Mike didn't move. He sat in the gathering gloom of his apartment, the phone a cold weight in his palm. His mind was no longer just thinking; it was calculating.
It was a rapid-fire cascade of connections, a mental simulation of power dynamics. He saw Whitmore & Associates not as a corporation, but as a fortress with invisible cracks; the transit contract was just one fissure, but the 'logistics relationship' that predated it was the structural weakness beneath the foundation.
He saw the Phoenix not as a company but as a physical stranglehold on District 1, its seven buildings acting as vertebrae in a spine that controlled the city's movement.
And then there was the board dinner. The margins.
The space where the real architects of Erosyne whispered their true intentions while the public spectacle played out on stage.
He wasn't just preparing for a dinner; he was preparing for a siege. And to win a siege, you needed to understand the enemy's supply lines.
