Chapter 23: What the Mirror Shows

The room smelled like grief and something older than grief — like the specific anguish of a body that has been made into a question it cannot answer. Viktor stood in the doorway for three full seconds, which was long enough to count them: twelve shapes in the aft compartment, distributed across six reinforced cots and the floor and, in one case, a corner where something had pressed itself into the angle of two walls and stopped moving but had not stopped breathing.

Twelve.

Nine on the thermal imaging.