Chapter 6: First Transmission — Vorath Reads the Reports

The chapel smelled of standing water and lamp oil and the particular rot that comes when timber has been wet for so long it forgets it was ever dry.

Vorath read the first page twice before setting it face-down on the altar rail.

It was not the information that required reading twice. He had understood the information on the first pass — he had been trained, once, to extract operational meaning from dense field reports in under sixty seconds, and that training didn't leave a man any more than his augmentations did. The second reading was something else. He did it the way a man runs his thumb along a blade's edge after sharpening: not to test the edge, but because the act itself meant something.