And that is exactly why the answer was not to rage at the system, and not to abandon it for the darkness Leo offered, but to route around the bought local choke point and get my daughter’s case into the hands of a part of the system too large and too distant to have been reached — the federal authorities, who had taken no one’s phone call, and owed those three families nothing, and were entirely willing to look.

The system had not failed my daughter.

A few bought men at its doorway had blocked her from reaching it.

My whole task was only to carry her past them, to the part that still worked.

It worked.

Chapter 6 — The Coin

I stepped out into the empty hallway, and I took out my wallet, and from behind the cards I pulled a thing I had not touched in nineteen years.

A challenge coin.