The screen flickers. The commandos' faces appear—but each one has two shadows.
In a lab in London, a scientist adjusts a dial labeled DP 2.5 .
She plants the limpet mines, but her regulator freezes. She has 2.5 minutes of air. Her doppelgänger rises from the abyss—drowned, eyes white, dragging a chain of dead Makos from other loops.
Sapper plants a charge on the fuel depot. It detonates—twice. Once in real-time, once 2.5 seconds earlier. The second explosion kills a guard he didn't see. The guard falls through the floor, into a memory of himself saluting a flag that no longer exists.
Chameleon infiltrates the command bunker disguised as a colonel. Inside, he finds a radio playing a conversation between himself and the spy from a future that no longer exists. "You always betray them in the end, Julian."
Julian wins by forgetting. He empties his mind of everything except the present second. The doppelgänger collapses into a pile of unused timelines.
On the extraction raft, Sapper counts: four of them. But there were five on the drop manifest. Who's missing?