POV: Dominic

There is a version of fear that is entirely useless. The kind that floods the system and shuts down the parts you need most, the thinking, the planning, the cold sequential logic of one step and then the next step and then the step after that. I know this kind of fear exists because I have felt it before, in the earlier days of my life, before I learned that emotion without direction is just noise and that noise costs time and time, in certain situations, costs everything.

I felt it for approximately forty seconds after Marcus’s call broke and I understood what had happened.

Forty seconds. Standing...