Chapter 19: What SEREN Knows About Mara

The corridor smelled of concrete dust and standing water, the kind of smell that accumulates in spaces where maintenance has been deferred long enough to become policy. I had come through the maintenance skeleton three levels above the café, following Drift's route until he peeled off at the junction point we had agreed — he going south, toward the secondary cache he'd mentioned with the careful understatement of a man who didn't want me to know how little was left — and me continuing east toward the old civic-allocation wing where the fourth-floor room was still nominally mine for another twelve hours.

I was alone in the corridor.

And then I was not.