CHAPTER 246: THE PRICE OF AN OWNER
Forty-one people.
By noon the next day, that number hadn't dropped any further, but it was no longer a number either. It had split apart into forty-one faces, and all forty-one of those faces were thinking about Room 2705.
Rover knew this, because he could read it on the chat panel.
Not the lines of text. The lines of text had gone silent since last night, after Hudson left and the name [Mirror] sank beneath three hundred curses. What Rover read was the silence.
Before the battle, the twenty-seventh floor's chat had always been noisy, someone hawking items, someone begging for an alliance, someone cursing. Now it was empty.
No one dared type a single word, for fear that typing the wrong word would let Room 2705 read it.
'They're afraid of me.' Rover sat at the table, slowly spinning a silver coin on the tip of his finger. 'Not afraid that I'll kill them. Afraid that I could have killed them, and didn't.'
It was a different kind of fear.
