We had forty-two hours left.
I kept telling myself that.
Forty-two hours.
It wasn't as bad as twenty-four or zero.
But it didn't help.
The moment I stepped back into the precinct, the air felt wrong. Everyone was talking in hushed voices, a tension so thick it clung to skin and clothes, impossible to wash off. The captains had dispersed, back to their sectors to maintain the illusion of normalcy. Grant stayed, the bags under his eyes heavier, his posture hunched, as if he were carrying the entire precinct on his shoulders.
But it wasn't him carrying it.
It was me.
And I had no idea what to do now.
We couldn't stall anymore. The borders couldn't come down, the archives couldn't be opened, not in forty-two hours, not even in a week if we tried. The system was a leviathan, slow and choking, and even if we burned the city's rulebook, we wouldn't be able to meet Hyena's demands. Not to mention that the very demand was out of the book to begin with.
I was out of moves.
