Chapter 22: The Fourteenth Name

The civic core's transit grid ran night shifts at reduced frequency, which meant the Number Four elevated took eleven minutes to arrive and I spent them on a rain-slicked platform pretending to read a bulletin board while watching the reflection in the shelter's plexiglass for anyone who had picked up my line in the last three blocks.

Nobody had. Or nobody I could see, which wasn't the same thing, but it was the best I could offer myself at half past ten with Solenne's voice still sitting behind my ears and forty-one signatures catalogued in the notepad pressed to my ribs.

I took the Four two stops north, got off, waited on the corner outside a closed bakery for four minutes, then walked back to the parallel road and caught the Number Nine going the direction I'd come from. Old military habit. Isara had once asked me why I never took a direct route anywhere and I'd told her I preferred the scenic option. She'd looked at me the way you look at someone whose scenic options tend to involve active ordnance.