"The facility, Bane. The whole thing. Somebody filed a report. A victim statement. This morning, early. The detective—Hwang—has been sitting on a state-level case for months waiting for a witness willing to go on record."
The room goes very quiet.
Atlas watches me arrive at it.
"Max," I say.
"Max."
I stand. The letter crinkles in my back pocket. My hands are shaking and I don't try to stop them.
"He went to the police." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "That's where he is. That's what the letters were. He was saying goodbye in case—in case it went wrong, in case they didn't believe him, in case Kline's people—"
"Bane."
"He walked into a police station and told them everything. About the facility. About what was done to him. He used himself as the—"
"I know." Atlas. Quiet. "I know what he did."
"Your guy at the scene. Does he have eyes?"
"He's got a camera. He's streaming to my phone."
We go to Atlas's office. Zero is already there. I don't know how he knew—the bond, maybe, or the sound of Atlas's footstepsgoing past his door with a different weight than they'd carried all morning. He's standing behind the desk, arms crossed, jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping.
Atlas sets his phone on the desk. The screen shows a shaky feed—a parking lot, concrete buildings, vehicles staging. Federal jackets. State police cruisers. Unmarked sedans. The building I have spent months staring at in photographs, the building I walked into to get Max, the building that has been sitting only miles from here holding people in cells while the world went on without them.
We watch.
The teams move. The doors go in. We can't hear anything—the camera is too far back, positioned across the road in a parked car—but we can see. Officers flooding through the entrance. Vehicles repositioning. A perimeter going up.
Then nothing.
The feed holds on the building. The parking lot. The perimeter officers standing with their hands on their belts, waiting. A helicopter appears overhead at some point—news or police, I can't tell. The building just sits there. Concrete and glass and whatever is happening inside it that we can't see.
Zero hasn't moved. Arms crossed. Eyes locked on the screen.
Atlas is on his phone. Not the one streaming—his other one. Texting his contact, trying to get information. He sets it down. Picks it up. Sets it down.
I stand behind the desk with my arms braced on the back of the chair and I watch a building I once walked into with sedatives in my blood and zip ties on my wrists and I wait.
Five minutes. Ten. The feed shakes—the guy in the car adjusting his grip, maybe. The image blurs and refocuses. The building hasn't changed. The perimeter hasn't moved. Nothing is coming out of that door.
"What's taking so long?" Zero. Through his teeth.
Nobody answers.
Fifteen minutes. Atlas's phone buzzes. He reads. His face gives nothing.
"What?" I ask.
"They're clearing floor by floor. There's a sublevel. They're bringing in a second team for the lower section."
The sublevel. I know the sublevel. I was in the sublevel. The cells are in the sublevel—the ones with the locks that cycle click-hiss at three in the morning, the ones with the cots and the fluorescent lights that never turn off. Max was in one of those cells. Wren was in the one next to him. Nine people are in them right now.
Twenty minutes. The helicopter circles. An ambulance pulls into the lot—then a second one. They park near the entrance and the EMTs get out and stand by their rigs and wait. Waiting for people to bring out.
"Ambulances," Zero says. Flat.
