Washington. The Situation Room. 2 AM.
The meeting had been called within thirty minutes of the announcement dropping and nobody who walked into that room was fully themselves.
That was the truth nobody stated and everybody understood. The voice had been eight hours ago. Eight hours since every person in this building had felt a single word arrive in their chest simultaneously with every other human being on Earth, through walls, through sealed rooms, through even the classified infrastructure this building had spent decades making impenetrable.
It's been eight hours since they had watched cameras compress inward from every surface while a teenager stood with his hands at his sides and watched them do it.
But eight hours was not enough time to process that. It was not enough time to file it somewhere manageable and return to the part of yourself that made decisions from a position of institutional confidence.
