The news just kept going.

  That was the thing nobody told you about something like this — it didn't stop. It kept updating, kept adding details, kept putting new graphics on the screen with the same information reorganized slightly differently, and if you sat there long enough you stopped processing it as real and started processing it as just. Sound. Just a thing happening on a screen.

  Ye Feng sat in front of it for six hours.

  JoJo turned it off eventually. Didn't ask, just reached over and hit the button and the room went quiet and Ye Feng didn't fight it.

  "When did you last eat," JoJo said.

  "I don't know."

  JoJo left. Came back with dining hall food in a takeout container and put it on the desk and sat back down on his own bed and didn't make it a thing. Ye Feng ate half of it without tasting anything.

  Outside, the campus was doing that wrong kind of quiet. Not peaceful. Just — hollow. Like everyone had gone inside and pulled the door shut and was sitting with something too heavy to bring outside.

  President James Arthur Caldwell. Dead. Vice President Howard Mills. Dead. First Lady Margaret Caldwell. Dead. Daniel Caldwell. Twenty-six years old. Dead. Ethan Caldwell. Twenty-three years old. Dead.

  He kept seeing the names. The news had put them in a list on the lower third of the screen and he'd read that list probably forty times and it still didn't feel like real words. Just shapes. Five lines of shapes that were supposed to mean something.

  "Raina," JoJo said quietly.

  "She's alive." Ye Feng stared at the blank TV. "She wasn't there. She was here the whole time." Pause. "She doesn't know I know. About who she is."

  JoJo didn't push on that. Just sat with it.

  "I have to go to her," Ye Feng said.

  "Yeah," JoJo said. "You do."

  She opened the door before he finished knocking.

  She looked like she'd been awake for thirty hours and had stopped crying not because she felt better but because there was nothing left. Oversized sweatshirt, phone in both hands, eyes that were red and dry and somewhere far away.

  She looked at him.

  "You know," she said. Flat. Not asking.

  "A few weeks ago. The courtyard. I saw—" He stopped. Started again. "I should have said something. I'm sorry I didn't say something."

  She shook her head. Like that was the last thing she cared about right now.

  "They're all gone," she said.

  Her voice didn't crack. That was the part that got him. It was completely level and that was so much worse than if it had broken.

  "Ethan called me last week," she said. "I didn't pick up. I was in the library and I thought — I'll call him back tonight. I'll call him back later." She pressed her lips together hard. "I never called him back."

  Ye Feng stepped inside and closed the door and sat down next to her on the floor — she'd slid down against the side of the bed at some point — and didn't say anything. Because what was there to say. What word exists for that.

  He just stayed.

  Six hours. He stayed six hours and they didn't talk much and that was okay. That was the right thing. Sometimes the right thing is just not leaving.

  Gerald Paxton got sworn in thirty-one hours after the attack.

  Nobody had voted for Gerald Paxton for anything except his local district. He was sixty-one, had been in Washington forever, looked like a man who hadn't slept properly since 2003. He went on television that first night and said — Ye Feng watched it on JoJo's laptop, Raina asleep finally in the other room — "I am not the president this country needs. I am the president this country has right now. My only job is to hold this together until the American people can choose someone they actually want."

  JoJo looked at Ye Feng.

  Ye Feng looked at the screen.

  Something moved in him. Not ambition — not the light version of it, the distant future-tense version he'd been carrying since he was nine. This was different. Heavier. Less like wanting something and more like — recognizing something. Like a door he'd been walking toward his whole life had just opened and the question was whether he was going to walk through it or stand in the hallway.

  "You're thinking about it," JoJo said.

  Ye Feng didn't answer right away.

  "You'd be the youngest anyone's ever seen," JoJo said.

  "I know."

  "People will say you're not ready."

  "I know."

  "Are you ready."

  Ye Feng thought about his mom. The locks. Henry at the trunk of the car. Pay attention. Not just to your grades. His brothers building something real. Raina on the floor with her phone in both hands and five names on a news ticker and nothing left.

  "No," Ye Feng said. "But I don't think that's the question anymore."

  The call came three days after.

  Late. Campus quiet the wrong way again. He was walking back from Raina's building, hands in his pockets, breath coming out in small clouds. His phone rang. Unknown number. He almost let it go to voicemail.

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  He picked up.

  "Feng."

  He stopped walking.

  Nine years and he still knew that voice in half a second.

  "Max," he said.

  A pause. Then: "My name is Lukas. Lukas Brandt." Like it cost something to say out loud. "Max Cole isn't real. It was never real. I needed you to know that first."

  Ye Feng stood on the path and didn't say anything. Just waited.

  "My father is Friedrich Brandt. He — he runs something. Out of Berlin. Has for a long time." Lukas's voice was doing a strange thing — controlled in some places, fraying in others, like he'd rehearsed this and it was falling apart anyway. "He sent me here when I was twelve. The name, the background, all of it was built. He put me in your school because of your family history. Your grandfather. He knew you were going to end up somewhere near power eventually and he wanted someone already inside that circle."

  Ye Feng's jaw was tight.

  "I was trained before I came here," Lukas said. "Since I was a kid. Things — I can't explain all of it right now. But I was good at it. That's the part I hate most. I was really good at it."

  "The President." Ye Feng said it quiet. "Raina's father."

  "My father ordered it." Fast, like he needed to get it out. "I didn't know. I found out with everyone else, I swear to you — he doesn't tell me things, Feng, I'm just a tool he put somewhere and left and I didn't know about Caldwell's family I didn't know about—" His voice broke on that last part. First time. "I didn't know about Raina."

  Something in Ye Feng went very cold.

  "But you knew about the rest," he said. "You knew who you were. You knew who sent you. You knew every single day for nine years and you looked at me like—" He stopped. Breathed. "You were at my grandmother's funeral, Lukas. You raised your hand for me at Future Leaders Day so I'd have to stand up and say it out loud. You made me promise we'd stay on the same side." His voice had gone quiet in a way that was more dangerous than shouting. "Was any of it real. Any single part."

  The silence went on long enough that he thought the call had dropped.

  "Some of it," Lukas said. Barely above a whisper. "The parts that I — yeah. Some of it was real."

  "That's not enough."

  "I know."

  "Don't say I know like that means something. It doesn't mean something."

  He hung up.

  Stood on the path for a long time. Phone in his hand. Cold going through his jacket. The kind of anger that doesn't burn hot — the kind that settles in and gets heavy and stays.

  Nine years.

  He'd given nine years of himself to someone who was built to be there. Who had a real name and a German father and a mission and a file somewhere that described Ye Feng probably as an asset or a target or a stepping stone. Nine years of inside jokes and shared lunches and a promise on a roof under stars that meant nothing. That were a lie from someone who might not have even known how to tell the difference between the lie and whatever real thing was underneath it.

  He didn't go back inside for a long time.

  After that he was different and he knew it and he didn't try to pretend otherwise.

  Not angry all the time — just. Recalibrated. More careful about what he gave people and when. In seminars he listened more than he talked and when he talked it landed differently, like there was more weight behind it now. Professors noticed. Other students noticed. He didn't explain it to anyone.

  JoJo adjusted without being asked. Gave him more room. Stopped filling silences that didn't need filling. Was just — there, solid, the same way he'd always been, and Ye Feng felt that more than he'd ever said out loud.

  Raina was going through her own version of all of it. The grief came in waves — some days she was okay, getting through, and some days she'd go quiet in a way that meant she'd gone somewhere inside herself he couldn't follow. The secret service had materialized around her the moment her identity went public, which happened forty-eight hours after the attack when a journalist figured it out. After that her face was everywhere. The last Caldwell. People on campus looked at her differently now — not like a person, like a symbol. Like something fragile that also belonged to everyone.

  She hated it. He could see exactly how much she hated it.

  He was the one person who still looked at her like she was just Raina. She told him that one night on the roof, the cold sharp and the city lit up below them. Said: you're the only one who looks at me the same.

  He didn't say anything back. Just sat with her.

  Three people. That was the perimeter now. JoJo. Raina. Himself. Everyone else was going to have to earn it from scratch and most of them weren't going to get the chance.

  That was fine. He was okay with that.

  Senator Robert Hale announced his candidacy on a Monday.

  Ye Feng watched the speech on his laptop. Hale was fifty-four, two decades in the Senate, the kind of polished that came from years of being careful. Good at sounding steady. Good at sounding like the safe choice. Half the country wanted safe right now — he understood that, couldn't even blame them, everything felt like it was coming apart and safe was a reasonable thing to want.

  The other half was angry.

  Not at Hale specifically. Just — angry. At the system, at the fact that a family had been killed in their own home, at the feeling that nobody in Washington had actually been paying attention to the things that mattered. That anger needed somewhere to go.

  Ye Feng announced on a Tuesday. Outside the university, no podium, no teleprompter. JoJo had made him wear a decent jacket. A crowd had gathered because word spread the night before and people showed up wanting to see if he was actually going to do it.

  He looked out at them and said:

  "My name is Ye Feng. People call me Feng. I'm twenty years old. I know what that sounds like." He paused. Let it sit. "I'm not going to tell you I have all the answers. I don't. I'm going to tell you that I've wanted this since I was nine years old and not once — not one single time — have I wanted it for the power. I wanted it because I grew up watching people who couldn't protect themselves, and I decided I was going to be someone who tried."

  He looked out at the cameras without looking at them, if that made sense — looking past them at the people behind them.

  "You're tired of being let down," he said. "I know. I am too. So let's try something different."

  That was it. No big finish. Just — done.

  The crowd took a second.

  Then it started.

  The next four months were not clean or easy or anything like what he'd imagined when he was nine.

  Hale's people called him a kid. Called him a stunt. Called him dangerously inexperienced, which landed differently coming from the party that had just lost a president and a vice president on the same day. Ye Feng didn't hit back. Not directly. He just kept showing up — small towns, community centers, the places candidates skipped because the math didn't make it worth the trip. He sat in rooms with twelve people and talked the same way he talked in rooms with twelve thousand. When he didn't know something he said so. When someone asked him a question he couldn't answer perfectly he said: I don't have that answer yet. Here's how I'm going to find it.

  He talked about his mom. The locks at night. What it meant to grow up knowing your family had enemies you couldn't see. He talked about Henry showing up quietly and staying. His brothers building something real. He talked about responsibility — not as a word, as a thing, a specific weight that you either wanted to carry or you didn't.

  He didn't talk about Raina publicly. That was hers.

  But people knew.

  And something about the image of him — young, steady, not performing anything — connected in a way that the campaign people said was unquantifiable, which Ye Feng thought meant they didn't understand it but it was working so they weren't going to question it.

  The night the numbers came in he was in a hotel room. JoJo on one side, Raina on the other, three screens, nobody talking much. The last state called and the math locked in and JoJo made a sound that wasn't a word and Raina grabbed his hand hard.

  Ye Feng sat still.

  He thought about nine years old on the living room floor.

  He thought about a roof and a promise made to someone whose real name he hadn't known.

  He thought about Friedrich Brandt still out there somewhere. Lukas/Max somewhere in the world, carrying whatever it was he was carrying. The fact that winning this didn't close anything — it opened something. The hard part wasn't getting here. The hard part was everything that came next.

  Raina was looking at him when he came back to the room.

  "Hey," she said.

  "Hey."

  "You did it."

  He shook his head slowly. "We're not close to done."

  She squeezed his hand. Didn't argue with that because she knew it was true.

  Outside the hotel the city was loud. His city now. His country now. All those people out there who'd taken a chance on something different and were waiting to see if it paid off.

  Ye Feng closed his eyes.

  Ten seconds.

  Just ten.

  Then he stood up and straightened his jacket and went to face what came next.