Chapter 8: Dorian's Message and the Terms He Offers

The note sat in his coat pocket for three hours before he read it aloud.

He'd meant to do it immediately — some instinct about transparency, about not being the kind of leader who filtered information before his people got to touch it. But they'd had to move fast out of Philadelphia, cutting east through a collapsed overpass district where the roads had buckled into something like a frozen river of asphalt, and there was no time for sitting in circles when Mira was calling fire-reads every forty minutes and Cael was tracking a scent he wouldn't name. By the time they found shelter — an old Pennsylvania Turnpike rest stop that Titan labor crews had stripped but not demolished, its roof intact, its bathrooms transformed into something archaeologically unpleasant — the sky had gone dark and everyone had settled into the particular exhaustion that followed adrenaline like a slow tide.

Ash sat on the floor of what had been a Sunoco convenience store and pulled the note from his pocket.