Chapter 29: The Reckoning on the Waterfront

The operations had been clean, which meant the debrief ran long.

By the time Falconer's aides finished cross-referencing the server room images against Dravec's network diagram, it was half four in the morning. By the time the secondary team confirmed Barrow Terrace was dark and Hanover Parade had locked up in a way that suggested strategic retreat rather than ignorance, it was past five. By the time Evander had given his account of the Caldwell Wharf extraction twice, once to Petra and once to a woman he did not know whose function was not explained to him and whose handwriting was extremely small, it was the particular grey hour that is not quite night and not quite morning but something between that has no comfortable name.

He could have slept. There was floor space. Dravec was unconscious in the corner under a jacket that was almost certainly not his, breathing with the total commitment of someone who has learned to sleep anywhere rather than nowhere. Seren was on the cot in the back room, her splinted wrist elevated on a folded blanket with the mechanical precision of someone who had been managing an injury so long its care had become automatic. Cael was in the chair he had claimed on arrival and had apparently not vacated since, because Cael had a gift for establishing territorial rights through sheer socially confident inertia.