He looked down at the flag in his lap, then up at the dog, and his mouth moved like he was saying something I couldn't hear.

"Donald! Help me with this console!" Harold’s voice cut through the deafening roar of the hydraulic purge. "The primary elevator shaft is locked, but the pneumatic freight lift still has auxiliary battery power! If we can drop the bulkhead behind us, we can bottleneck the pack in the spillway!"

"I can't leave him, Harold!" I shouted back.

Rex was tearing his own skin against the twisted metal. Blood—crimson and bright—was smearing across the jagged steel edges of the server rack. He didn't care about the pain; the programming had severed his nervous system's self-preservation instinct. He was destroying himself simply to close the four feet of distance between his jaws and my throat.

"You have to shoot him, Donald!" Harold screamed, his hands shaking violently as he tried to bypass the security relays with a jumper wire. "Look at him! He's not your father's dog anymore! He's an unguided missile! In thirty seconds, the lower doors will open completely, and if he’s free, he’ll lead them straight to us!"

I looked down at the animal.

I saw the gray hairs around his muzzle—the scars on his left ear from a barbed-wire fence he had jumped ten years ago to protect my father from a rabid coyote. I saw the faded patch of fur on his shoulder where he used to lean against my knee while I sat on the porch, grieving my mother’s death. This dog had carried my father’s soul out of the jungle when no human being on Earth could reach him.

I threw the shotgun to the floor. It clattered against the concrete, the heavy iron ringing out like an altar bell.

"Donald, what are you doing?!" Harold shrieked. "Are you out of your mind?!"

I didn't answer. I dropped flat onto my knees in front of Rex, inches from those thrashing, snapping jaws. The wind from his snapping teeth chilled the sweat on my forehead.

I reached out with my bare, empty hands.

"Thomas didn't teach him to hate," I whispered, my voice barely audible over the sirens. "He taught him to survive."

I closed my eyes for a single heartbeat, summoning the memory of the funeral. The cold November wind. The rain dripping from the brim of the honor guard’s caps. My father sitting in his dress greens, his arthritic hands gripping the folded triangle of the American flag resting on his knees.

*He looked down at the flag in his lap, then up at the dog, and his mouth moved like he was saying something I couldn't hear.*

It wasn't German. It wasn't a military code. It wasn't a serial number or an operational codename.

Thomas had looked at the flag—the symbol of everything that had broken him, everything that had used him, everything that had taken his youth and his friends—and then he had looked at the only innocent thing left in his universe.

I opened my eyes. I leaned forward until my face was less than six inches from Rex’s snarling, frothing maw. I didn't make a sound. I didn't let air escape my vocal cords.

Carefully, deliberately, my lips formed the four silent shapes my father had made in the rain:

*F-R-E-I.*

*N-A-C-H.*

*H-A-U-S-E.*

German. But not the language of the command. The language of Thomas's grandmother. The words he had whispered into the cold dirt of Bavaria before he ever set foot in Vietnam.

*Free. Go home.*

Rex froze.

The snapping stopped mid-strike. His jaw hung open, a single thread of bloody drool dripping onto the floor between my knees.

The unnatural, mechanical blackness in his dilated pupils flickered like an incandescent bulb losing voltage. A low, pathetic whimper—human, agonized, and confused—welled up from the deep cavern of his chest. His ears, pinned flat against his skull in attack readiness, slowly lifted, angling forward.

The trembling didn't stop, but the violence drained out of his posture like water through sand.

"Rex?" I whispered aloud, my voice breaking. "Come on, boy. Look at me. Come on back."

Slowly, terrifyingly, the dog’s pink tongue reached out and weakly licked the dry blood on my cheek.

"My God..." Harold breathed from the console, his hands frozen in mid-air. "He broke the Chimera link. He broke it with a somatic emotional anchor."

"He didn't break it," I said, grabbing the steel server frame with both hands, my cracked rib screaming as I hauled upward with everything I had left. "He just remembered who he was."

With a roar of effort, I threw the crumpled steel chassis backward. Rex scrambled out from beneath the wreckage, his rear leg dragging slightly from the crushing weight, but his eyes were bright amber again—wild, alert, and fiercely intelligent.