Chapter 3: Three Names on a Probability List

The coffee in the third-floor annex was less criminal in the same way that a smaller wound is less serious — technically accurate, functionally irrelevant. I drank it standing up, facing the window, watching the morning shift of aerial transit cut pale lines through the overcast above the outer ring. Nexus Prime in daylight looked like a promise someone had made and then industrialized. From this height, the arcology towers were just geometry, and Tower Nine was indistinguishable from the ones that still had people in them.

I had twenty minutes before SEREN's formal case briefing. I spent ten of them reviewing Isara's notation — vasodilation, extremities, mechanism unclear — and the other ten asking myself whether a man with a cardiac condition would walk twenty-three flights of stairs into a condemned building at three in the morning for reasons that had nothing to do with someone telling him to.

The answer kept coming back the same way. No. Not without help. Not without purpose.