William signed the last page at 7:14 in the morning, alone in an office that still smelled of the coffee he'd burned an hour earlier and forgotten about, and set the pen down with a care that felt strange for something this small. A signature. Black ink on a line that had been blank for nearly two years, waiting, apparently, for exactly this hand to finally fill it in. The formal referral sat in front of him in a folder thick enough now that the elastic band strained at its corners the same way Fredric's had, three miles across the city, though William had no way of knowing that and wouldn't have cared if he had. Ferrer's sworn statement. The altered forensic report, cross-referenced page by page against her original carbon notes. The transport officer's account of a sentencing pushed through faster than any comparable case in the department's own records. Osric's written testimony, filed before his death rather than after it, sworn and notarized in a room William had chosen specifi

Boars hated GalaXtore on principle before he ever set foot near its loading docks. Too much glass. Too many escalators that hummed even at three in the morning, running for nobody, burning money just to look alive. He'd walked the perimeter twice already this week in a maintenance jacket two sizes too big, clipboard in hand, and every time he passed under those glowing atrium windows he thought about the fruit warehouse Nate used to tell stories about, the smell of rot in the dark, and how far a man could come from that and still end up standing in the shadow of something built by the same rotten money. Tonight he wasn't wearing the maintenance jacket. Tonight he wore black, and the only light on him came from a penlight clipped to his collar, angled down so it wouldn't catch on any camera he hadn't already accounted for. "Two more minutes on the west camera loop," Jo said in his ear, voice thin and steady the way it always got once a plan actually started moving instead of just si

He didn't sleep either, though for reasons that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the particular electric hum that had settled into his chest the moment he'd walked out of his father's study with the folder still pressed against his ribs. He drove home with the windows down despite the cold, the night air biting at his knuckles on the wheel, and found himself grinning at nothing in the rearview mirror like a man who'd forgotten, somewhere along the way, that he was allowed to want something out loud. “Don't disappoint me. I don't intend to give this speech twice.” He'd turned the sentence over so many times on the drive home that it had started to lose its shape the way any word does when you say it too often, and still he couldn't stop himself from turning it over one more time, parking in his own driveway with the engine ticking and the folder resting warm against his thigh where he'd set it, unwilling to let it out of arm's reach even for the walk to his

Ron had thirty-one hours left on the clock by the time he finally laid eyes on Aldous Beckert in person, and he spent the first ten minutes of that meeting deciding he didn't like the man very much, which was inconvenient, because disliking a man made it harder to move fast for his sake. Beckert lived in a narrow apartment above a shuttered dry cleaner's on the eastern edge of the warehouse district, close enough to GalaXtore's distribution center that he could walk to work in twenty minutes and never once needed to spend money on a car he couldn't otherwise afford. Ron had watched the building for two hours before he ever knocked, parked in a delivery van three doors down with a magnetic sign on the side advertising a plumbing company that didn't exist, cataloguing the foot traffic, the lit windows, the particular rhythm of a street that had learned, over years, exactly which hours belonged to which kind of person. Nobody watching. Not yet. That was the only mercy in the whole sit

William had learned, over the last six weeks, to read a courtroom's mood the same way he'd once read a crime scene not by what was said out loud, but by the small, involuntary things bodies did when they thought nobody important was watching them do it. The prosecutor's assistant chewing the cap of her pen a little too fast during cross-examination. The bailiff's eyes flicking toward the gallery every time a new name got mentioned, checking to see who'd shown up to hear it. The judge's clerk, a young man named Petrik, who'd started arriving twenty minutes early to sort through filings that used to sit untouched until the actual session began. Momentum had a texture to it, if you paid attention. William had spent a career learning to feel it before anyone bothered to name it. He felt it now, sitting in the gallery of a preliminary hearing that had nothing directly to do with Nate Evander's case on paper, though everyone in the room understood, without a single person saying so aloud