She looked at me for a moment.

“And Sena Dalloway?” “Sena believes she’s the one pulling the strings,” I said, standing, smoothing the front of a tailored crimson suit that felt more like myself than anything I’d worn in a decade.

“She’s about to learn whose hand is actually on them.” I walked out to a waiting car and opened my laptop, and I logged into the one door my father had left me into the heart of the whole machine.

The clock in the corner of the screen read 11:45.

I loaded the live feed of the press conference, and there he was at his podium in a glass atrium, radiant with a triumph he had not earned and was about to lose, and I set my finger lightly on a single key and waited for noon.

Buying the debt was not, I should say, about cruelty, whatever it may have looked like from the outside.