“I’m gonna go shower,” he says, patting me on the shoulder as he passes by.
Feeling like a man tossed out to sea by a rogue storm, I stand alone in Hale’s empty office for several minutes, trying to figure out a way out of this that doesn’t end in the worst possible conclusion.
As in, we lose everything.
We lose the station. We lose our crew, our friends. We get rearranged and reorganized, the union scattering us throughout the city wherever there are positions to fill. We lose our captain, who ranks so high that he’ll likely need to be transferred to the outskirts of the city or sequestered to a desk job until another captaincy opens up.
We lose Old Bill, who will probably just give up and retire early. We lose the battle we marched into when we started the Save A Hero campaign.
We lose our reputation, too. The reputation that I tarnished in the first place. If Banks wins, it’ll be all the proof the public needs to know that he was right all along. And I don’t really give a fuck if the world hates me, but I can’t stand if they hate the others. They don’t deserve it.
I make my way out of the office and march numbly back to the bay.
The main entrance door bangs open, startling a handful of sleepy-eyed crew members who are in the middle of cleaning up the truck we brought to the scene last night.
Lila comes storming in.
She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t really seem to notice anyone. Her mind is stuck on a single track as she breezes past everyone and stomps up the spiral stairs to the mezzanine.
Clearly, she’s heard the news about the vote.
I need to help. I need to be useful.
I don’t care that I’m basically a zombie. I take a deep breath and follow her.
When I catch up to her on the mezzanine level, the door to her dorm is cracked. I nudge it open further to find her pacing the length of the room. She’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday, which means she went straight from the scene to Evan’s place to the station.
Have any of us taken a single minute to gather ourselves since the alarms went off yesterday?
“Lila—”
She halts, turning around to see me. “Oh! Good. Noah, we need to call a meeting right away. I know Hale is in the hospital, butmaybe we can take a cab to go see him. He needs to know that Banks has—”
“Called an emergency vote?” I move further into the room, closing the door behind me with a softclick. “He knows. He just left to get himself suited up for the confrontation of the decade.”
Lila blinks. “He left… the hospital?”
“Well, he left the hospital around three in the morning. He’s a very strong-willed patient. We were puttering around the station for a couple of hours until someone dropped him a line about the emergency vote.”
She deflates, sinking down onto the edge of the mattress. “Oh. Must have been Lou. Thank God for that woman.”
“It seems crazy that Banks would make this move in the wake of a fire like that,” I muse.
Lila shakes her head, wincing slightly. “It’s Jake. Or Barry, I guess. I know it, deep down in my bones.”
“Who and who?”
“A longtime devoted hater of mine, Barry Pelavin, is running Banks’s reelection campaign. I found out last night that Jake, my main camera guy, has been his mole all along. He probably saw that Hale was—that he—well, he saw an opportunity for the bad guys to make a calculated move.”
“That’s disgusting.”
She snorts humorlessly. “Yes, well, people like that tend to flock together.”
I fall quiet. She drops her head into her hands.
“Lila,” I murmur, taking a step toward her.
She doesn’t lift her head, instead muttering a dull, “What?”
