The notification didn’t come through as an email or a direct text. It didn't wait for Elias to be ready for it. It just landed squarely across the top of his locked screen as a three-line headline on the Dow Jones industrial wire at exactly seven-fifteen in the morning.
Around him, the world felt entirely dead and heavy. The old utility truck was idling with a low, bone-shaking rattle behind the lime-washed brick of an abandoned boiler house, roughly two miles north of the ferry slip.
Its ancient diesel engine was chugging hard against the cold, spitting out a thin, oily curl of blue smoke that rose up and immediately dissolved into the thick yellow fog rolling off the river. Inside the cab, Rafe was completely dead to the world, slumped heavily against the passenger door with his head
