The meeting with Salazar was in two days and Darius couldn't sleep.
Not the kind of not-sleeping that came from anxiety. Darius didn't get anxious. Anxiety was a luxury for people who hadn't grown up hearing gunshots through apartment walls, for people who hadn't learned by twelve that fear was a thing you put in a box and closed the lid on because the box was the only thing between you and the kind of panic that made you stupid. Darius didn't do stupid. He did awake. He did alert. He did the thing that looked like insomnia to other people but was really just the engine running, the mind turning over the same problems again and again the way an engine turns over the same pistons, not because it wants to but because that's what engines do.
