"Chase where are you going? I can't hold this whole crowd back on my own!"Chase had only said he had somewhere to be, expression suddenly serious, and left without further explanation. Miles let him go, though not without a pang of regret chances to see Scarlett Vance this close didn't come around often.Chase kept calling his parents, over and over. No answer.Dread built fast, thick enough to feel like actual suffocation.He drove straight home and tore through the study, hunting for any reference to the project they'd mentioned. If he could find it, maybe he could still stop whatever was coming.Nothing useful turned up on the desk.It hit him then, hard, how little attention he'd ever paid to his parents' actual work. He'd coasted through life carefree, and they'd carried every real burden quietly, running the same exhausting cycle of due diligence and risk analysis on his behalf, without him ever once asking how any of it worked.His eyes landed on the safe.His birthday, first

"We have a new option on the table. I want the room's honest input on the three strongest candidates."Grant's announcement reignited the room, every eye fixed on her, waiting."We also have Starlight Sight. His full capability's been kept quiet deliberately it's powerful enough that we didn't want it common knowledge. In theory, he can wish for almost anything.""The catch is probability. The more ambitious the wish, the lower the odds of it landing. The earlier example eliminating Subject One outright sits at 0.03%. Essentially a non-starter.""He can only verify three potential wishes per day, and the actual casting only happens at midnight. Given how limited our trial-and-error window is, I want the room's best three candidates right now."The room reacted with visible surprise. Most of them had assumed Starlight Sight existed purely to keep the base stocked with the occasional supply windfall. Nobody had grasped the actual scope of it though the brutal math on eliminating Subject