Chapter 15: What the Cartographer Is Actually Building

The next morning arrived in Edinburgh the way most November mornings did — not with announcement but with a gradual lessening of dark, the city assembling itself out of grey and damp the way a photograph develops in a tray, detail by reluctant detail. By seven, the cobblestones were slick and the sky was the precise colour of old pewter. By half eight, The Amber Cup had been open for forty minutes and Margaret had already burned the first batch of whatever she had attempted to bake, disposed of the evidence without comment, and made a pot of coffee that was, by any objective measure, exceptional.

Seris arrived at eight forty-three.

She did not order immediately. She set her bag on the table — their table, the corner one, which had acquired the status of theirs in the way that territories are established between careful and long-habituated parties — and took out the notebook, the map, the folded printouts of street directories that she had acquired from the city library on the pretense of historical research, which was technically accurate if one's definition of history was capacious enough to include the present tense. She arranged these with the particular precision of someone who had been awake for a very long time and found in arrangement a substitute for rest.