The note came back to him in pieces all the next morning, which was how good threats worked.
He'd read it twice and folded it into his pocket, and now it surfaced between other things, while he was eating, while Sam counted reps at the table, while his mother moved around the kitchen like the day was an ordinary one.
I will have to come at this another way, and I will. Aldric did not waste words, so the second half of that sentence was a schedule, not a feeling.
Two days left on the clock. The petition still moving on the eleven even with the living-person bridge dead. And somewhere in those two days, Aldric Voss starting down a road Caleb couldn't see the shape of yet.
He laid it out for Elara in her car because her car was the one place the Hacker had checked and cleared, and because Elara was the one who would know what a man like Aldric did when the clean path closed.
"He files something else," she said.
