Chapter 15: The Synchrony Problem

The transit-gate back to the Seam Station deposited them without ceremony — one moment the Pell Mora Building's stairwell, the next the particular gray-green light of the Station's central chamber, which had the quality of air that had been breathed in a closed room for too long. No threshold sensation. No fanfare. Just the abrupt fact of being elsewhere.

Maren sat down on the floor.

Not collapsing — it was not that kind of sitting. It was the deliberate lowering of someone who has made an executive decision about their body's requirements, which her body had been making a case for since roughly the third dead witness in the Syndicate's records room. She sat with her back against the central console and her legs extended and her hands loose in her lap and she looked at the ceiling, which was doing its usual thing of being all four ceilings at once, and she did not say anything.