PREFACE
Guardian entities do not announce themselves.
Survival is their only signature.
— Classified appendix, Project OZ
I was six years old the night Detective Adrian Hale died for me.
I didn’t understand it then—the gunfire, the rain, the way my mother’s hand trembled as she dragged me through an abandoned industrial park. I only knew the terror in her breath and the small, fierce comfort of my stuffed bunny pressed to my chest.
What I didn’t know—what I couldn’t have known—was that a man I had met only minutes earlier had already made a choice that would shape the rest of my life. A choice to stand between the people hunting my mother. A choice to take the bullets meant for me.
For years, I remembered that night in fragments: the echo of a shout, the flash of a muzzle, the metallic taste of fear. But there was something else, too—something I never told anyone. A feeling. A presence. A sense that someone was guiding us through the dark, nudging us toward safety when every shred of logic said we shouldn’t have survived.
I didn’t know his name then. I didn’t know the truth about the men chasing us, or the secret they were willing to kill to protect. I didn’t know why the signs glowed, or why I felt warmth at my back when the world around us was so cold.
But I know now.
This is the story of the man who died for me… and the guardian who stayed.
He was the one who called me Bunny. I didn’t truly know him—not then—only the name he left behind to keep us safe. And the man who died for me left a signature I wouldn’t understand until much later:
OZ.
And long before I understood any of it—before the truth unraveled and the past came for us again—it all began with a thin file in the hands of a detective who refused to look away.
