Noah POV

I spend the better part of two hours asking questions and receiving nothing.

Not ignorance—that would feel different. Ignorance has a texture to it, a particular blankness that reads as genuine. What I’m getting from the people of Ironshade is something else entirely: the careful, practiced quality of people who know exactly what they’re not saying, who have measured the cost of saying it and decided the cost is too high. Every conversation ends the same way. A ...