Chapter 5: Solano's Impossible Geometry

The blood did not lie. This was the first thing Marguerite Solano had learned from her mother's pharmacist shelves, reading labels at the age of nine while her mother counted tablets and explained that the numbers on the bottles were a promise — that chemistry was a language that did not have a word for approximation. The blood did not lie, and the numbers on the bottles did not lie, and when they did, people died. Her mother had taught her this as a comfort. It had taken Marguerite thirty-four years to understand it was also a warning.

She waited until Blackwell left the observatory.

He did not leave willingly. He left because the pharmaceutical regulator in the burgundy waistcoat had begun asking questions in the corridor with the particular insistence of a man accustomed to regulatory hearings, and because the train's conductor — Marek, still holding his composure together with both hands and visible effort — required someone with authoritative manner to manage the passenger situation before it became several separate passenger situations. Blackwell assessed this in the doorway for perhaps four seconds, weighed the corridor against the observatory, and left with the expression of a man setting down a glass he fully intended to pick up again.