Ryan called Danny back before the thought had fully finished forming, because three hours was not a lot of runway and Carter's people were not the kind of people who left a conversation neutral, they came in with a specific version of events already prepared and they were very good at making that version feel like the one that had always made the most sense.Danny picked up on the first ring this time, which meant he had been sitting with the earlier call rather than moving on from it, and that was either a good sign or a sign that Ryan had already made him nervous enough to stay close to his phone."That was fast," Danny said."Something came up," Ryan said. "Something you need to know before someone else gets to you first, and I need you to hear it from me because the version you are about to hear from them is going to be designed to make you put the phone down and walk away."There was a silence on Danny's end that felt careful rather than alarmed, the silence of a man who had spen

"No," the system said, with something in its tone that Ryan had not heard before, something almost careful, like it had been waiting for him to reach this conclusion on his own rather than pushing him toward it. "You were a specific one."Ryan sat with that for a long time, longer than he sat with most things, because it changed the emotional weight of everything he had been doing and everything he was planning to do, shifted it from the register of personal injury into something colder and more serious and considerably more necessary.He had been building a company and planning a careful takedown of a corrupt security consultant and his slightly more powerful boss, and that was still the right plan, the right pace, the right approach for where he was in his current capabilities, but underneath it now was a different understanding of what this ultimately was and what it ultimately required."Okay," Ryan said finally, to the lamp and the notebook and the system and the city outside the