy,” he said quietly, “what exactly do you expect me to do?”

I picked up my wrench, slid the panel closed, and finally let the mask drop from my voice.

“Simple,” I said. “Live through tomorrow, Colonel.”

His eyes narrowed. “And after that?”

The base siren began to wail for incoming aircraft, drowning out the rest of the hangar.

I wiped one last smear of grease from the raven on my arm, pulled my sleeve down, and turned away.

“After that,” I said over my shoulder, “we stop pretending I’m just a mechanic.”

The C-17’s engines were still spooling down on the ramp when Colonel Hargrove found me again, just after midnight. The hangar was half-dark, only the security floods painting long shadows across the concrete. He moved like a man who’d spent the last six hours replaying every conversation he’d ever had with General Rowan.

He didn’t waste words.

“I read the note,” he said, voice low. “You want me to swap the hydraulic actuator on the port aileron with the one you flagged as sabotaged, then log it as a routine replacement. You want me to let Rowan’s people think their plan is still intact.”

I nodded once, tightening a bleed valve that didn’t need tightening. “Exactly. They’ll be watching the logs. They’ll see the part number they tampered with go back in. They’ll relax.”

“And when I’m wheels-up tomorrow at 0900 for the demonstration?”

“You’ll have the good actuator. The bad one will be in evidence lock-up, tagged, fingerprinted, and waiting for the investigators I’ve already queued.”

He exhaled through his teeth. “You’ve got friends left in high places.”

“Some,” I said. “Not many. Most of them are still pretending I died at Sevastapole.”

He studied me for a long moment. “What’s your real name, Sergeant?”

“Doesn’t matter. The one on my orders is the one that’s dead. The one on my coveralls is the one that’s breathing.”

He almost smiled—almost. “Fair enough.”

Then he did something I didn’t expect. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver flash drive. “Rowan’s aide tried to delete these from the secure server yesterday. I intercepted the traffic. Maintenance schedules, parts requisitions, and a string of emails that trace back to a shell company in Delaware. Same company that supplied the faulty actuators.”

I took the drive, careful not to let our fingers touch. Evidence was evidence; skin cells were evidence too.

“Good,” I said. “That’s the thread we needed.”

He hesitated. “If this goes sideways tomorrow—if their spotter realizes the swap—”

“It won’t. I’ve been bleeding bad parts into the supply chain for three months. They think they know which ones are compromised. They don’t.”

He nodded slowly, accepting it the way pilots accept weather they can’t change.

“Anything else I need to know?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “When you’re in the pattern tomorrow, do the demo exactly as briefed. Full gun run, low pass, the whole show. Make it look like nothing’s wrong. The moment you land, taxi straight to the secure hangar. Don’t shut down. My contact from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations will be waiting with a team.”

“And you?”

“I’ll be gone before the chocks are in.”

He looked like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t. Instead he offered his hand.

I stared at it for a second, surprised. Then I shook it—firm, quick, the way soldiers do when time is short.

“Whatever your name is,” he said, “thank you. For the warning. For… still fighting.”

I released his hand. “Just don’t die tomorrow, sir. That’s all the thanks I need.”

He left without another word, boots echoing down the empty bay.

At 0855 the next morning the sky over the range was clear and mercilessly blue. I watched from the maintenance shack roof—binoculars, ball cap pulled low, just another tech on break.

Hargrove’s A-10 lifted off smooth and straight. The gun run was textbook: the GAU-8 roared like an angry god, shredding the target sled into confetti. The crowd of brass on the viewing stand—Rowan front and center—applauded politely, unaware they were watching their own trap spring shut on empty air.

When Hargrove landed and taxied to the secure hangar, I was already moving.

By the time Rowan’s entourage arrived for the post-flight debrief, the investigators were waiting. Warrants, cuffs, the whole quiet circus. Rowan went pale when he saw the actuator laid out on a table under floodlights—his fingerprints still on the sabotaged shear pin, lifted clean by forensics.

He tried bluster. It didn’t last long.

Two weeks later the story broke, carefully sanitized for public consumption: “Senior Air Force Officer Detained in Connection with Procurement Fraud and Sabotage.” No mention of black ops, no mention of Sevastapole, no mention of a ghost mechanic with a raven tattoo.

Colonel Hargrove got a quiet commendation and a new assignment—command of a training wing far from anyone who remembered Rowan’s name.

Me?

I vanished the same night Rowan was arrested. Left the coveralls folded on my bunk, torque wrench on top like a calling card. By dawn I was on a civilian flight out of Salt Lake, duffel bag light, new orders sealed in an envelope I hadn’t opened yet.

Somewhere over Nebraska I rolled up my sleeve and looked at the raven one last time. The shattered talon still hurt when the weather changed, a reminder that some wounds don’t close.

But five ghosts had a little more justice now. And one living woman had a little less weight on her shoulders.

I pulled the sleeve down, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

The war wasn’t over. It never is for people like me.

But for the first time in five years, I slept on a plane without dreaming of fire.