Chapter 2: What Voss Calls a Conversation

The flat was small enough that Voss had taken in most of it by the time Evander had closed the door behind her. He watched her do it — the single, unhurried survey of a person cataloguing exits and contents simultaneously, old habit or genuine curiosity, possibly both. She would have noted the books on every horizontal surface. The cat now sitting in the kitchen doorway, regarding her with the particular suspicion Ptolemy reserved for the unannounced. The two mugs on the drying rack. The absence of anything on the walls.

'Sit down,' Evander said. 'If you want to.'

Voss sat in the armchair by the window — the better chair, which she would have recognized as such and chosen deliberately, though not, he thought, out of power-play. Out of the same practical instinct that had brought her own tea. She settled her coat around her, held the paper cup in both hands, and looked at him without apparent agenda.