CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
bargaining chip
DAY 4
Miraculously, I slept. Rupert promises he did too, that Wes forced him to go home and rest, though the bags under Number Two’s eyes offer a different version of events. Mrs. Corwin raised a fuss last night at town hall about how the men in charge of this operation needed to sleep in shifts or else they would suffer “cognitive issues, hallucinations, and potential cardiac manifestations.” She spoke as if behind a lectern, citing a bunch of research she did for one of her novels in which the main character had fatal insomnia and what a lack of purposeful, restorative downtime can do to a person. I think Len and Wes and their teams were lulled to sleep by Mrs. Corwin’s impromptu lecture, so maybe that was her plan all along?
Regardless, the troops l
