The silence had stopped feeling like silence.
Now it was pressure—a low, grinding weight that had taken root behind my sternum and pressed inward with every breath. I sat on the edge of the guest room's old bed, elbows on my knees, phone facedown beside me. Mark's words clung to my skin like oil—refusing to be washed off, refusing to be forgotten.
He knew who the World President was.
And he refused to tell me.
It was a strange kind of betrayal. Not surprising, since we weren't fully allies. Not even painful. Just... exhausting. I was tired—tired of waiting for people to help, tired of trusting anyone to hold their end of the thread without slicing through mine. Anthony's report on Novacore would take time to get back, buried under layers of encrypted bureaucracy. But I couldn't sit here and wait anymore. Not after everything. Not after the crash site on Mars, not after being told to become the World President, not after Sienna being captured.
