Chapter 40 The Witness

• The physical therapy session had left a new kind of tension humming in the air. It was no longer the sharp, brittle silence of hatred, but the charged, uncertain quiet of a truce being tested. Alexander, exhausted and humbled, slept. I retreated to the command post, the phantom sensation of his body under my guiding hand a persistent, unwelcome echo on my fingertips.
• Vance found me there, staring unseeingly at a bank of monitors displaying Vivian’s vitals from her medical cell.
• “We found it,” she said without preamble, her voice crackling with suppressed energy. She dropped a thick file onto the console. “The green laser. Or rather, the company that manufactured it.”