I looked at the room.
I looked at my hands.
I said: "I need to know something."
He waited.
"When you came to find me on that road — you said the timeline was off. You thought you had two more days." I met his eyes. "What were you going to do with those two days?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"Prepare," he said.
"Prepare what."
"The compound. The crew. The legal groundwork." He paused. "A better explanation than the one you got."
"You were going to explain it to me before showing up."
"I was going to have more of the answers before I had to give them." Something in his expression — not quite an apology, Ryke Mallen was not built for apologies, but adjacent to it. The expression of a man who understood that a thing had been handled imperfectly and was acknowledging it without making
