Page 34 of Her Last Vow

Anderson was quiet for a second, and she could hear him typing somewhere on the other end. "That's going to be a public safety argument, not a criminal one. You'll want it framed as an imminent harm request, not tied to any one suspect. Because if you name anyone within the company or anyone else in the filing and it turns out wrong, the whole thing gets thrown out and Apogee's lawyers use it to make you look reckless. We’d be eating shit on that for months."

"Yes, sir. I know that. We’ll be careful about it."

"I know. I'm thinking about which judge signs it without asking a hundred questions first. And I just…for something like this, I just don’t know." There was another brief silence and she could hear the very faint sound of fingers on a keyboard somewhere on his end now. "Halloran's the one I'd go to. She's handled two of our emergency injunctions before; she moves fast, doesn't need a lot of hand-holding on the technical side. I can have somebody reach out to her clerk within the hour if you get me something in writing I can forward."

"How long from filing to signature, if she's willing?"

"If she's willing, and if what you send me is clean? Could be this afternoon. If she wants a hearing first, even a short one, you're looking at tomorrow at the earliest." Anderson exhaled, the sound of it carrying some of the same fatigue Rachel felt sitting behind her own eyes. "I'll push as hard as I can on my end. You focus on getting me the affidavit. Deaths, dates, the connection to the predictions. Keep it factual, keep opinion out of it, and for God's sake don't put anything about a specific suspect in there unless you're prepared to name them formally."

"Understood."

"How are you holding up?" Anderson asked, and something in his tone shifted, less procedural now. He did this from time to time, and she’d always found it slightly robotic.

"Just tired. Me and Novak both."

"When's the last time you slept?"

"I'll sleep when this is finished,” she said rather than answering the question.

"That's not an answer, Gift, that's a warning sign." He didn't push further, though, and she was grateful for it. "Get me that affidavit. I'll call you the second Halloran's clerk gets back to me."

The line went dead, and Rachel sat for a moment with the phone still against her ear before lowering it. Through the windshield, she watched Novak pacing a slow line along the edge of the parking spot, his own phone pressed to his ear, his free hand moving in short gestures like he was trying to talk someone down from something.

She got out of the car, phone still in hand, and caught the tail end of what he was saying.

"—no, I understand it feels like an overreaction, but I'd rather you hear it from me than read about it online tomorrow. Delete the app if you're comfortable doing that, and don't be alarmed if you notice a car outside your place for the next few days. It's for your protection, that's all it is." Novak listened for a moment, nodded once though the person on the other end couldn't see it, and said, "I appreciate that. Take care of yourself," before ending the call.

"How many left?" Rachel asked.

"That was three. Four more to go." Novak looked to the list in his other hand, waving it at her. "Nobody's thrilled to hear it, but nobody's arguing either. Everybody on this list already knows people are dying. They're scared enough that the surveillance part barely registers."

"Good. Keep going." Rachel leaned against the side of the car, arms crossed, watching the building. "Anderson's working on a judge. Halloran, if she's willing. Could have a court order by this afternoon if the affidavit's clean."

"That's fast."

"Fast for us. Slow for the person who dies tomorrow if it's not fast enough." Rachel rubbed at her eyes, aware of just how tired that sentence had sounded coming out of her own mouth. And now she had the dreadful paperwork of getting a court order in line to look forward to.

Novak was punching in the number of the next person on the list when Rachel's phone buzzed in her hand. Corbin's number filled the screen. She almost let it go to voicemail out of pure reflex before answering. So far, calls from him had caused nothing but trouble.

But of course, she answered. "You have to stop calling me,” she said, trying to sound humorous. “Every time you do, somebody's dead."

"Not this time," Corbin said. "Well. Not exactly. It's not great, but it's not the usual either."

"I'll take it." Rachel straightened up off the car. "What is it?"

"Sloan just went live. Like, right now, from inside a room at the Apogee offices. Some kind of company-wide broadcast, but it's public, anybody can watch it. I'm sending you the link."

“What the hell?” she said. “We’re literally there, in the parking lot. We spoke to him about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Maybe that’s what caused this, then,” he said. “Link sent.”

Her phone buzzed again a second later with the text. Rachel tapped it open, and Novak caught the shift in her posture. She heard him excuse himself from the call. He ended it and crossed to stand beside her, close enough that they could both see the screen.

The video was already several seconds in when it loaded. Sloan was sitting at a large desk and it appeared he had done a bit of work to make himself look less washed out than he had fifteen or twenty minutes ago. The glass walls of his office behind him let in the glowing morning light. He wore a gray sweater he’d not had on earlier and as he spoke to the camera, he kept a small smile on his face, one of pure professionalism. His voice, when it came through the phone's tinny speaker, was steady and low, carrying none of the exhaustion Rachel had heard in it twenty minutes earlier.

"I want to start by saying that Apogee was never meant to be a burden," Sloan said as they caught the feed live—roughly forty seconds into his message. "It was built to be a gift. The ability to understand your own body, your own trajectory, in a way that traditional medicine has never quite managed to offer anyone. I believed that then, and some part of me still believes it now."

He paused, letting the words settle before continuing, his hands resting flat on either side of the podium.