I knock.
The voices stop.
"It's me," I say. I cringe internally. Who else would it be? I say it anyway.
A pause. Then Atlas: "Come in, Max."
I push the door open.
Atlas is behind the desk. He hasn't taken his jacket off. His tie is loosened one inch, which is the Atlas equivalent of screaming. Bane is in the leather chair to the left, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his glasses on, a sheaf of something in his hands he's gripping too tight. Zero is standing at the window with his back to the room, arms crossed, looking out at the dark grounds like he's considering setting fire to them.
The room feels tense and stormy but I don’t step out.
I want to be with them, through whatever the hell is going on.
"Sit down, sweetheart," Atlas says.
I don't sit down.
"What happened?"
A lump forms in my throat and I swallow around it, desperate for someone to fill the silence.
Atlas watches me for a beat. His eyes do the thing—the quick assessment, the read. He's deciding how much to tell me.
"Don't," I say. "Don't do the math on what I can handle. Just tell me."
Bane looks up from the papers. His eyes meet mine and the bond between us pulses once—warm, sorry, bracing.
Atlas exhales.
"Santos pulled out."
Santos. The name Bane said on the phone the night of Wren's dinner—tell Santos, get back here—when he didn't know I was in the hallway. I filed it then. I don't know who Santos is. I've never been told. Atlas has been very careful about what goesin my head and what doesn't, and names are the first thing he keeps behind the wall.
But tonight the wall isn't there.
I can see it in his face. He's too angry, too hollowed out, too thirteen-days-gone to do the math he always does—what Max can carry, what Max should know, what to say and what to swallow. He's just talking. Dumping it. Like a man who's been holding a bag of rocks for a week and doesn't have the strength to sort through them anymore.
"Santos is the federal prosecutor I've been building the case with. DC. Chicago. Boston. He's been the whole thing—the warrant, the subpoenas, the coordination with the other jurisdictions. Everything ran through him." Atlas's jaw works once. "He got a call from someone above him. Kline's lawyers reached the deputy AG's office. Santos was told to stand down. The warrant request was pulled before it even reached a fucking judge."
I'm hearing things Atlas would never have told me a month ago. Names. Titles. The architecture of something he's been building in the dark this whole time, laid out in front of me because he's too wrecked to remember he's supposed to be protecting me from it.
"That's—"
"The case isdead, Max. The federal angle is gone. Hwang can still subpoena at the state level but without Santos backing it, no state attorney is going to touch Kline with a ten-foot pole. Everyone who was willing to move is now looking over their shoulder."
I'm still standing just inside the doorway. My hand is on the frame, gripping like it’s going to keep my upright.
"What about the nine omegas?" I ask. "The ones still inside."
Zero turns from the window.
His face is the answer.
"We're working on it," Bane says. Careful. "We have options—"
"What options?" My voice is doing something I don't authorize. Going thin. Going high. "You just said the federal case is dead. You said no one's going to touch it. What options, Bane?"
