Page 110 of Fate, Interrupted

And he’s been watching those edges move inward his entire life.

Whittier coming to this room, with his silver hair and his reasonable face and his talk of optics and cooperation, is not new information. It’s confirmation that the edges have moved far enough that even the pragmatists are delivering messages now.

Greer knows it. I can see it in how carefully he’s not looking at Elias—the tact of a man who understands that his principal needs a moment before he’s ready to be observed again.

Logan knows it. His jaw is tight in the way it gets when he’s running calculations, and the numbers aren’t working.

Greer and Logan exchange a look across the room—the compressed communication of two men who have been in this operation long enough to understand the outcome. Greer looks back at the floor. Neither of them says what they are both thinking.

I’ve spent my adult life learning which ones they are. The moments when the thing that needs saying gets held back. We hold things in this family with the practiced efficiency of people who have always known that timing is its own kind of power.

What I’m no longer sure of is whether that’s strength or the habit of men who have been navigating a system that never fully had room for them, learning to take up exactly as much space as they’re given and calling it strategy.

Whittier was very polite about the size of the room.

Logan’s jaw is tight. “Enhanced community accountability,” he says. “That’s the framework. That’s what they’re going to build.”

“It’s what they’re going to try to build,” Elias says. He moves to the window, looking out at the street, his hands clasped behind his back. “It won’t pass as written. It will be amended, softened, given a different name. And then it will pass.”

I push off the wall.

“And then,” I say.

Elias turns.

“And then what?” I say. “We cooperate with an investigation into things we didn’t do while they build a case around who we are, and hope Whittier keeps his word long enough to matter.”

My father looks at me with an expression that has moved past anger into assessment.

“That’s a version of it,” he says.

“Is there another version? One that doesn’t have us at war or in prison?”

The room is silent again. Logan is looking at the table. Greer is looking at me with an expression I can’t fully read, a mix of caution and agreement—he knows what I’m about to say and is deciding whether to stop me.

He doesn’t stop me.

“Because I’m not sure that version is the one I want to be standing in,” I say.

Elias holds my gaze for a long moment. The look of a man who has heard an argument he doesn’t like and hasn’t decided how to land it yet.

“Go back to the warehouse,” he says. “I’ll be there shortly.”

He dismisses me with the wave of a hand. A man who wants the room to be smaller before he continues the conversation.

I go.

Chapter thirty

Silas

The day after the Whittier meeting, I go back to work. It’s the only sane response to an unsolvable problem: move, stay useful, don’t let it sit in the open where everyone can see it.

I find a corner of the loading dock in the mid-afternoon, when the crew has moved to deliveries and the dock is empty. I sit on a pallet and look at my phone before I dial.

It rings three times.

“Silas Coulter.” The voice that picks up is warm and surprised, with the warmth of someone who wasn’t expecting the call and is genuinely pleased by it. “I thought you’d fallen off the planet.”