The morning of the inauguration it snowed.

  Not a lot. Just that thin early morning kind that dusts everything and makes the world look like it got wiped clean overnight. Ye Feng stood at the window in his suit at six in the morning and watched it come down and didn't think about anything specific. Just watched.

  JoJo showed up at 6:15 with two coffees. Sat down. Didn't say anything for a while.

  That was why JoJo was JoJo.

  "How do you feel," he said eventually.

  Ye Feng thought about it. Actually thought about it instead of just saying fine. "Like I've been walking toward something my whole life and I'm about to find out if it's what I thought it was."

  JoJo turned that over. "Exciting or terrifying."

  "Both," Ye Feng said. "Kind of mostly both."

  JoJo nodded and drank his coffee and that was the whole conversation and it was exactly what Ye Feng needed.

  He'd read about inaugurations. Watched footage of them. He thought he knew what it would feel like.

  He didn't.

  Standing at the podium in the January cold with one hand on the Bible, the words coming out of his mouth one at a time — it didn't feel like footage. It felt like each word had weight. Like he was lifting something with every line and by the end he'd be holding the whole thing.

  I do solemnly swear.

  His mom somewhere in the crowd. He couldn't find her face but he knew she was there.

  That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.

  Nine years old on the living room floor. The news segment. That feeling — this is broken, someone should fix it — that had never once left him in eleven years.

  And will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

  Raina off to the side. Not in the crowd. Just — there. Looking at him the same way she always looked at him. Like he was just Ye Feng. Like none of the rest of it changed that.

  "So help me God," he said.

  The sound the crowd made after that — he'd never heard anything like it before. Didn't have a word for it. Didn't try to find one.

  The first two weeks were just — a lot.

  Briefings before sunrise. Reports that ran forty pages on topics he'd never had to think about in specific terms before. Meetings with people who'd been in Washington since before he was born, who were professional about it, mostly, except for those moments when he'd catch an expression on someone's face — quick, controlled — that said he's younger than my youngest kid before they put it away.

  He absorbed everything anyway. Took notes in margins. Asked questions that apparently surprised people, which told him more about what they'd expected than anything they said out loud.

  He didn't let himself forget about Friedrich Brandt. About the car outside the dorm that felt like a lifetime ago now. About the mole — someone inside his own circle, still unidentified, feeding information out. He kept all of it in a separate part of his head and kept moving.

  Nights were harder.

  The residence at night was very quiet and very big and he was twenty years old and sometimes he'd sit in the study at midnight and just — feel how large it was. How many people. How much. He'd call his mom most nights. She always picked up. Sometimes they talked about real things and sometimes she just told him what she'd had for dinner and he listened and that was enough. Just her voice.

  He called Henry once. Didn't plan to, just did.

  Said: "I think I understand what you meant. That morning. Pay attention."

  Henry was quiet a second. "Good," he said.

  That was it. Whole call.

  Three weeks in he had to give his first real public address.

  Not the inauguration speech — that had been written by a committee of people and reviewed by another committee and was correct and careful and sounded nothing like him. This was different. This was him standing in front of the country and talking.

  His communications director gave him prepared remarks at eight that morning. Thick stack of paper, talking points highlighted in three different colors.

  He read it once.

  Folded it.

  Put it face down on the desk.

  She noticed. She was already good at reading him. "Sir, the remarks have been—"

  "I'll be fine," he said.

  She looked at him for a second. Decided something. Left.

  He walked out into the cold in front of ten thousand people and three hundred cameras and looked at all of it and took one breath.

  "I want to be straight with you," he said. Nothing before it. No good morning, no thank you for being here. Just that.

  The crowd went still in that way crowds go still when they realize something unscripted is happening.

  "I know what's being said right now. I know people are scared. I know there are voices — outside this country and inside it too — saying we're weak. That we're open. That whoever comes at us next is going to finish what got started." He paused. Let it sit. "I want to talk about that."

  He looked out at them.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "There are people who want this country. Not the idea of it — the actual thing. The land. The gold. The food. The infrastructure that took two hundred years and a lot of people dying to build. People who look at all of that and think — if I could just get in. If I could just break it down from the inside first." He stopped. "I know who some of those people are. We know. We're watching."

  He wasn't using any notes. Wasn't performing anything. Just standing there saying what was true.

  "Every president before me had a playbook. Ways things get done, language that means something in certain rooms, protocols that protect the people using them more than the people they're supposed to serve." Pause. "I don't have a playbook. I have a reason. Same reason I've had since I was nine — people who can't protect themselves deserve someone who actually tries. That's it. That's all this ever was."

  He looked directly at the cameras.

  "So I'm not going to do what they expect. I'm going to do it my way. Which means I'm going to be honest with you, I'm going to be honest with them, and I'm going to protect this country like it belongs to every person standing in front of me right now." He stopped. "Because it does."

  He stepped back.

  The crowd took a second — that one held breath — and then it wasn't quiet anymore.

  He didn't see it.

  Nobody did.

  Seventh floor. Building three hundred meters east. Window that had been swept at nine and cleared. Someone had gotten in after the sweep, which meant someone had known exactly when the sweep happened and what the gaps were.

  The mole.

  The bullet took him in the left shoulder.

  The impact spun him sideways and then there were bodies on top of him — three agents, heavy and immediate, getting him down and covering him before his brain had even caught up to what happened. He let them. He couldn't feel his left arm and his ears were ringing and the crowd was screaming somewhere far away and his face was against the cold wood of the stage.

  First thought:

  Shoulder. Not head.

  Second thought:

  Lukas.

  Surgery was two hours. Bullet went through clean. His doctor said no permanent damage, weeks of recovery, he'd be fine. She said it three times.

  Raina was in the waiting room. She stood up when they brought him out and walked straight over and put her hand on the side of his face, careful, and just looked at him. Checking. Making sure.

  "I'm okay," he said.

  "I know," she said. "I needed to see."

  JoJo was against the wall, arms crossed, hadn't moved in what looked like hours. He looked at Ye Feng. Ye Feng looked back. Nod. That was enough.

  His mom called seventeen times while he was in surgery. He called her from the hospital bed after and she cried — not loud, just quiet and controlled and that was somehow harder to hear than loud would have been. He talked to her for forty minutes until she sounded like herself again.

  Henry at the end: "Still paying attention?"

  Ye Feng almost smiled. "Yeah," he said. "Still paying attention."

  He knew who fired the shot. Knew it the moment the bullet hit him.

  Shoulder. Not head.

  Lukas had been there — scope, angle, everything lined up — and he'd moved it. Deliberately. Taken the shoulder and left the head alone. That wasn't a miss. That was a decision made by someone who had nine years of breakfasts and study sessions and one promise on a roof stored somewhere in his chest and couldn't completely burn them out.

  Ye Feng lay in the hospital at two in the morning three days after the surgery and stared at the ceiling and sat with that.

  He didn't forgive him. Not even a little. But he filed it away somewhere separate from the anger because anger wasn't the tool he needed right now and information was.

  Some of it was real, Lukas had said.

  The shoulder was what real looked like. Coming from someone built the way Lukas was built. Maybe the only version he had.

  The intelligence report hit his desk three weeks into recovery.

  Twelve pages. Patricia Owens — his security director, twenty-two years in the job, the kind of stillness you only got from seeing most things — sat across from him while he read it.

  He read it twice.

  Friedrich's network was bigger than anyone had known. Three governments. Seven financial channels. A communications infrastructure that had been built slowly and carefully over fifteen years specifically to avoid the kind of detection that would have stopped it earlier. The assassination attempt wasn't the plan — it was a test. See how fast the response was. Find the gaps. Measure the new administration.

  They'd been watching before the election.

  Maybe before the campaign.

  Page nine.

  Someone on his security detail had provided the schedule that morning. The sweep times. The window. Someone who had shaken his hand. Someone who called him sir.

  He put the report down.

  "The mole," he said.

  "Days not weeks," Patricia said.

  "Brandt."

  She was careful with this part. "His objective — based on what we've intercepted — isn't just instability. It's acquisition. He wants the land. The resources. The gold. The infrastructure. He wants to show that the strongest country in the world can be hollowed out from the inside if you're patient enough." A pause. "He has been very patient."

  Ye Feng looked at the window.

  The city outside. Stripped back by winter. Everything underneath showing.

  All of it — the fields, the coasts, the things built over two hundred years by people who believed in them — and Friedrich Brandt somewhere in Berlin looking at it like a calculation.

  "Find the mole before the week ends," Ye Feng said.

  "Yes sir."

  She left.

  JoJo appeared in the doorway a minute later. Ye Feng hadn't known he was nearby.

  "You okay," JoJo said.

  "No," Ye Feng said. "But I will be."

  JoJo came in and sat down and didn't try to fix anything and that was the right call like it always was.

  Raina found him on the balcony that night.

  He shouldn't have been out there — healing shoulder, cold air, his medical team would have had opinions. He needed to be somewhere that wasn't a room full of people watching him for cracks.

  She came and stood beside him without asking. She knew.

  They looked at the city for a while without talking.

  "I used to come here when I was little," she said. Quiet. "My dad would bring me when my brothers had school. We'd just walk around and he'd explain things. Point at buildings and tell me what happened in them." She stopped. "I thought it was the safest place in the world because he was in charge of it."

  Ye Feng didn't say anything.

  "I know better now," she said.

  "I'm going to make it safer." Heavy. The real kind of promise. The kind you can feel the weight of when you say it.

  She looked at him. "I know you are."

  They stayed until the cold got serious. Then went inside.

  The mole's name was David Marsh.

  Fourteen years. Spotless record. Two commendations. Had been feeding information to Friedrich's network for eight months — before the election, before any of this. Arrested on a Thursday morning. No press, no announcement. Ye Feng found out over coffee at seven AM and nodded and kept going with his day.

  That was the new normal now. He paid attention to how normal it was getting. Made sure not to settle too far into it.

  The intelligence on Germany came the way bad things usually came.

  Not all at once. Piece by piece. A detail here, an intercept there, and then one day you put everything side by side and step back and the shape of it appears and you wish it hadn't.

  Friedrich had backing. Not just money — political backing. Quiet, deniable, careful. A faction inside the German government that believed what Friedrich believed. That America had held too much for too long. That its land and gold and position were things that could change hands if you were methodical about it.

  They had been methodical.

  Ye Feng read the final assessment alone on a Sunday night. Once, all the way through. Then sat with it for a long time.

  He thought about his grandfather. The legacy. Everything his family had spent his whole life running from. He thought about how power worked — how it consumed itself looking for more of itself. How the people who had it could never quite convince themselves they had enough.

  He thought about all those people out there. His people now. Going about their lives with no idea what was being moved around them.

  He picked up the phone. Called Patricia.

  "How long do we have."

  No hesitation. "Months. Not years."

  He set the phone down.

  Looked at the window. City outside, dark, quiet, unaware.

  Lukas somewhere out there — no location, no contact since the phone call, just gone. A ghost who could have ended this and didn't. Whose reasons Ye Feng still hadn't completely worked out.

  Friedrich Brandt moving pieces on a board most people didn't know existed.

  And somewhere across the Atlantic, inside the government of a country that had been an ally, people looking at a map of the United States and seeing not a nation.

  A prize.

  Ye Feng sat in the quiet with the weight on both shoulders — the healing one and the other — and opened his notebook and started writing.

  There was a lot to do.

  And for the first time in eighty years, the drumbeat of war had begun to sound.