Chapter 9: Malachar's Bureaucracy

The safe house smelled like burnt copper and someone's abandoned takeaway.

Evander registered both before he registered anything else — the particular metallic edge that clung to rooms where magic had been worked recently, and underneath it the grease-and-cardboard smell of noodles consumed hours ago and left in the bin. Seren had not told him what the building was before they reached it. She had said, on his doorstep that morning, that she had information specific to his neighborhood and that she would rather show him than describe it, and he had looked at her for a moment and said, "That's a very careful framing," and she had said, "Yes," without apparent embarrassment, and he had put on his jacket.

The building was a converted commercial unit two streets behind the harbor road — the kind of space that had been, at various points, a print shop, a storage facility, and most recently a small accountancy practice whose sign was still half-visible beneath a coat of grey paint. The windows had been treated with something that made them look dark from the outside without actually being curtained. There were nine people inside when they arrived, and the table in the center of the room was covered in maps.