Chapter 25: The Resistance Wants Its Centerpiece

The safe house had three rooms and the organizational optimism of somewhere that had been set up to serve eight people and was currently serving eleven.

Evander discovered this when Seren opened the interior door and the murmur of voices resolved into an argument about whether the secondary comm channel had been compromised, conducted between a woman Evander recognized from the Caldwell Wharf briefing and two people he had never seen. There were folding chairs arranged in a configuration that suggested a meeting had been planned and then overtaken by events. A camp stove on the counter. Someone had made porridge and then apparently abandoned the project midway, leaving the pot to congeal in its own particular way.

He had forty-seven minutes of sleep in the car. His jacket had blood on the sleeve — not his, he was fairly sure — and the cut above his eyebrow had dried into something stiff and uncomfortable that he kept forgetting about until he moved a specific way.