Chapter 571 -  The Name

The silence that followed Holloway's frozen introduction stretched across the conference room like a living thing, thick and suffocating, feeding on the collective breath of fifty people who had come expecting uncertainty and found instead the particular terror of certain doom without known shape. Holloway stood at his place, his hands trembling at his sides, his eyes fixed on that spot of discolored paint as if it might offer escape, might dissolve and swallow him, might transform this moment into something other than the nightmare it had become.