Chapter 9: Varenthal — The Monarch in His Counting House

The transit-gate opened on morning, which felt like an insult.

Lira had forgotten that Varenthal had mornings. The Seam Station existed in a kind of suspended interval, lit by the residual glow of four competing physics, and she had been in it long enough that the concept of a sun — a single, uncomplicated, ontologically stable sun — struck her as almost offensive in its simplicity. She stepped through the gate onto the service road behind the Chandlers' Quarter and the light hit her face and she thought, with the automatic reflex of a woman who had grown up on these streets: cover.

She moved into the shadow of the awning before she had consciously decided to.