Chapter 13: Maren's Mother and the Closed File

Orin Voss was already in the room.

That was the first thing Maren registered — not his face, not the two men positioned at the door she hadn't come through, not the particular quality of stillness he occupied like a man who had been waiting long enough that waiting had become another room he lived in. The first thing was the simple fact of his presence, which meant he had known they were coming before they stepped through the transit-gate, which meant something in her preparation had been legible from outside, which meant she needed to revise her operational assumptions immediately and substantially while keeping her face doing nothing.

She did all of this between one step and the next.