Chapter 26: Three Nights — Dismantling the Architecture

The fog came in off the river on the first night, which Watson took as neither omen nor obstacle but simply weather, the way a soldier learns to take mud.

He was at the kitchen table at half past eight, the lamp turned low, Holmes's notebook open to the final entry. He was not reading it. He had stopped needing to read it some weeks ago; the words had worn themselves into him the way a prayer wears into a man who has said it too many times in the dark. He was looking at the ceiling and thinking about sequencing.

The registry sat at the centre of the table, its forty-seven names arranged in the order Adelaide had determined: not alphabetical, not chronological, but structural — organised by the weight each node bore within the network's architecture, so that the removal of each would degrade the whole by the maximum possible degree before any surviving node could warn the others. She had spent two days producing this ordering. She had presented it without ceremony, sliding it across the table with the particular composure of someone who has done the difficult work and does not require the observation to be noted aloud.