Chapter 21: Seren Finally Finishes the Sentence

The planning took most of the night.

Dravec's file arrived in pieces — a thermal imaging pass that was three weeks old and therefore unreliable, planning authority records for the original commercial conversion that showed load-bearing walls and utility access points but nothing useful about what the interior had been made into since, and seven photographs taken from the street at varying hours of the day by someone with a good eye for angles and a poor eye for focus. Evander spread them across the kitchen table after midnight, weighted the corners with a pepper grinder and two mugs and the salt cellar, and stood over them with the particular concentration he had been using for years to manage Russian literature donations and was now apparently redirecting toward something rather more consequential.

Seren sat across from him. She had her own annotated copy of Dravec's site report and a field communicator that she kept checking without visible reaction to what it returned. The communicator made a faint sound when it received updates, a low hum at a frequency just below comfortable, and after the fourth time Evander heard it he stopped noticing it consciously and filed it with the rain against the window and the distant ambient sounds of a harbor city at two in the morning.