His Queen of Chaos
Kings didn't have to feel the thing.
I was feeling the thing now. It had been rising in me since 8:14 that morning, when a camera at a public library on Ponce had gone dark for ninety seconds and Zariah had walked into that darkness and not walked out. It had climbed all day through the drone footage and the dead phones and Naomi's flat, fast, terrible updates, and it had crested somewhere on the drive to the rail yard, and now, crouched in the dark against the corrugated wall of a warehouse I was thirty seconds from breaching, I was the sixteen-year-old in the mirror again, and I welcomed it, because tonight I was going to need it.