Mirage

Seventeen kills for the Academy. Then Brynn Walker stopped counting. She's their best operative. Codename Mirage. Precision without attachment, execution without hesitation. When the Academy sends her to terminate a rogue asset outside Marseille, it's supposed to be clean-up work. It isn't. The woman waiting for her has made two cups of tea. She knows Brynn's name — her real name. And what she reveals in the next ten minutes will dismantle eighteen years of conditioning, loyalty, and carefully buried grief. Brynn's parents didn't die in a robbery. The Academy killed them. Then it took their children and built weapons out of the wreckage. Now Brynn has a choice. Complete the mission. Or find out who she is when everything she was made to be gets taken apart. Forward Operation is a prequel short story set in the Shadows Over Earth universe — the story of how Mirage became Brynn Walker again, and what it cost her to get there.