SILO POV
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Silo did not get nervous about physical threats.
He had run perimeters against wolves he couldn't identify, prepared for a man who'd spent sixty years watching from six miles away, coordinated security for a testimony that was about to expose a multi-generational conspiracy. None of that had produced the specific unsettled quality he was carrying now, ten days out from the council chamber.
This was different.
This was Vael, in the studio, looking at the empty wall space beside his last painting and saying she wanted to draw something for it. Something of her own. Something that would sit permanently among the record of everything he'd built here.
He hadn't told her that the empty wall space was the one he'd been saving. That he'd looked at it for months without letting h
