He heard the dog bark once—sharp, furious, alive—and then the sound of movement, chasing, pursuit.
And then nothing.
By the time backup arrived, the suspect was gone, the civilian was alive, and Daniel Reeves was staring at a ceiling he didn’t recognize, his lower body eerily silent in a way that would come to define the rest of his life.
Titan never came back.
The official explanation, repeated in careful tones by people who meant well but didn’t understand what they were taking away, was that the dog had pursued the suspect and likely become disoriented during the chaos. Search teams were deployed, drones sent up, volunteers combed through the surrounding districts, but days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, and eventually, the search shifted from active to hopeful to quietly abandoned.
