Michael hung up the phone and sat in the dark.
Not metaphor dark. Actual dark. He had not turned on the desk lamp after Silas called, and the Los Angeles sunset had finished bleeding out twenty minutes ago. The only light came from his monitor and the city below his window. He sat there and counted his breaths. Four in, four out. The way he had learned to do when the math was bad.
The math was bad.
Silas had sounded almost normal on the call. Flat, careful, exactly the temperature Michael expected from a man who needed something he did not want to admit needing. But underneath it, Michael had heard the crack. He knew Silas's voice the way a mechanic knows an engine. He had listened to it for twenty-three years in briefing rooms and private jets and the back seats of cars in cities he no longer remembered. And tonight, Silas had asked him where he was the night the Luna story broke.
