Chapter 28: Not the Savior, Not the Variable

The briefing took forty minutes and used three different maps.

Falconer ran it herself, standing at the end of the safe house's kitchen table with the particular economy of someone who has been doing this long enough to have stopped performing authority. The table had been cleared of everything except the maps and a single lamp with a shade that tilted slightly to the left, and eleven people occupied a room that seated eight, and nobody mentioned either problem.

Evander stood at the back near the window. Not because he needed an exit — the exits were all suboptimal from the window — but because the back of the room was where you could see everyone, and seeing everyone was a habit he appeared to have been sustaining, without examination, for the entirety of the past seven years. He had thought it was a bookshop habit. The kind of vigilance that comes from spending long hours in a small space with strangers and their uncertain intentions regarding the returns policy. He understood now that it was older than the bookshop.