My decorated K9 partner had never disobeyed me in five years.

The change in the machine's cadence wasn't lost on Titan. Dogs hear frequencies that sit far beyond human capability. The ultrasonic hum of the charging capacitor hit his ears like a whip; I saw his pupils dilate until his eyes were almost entirely black.

“Lucas!”

I glanced over my shoulder. Sergeant Mark Miller, my supervisor and a twenty-year veteran of the department, was sprinting across the frozen lawn, weapon drawn, stopping abruptly twenty yards back as he registered the perimeter markers I’d barked out.

“Don’t come any closer, Sarge!” I shouted. “It’s a command-detonated or timed secondary! The switch just closed!”

“The girl’s mother is at the perimeter screaming bloody murder, Vance! What’s your status?”

“If Titan moves, she dies! If I move him, we both die!”

I looked down at Lily. Tears were freezing on her eyelashes. She was trying so hard to be brave, her small fingers clutching the fabric of Titan’s Kevlar vest. Titan had dropped his head lower now, resting his chin right on top of her wool cap, his warm breath billowing out in white plumes that shielded her face from the icy air.

“Lily, listen to my voice,” I said softly. “You’re doing incredible. You are the bravest girl in Seattle today. Do you know that?”

“I... I want my mommy,” she whispered, her voice barely carrying over the wind.

“Your mommy is right over there by the big trees. She’s waiting for you. But right now, you and Titan have a job to do. You have to be a statue. Can you do that for me? Like the stone lions outside the library.”

She nodded once, a microscopic tilt of her chin.

The diode was blinking faster now. Once every half-second.

I knew how these devices worked from my two tours in Kandahar before I joined the force. Bounding mines were designed to project thirty to fifty inches into the air via a small propellant charge before the main explosive payload ignited, spraying steel spheres at chest height in a lethal 360-degree perimeter.

If that secondary charge fired while Titan was lying across Lily, the blast would direct into his body. He would take the full kinetic force of the steel shrapnel. He would be torn apart.

“No,” I whispered. “Not him. Not her.”

I reached down to my utility vest, unsnapping my multi-tool with numb, shaking fingers.

“Vance, stand down!” Miller’s voice echoed across the lawn. “EOD is ninety seconds out! Do not tamper with that device!”

“We don’t have ninety seconds, Mark!” I yelled back, not taking my eyes off the blinking red light. “The capacitor is cycling! It’s got a sixty-second burn timer!”

The wire was caught in a small tangle of blackberries just beside Titan’s left rear paw. If I tried to cut it without neutralizing the current, the sudden release of tension would trigger the striker pin. But behind the main casing, partly obscured by a root, sat a tiny battery housing wrapped in black electrical tape.

Two wires emerged: a blue wire and a striped ground wire.

I knelt lower, pressing my chest into the mud beside Titan. The dog didn't flinch, but his breathing grew shallower, matched to my own. He trusted me implicitly. For five years, through drug raids, building clearances, and tracking armed suspects through pitch-black ravines, we were two halves of the same pulse.

“Forgive me, buddy,” I muttered.

I opened the wire cutters on the multi-tool.

My hands, usually steady enough to thread a needle in a hurricane, were trembling. The cold was seeping into my joints, but beneath the uniform, sweat was running down my spine.

Five seconds.

Four.

The red light turned solid.

I jammed the blade between the battery pack and the primer cap, severing the ground wire and levering the battery loose from its housing in a single, violent motion.

A spark leapt from the severed copper, snapping against my Kevlar glove with a sharp *crack*.

Titan gave a muffled grunt, absorbing the jolt through the damp earth, but held his ground.

Silence fell over the clearing.

The red light died.

The rattle of the mechanical timer ceased.

For three agonizing seconds, none of us breathed. The wind whistled through the bare branches of the maples above us.

Then, Titan let out a long, heavy exhale that ruffled the fur around his snout. He slowly turned his head, looked down at me, and licked the cold sweat off my cheek.

“Mother of God,” Miller breathed from twenty yards away, finally moving forward with two tactical officers behind him. “EOD! Move in! Secure the package!”

I grabbed Lily by the arms, lifting her gently from under Titan’s body. The moment she was clear, Titan stood, shook his entire coat until his tags jingled, and immediately placed himself between the girl and the neutralized mine, his posture returning to full tactical alert.

Lily was scooped up by two paramedics who rushed in with a thermal blanket, her mother breaking through the tape line with a shriek of relief that echoed off the glass walls of the conservatory.

I collapsed backward onto the frozen mud, staring up at the slate-gray sky, chest heaving.

Titan walked over, sat down heavily beside my shoulder, and dropped his massive head directly onto my chest.

“Good boy,” I rasped, running my fingers through the thick fur of his neck. “Good damn boy.”

But as the bomb technicians in their eighty-pound blast suits descended on the site with portable X-ray equipment, a cold reality began to settle in my gut.

This wasn't a pipe bomb left by an amateur. This was an engineered military munition, concealed meticulously in one of the wealthiest, most populated family parks in the city.