Chapter 7: What the Symbol Means

The first analyst worked out of a converted light-industrial unit in the Meridian fabrication ring, the kind of place that smelled permanently of solder and had no signage on the door. His name was Pask, and he had spent eleven years as a visual cryptography contractor before the Bureau had automated most of that work with a pattern-recognition module that ran at a fraction of the cost. He was not bitter about this, or said he wasn't, though the absence of his Bureau credentials anywhere in the room suggested otherwise.

I slid the printed photograph across his worktable without context. "Tell me what that is."

He looked at it for three minutes without touching it. Then he picked it up, held it toward the overhead light, and set it back down.