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.

The impact hit me like an artillery shell. A hundred pounds of compressed bone and fury slammed directly into my chest, knocking the air from my lungs as my back cracked violently against the tarmac. The gray sky spun violently. Concrete tore through my jacket, scraping raw skin across my shoulder blades.

Jaws snapped shut less than an inch from my carotid artery. The force of Rex's teeth colliding sounded like two stones cracking together under water. Saliva splattered my cheek as his claws dug through the heavy denim of my jeans, pinning my thighs to the ground.

"Rex, stop!" I roared, throwing my left forearm across his throat to keep those razors away from my jugular.

His weight was unnatural. It felt less like wrestling an animal and more like wrestling a running hydraulic piston. The beast's eyes remained glassy and pitch-black, blind to reason, blind to love, driven entirely by the neural override sparked by the agent’s silent words. His breath scorched my skin with ozone and copper.

Ten feet away, the agent watched with cold clinical interest, scribbling something onto a digitized slate. "Remarkable latency. Zero hesitation index. Even after six years of domestic dormancy, the Chimera imprint overrides all associative conditioning."

"Dad..." I gasped, my arm shaking violently as Rex's jaw forced my elbow toward my neck. "Dad, what did you do?"

My right hand, pinned between my hip and the pavement, brushed against the folded nylon of the burial flag. Within the thick triangular fold, my fingers encountered something hard and cylindrical. Not the titanium tube from the safe—that was destroyed at the mill.

This was smaller. Thinner. A slender steel rod sewn into the internal hem of the American flag itself.

Thomas had folded this flag himself before he died. He had spent three hours in the hospice room obsessively creasing the blue field with the white stars, his arthritic hands shaking, refusing any help from the nurses. *“Every star has its weight, Donnie,”* he had rasped through the oxygen mask. *“Don't let them take the stars.”*

Gritting my teeth, I ripped the seam with the tip of my thumb.

The steel cylinder slid into my palm. It wasn't a weapon; it was an antique field whistle made of blackened bronze, stamped with the insignia of MACV-SOG: a skull and crossed berets over an anchor. But it had no hole on top. No pea inside. It was a solid, notched pressure whistle—an ultrasonic emitter built for silent tactical coordination.

Rex’s fangs grazed the stubble on my jawline. Blood welled, hot and stinging in the mountain wind.