Chapter 154: The House That Remembers
The silence had stopped feeling like silence.
Now it was pressure—a low, grinding weight that had taken root behind my sternum and pressed inward with every breath. I sat on the edge of the guest room's old bed, elbows on my knees, phone facedown beside me. Mark's words clung to my skin like oil—refusing to be washed off, refusing to be forgotten.
He knew who the World President was.
And he refused to tell me.
It was a strange kind of betrayal. Not surprising, since we weren't fully allies. Not even painful. Just... exhausting. I was tired—tired of waiting for people to help, tired of trusting anyone to hold their end of the thread without slicing through mine. Anthony's report on Novacore would take time to get back, buried under layers of encrypted bureaucracy. But I couldn't sit here and wait anymore. Not after everything. Not after the crash site on Mars, not after being told to become the World President, not after Sienna being captured.
Because while the world was playing chess with masks and monsters, I remembered something colder. Sharper. A detail that refused to fade.
There were dozens of ships downed that day. Only one bore that unmistakable emblem scorched across its fractured hull—silver threads spiraling into a dark, angular nova. Their insignia. I'd stood on the cracked Martian soil, suit torn, lungs burning, as the sun rose over a scrapyard of twisted metal and scorched glass. One ship of many destroyed ships with its walls that had melted inward. The emblem half-charred, half-intact.
And I remembered something else.
A bitter, old thought.
My father worked for them.
If he had any hand in this—if he bore even a fraction of the guilt for the things I'd seen—then I needed more than whispers. More than apologies. I needed proof.