"My business here is done," Nathan says, standing.Devon doesn't move right away. She's looking at him with something new in her face, something that wasn't there an hour ago, and it takes Nathan a second to place it. Doubt. Not about the money, about him, about a young man who looks barely old enough to run a company let alone command the kind of power he just put on display."You're very young," she says, careful, "to be making threats to a sitting head of state.""I'm young enough that Korr thought I was a joke," Nathan says. "That's the only part of my age that's going to matter to him by tomorrow. Age has never bought anyone safety from what my family can do. It's not the years that scare people, Mrs. Devon. It's the name."She studies him a moment longer, then nods, the doubt folding itself away somewhere she's decided not to look at again. "And if he doesn't return them?”"He won't." Nathan says it simply, like weather. "Men like Korr don't believe a threat is real until it's a

Four days later, Theodore is on a plane nobody scheduled through the usual channels, descending toward a capital that still cuts its power for six hours most nights, the kind of city where half the skyline is new glass towers and the other half is still rebuilding from a war three governments ago.The Dravin Federation doesn't get much attention in the outside world, not the way its neighbor does now that Nathan's name is attached to it. Nobody sends journalists here. Nobody argues about it in the U.N. What it has instead is quiet, staggering wealth sitting under quiet, staggering poverty, cobalt and lithium and a dozen rare metals nobody outside a handful of mining executives can even pronounce, all of it sitting in ground that's never once, in Marcus Feld's lifetime, been dug up by anyone who actually shared the profit with the people standing on top of it.Theodore's been coming here for close to twenty years, long before Nathan was old enough to know what a border was. He was the

Nathan's alarm hasn't even gone off yet when the knock comes.He's already awake, lying flat on his back staring at a ceiling that looks exactly like every other ceiling he's stared at this week, running through the mental list of things a person named Nathan Walters has been quietly running for the last four days and the much shorter, much more mundane list of things a person named Oliver Salmon is supposed to show up for by nine a.m. Textbooks he hasn't opened. A lab report due Thursday he's fairly sure he's already failed by default. A girlfriend who's sent him three texts in two days that have gotten progressively shorter and progressively more pointed.Dwayne lets himself in without waiting for an answer, already dressed, already alert in the specific way Dwayne always is no matter what hour it happens to be, phone held out in one hand."It's her," he says. "Devon."Nathan sits up, takes the phone, and doesn't say anything for a second, just listens to the sound on the other end,

He takes her to dinner two nights later, a proper one this time, a quiet little Italian place off campus that doesn't have a single Braxton student in it, which Nina suspects isn't an accident.It's a good night. A genuinely good one, the kind she almost forgets they're still capable of having, underneath everything she's decided she's about to go do. He tells her a story about a professor's disastrous attempt at a live coding demo that goes so wrong it actually crashes the projector, and she laughs so hard she has to put her fork down, and for two straight hours neither of them mentions doors, or bruises, or the particular silence that lives underneath every question she's ever asked him about his father.He drives her home in the car he actually owns instead of one of the beat-up loaners he usually bothers with around campus, an indulgence she's noticed he only allows himself late at night, when the roads are quiet enough that nobody's around to wonder why a scholarship kid's drivin

They end up sitting on the front steps of the mansion, because Nina refuses to go inside, and Nathan doesn't push it, understanding without being told that she needs this conversation to happen somewhere she can still walk away from if she decides she needs to."Start with your name," she says. "Your actual name. Not Oliver Salmon. Or Nathan Walters… Not whatever half-truth you're about to try dressing this up in.""Nathan Walters is really my name." He says it plainly, no flourish, the way you'd finally set down something heavy you've been carrying so long your arms forgot it was ever optional. "Heir to the Walters Empire. My father's Sage Walters. I've been hiding my identity, on paper and everywhere else, for the last several years, because Sage wanted me to grow up somewhere nobody would treat me like a bank account before they treated me like a person."Nina stares at him for a long moment, processing that against every single memory she has of him — the mismatched shoes, the jan