Chapter 16: Eleven Names Her Mother

The afternoon light came through the hardware store window at an angle that turned everything amber, and Holmes had been staring at the cross-reference chart for long enough that the lines had stopped meaning anything.

He set down the pencil. He picked it up again. He set it down.

This was new. He recognized it as new, which was itself an exercise he had not previously needed to perform with any regularity — the monitoring of his own cognitive function for novel failures. In London, in the architecture of familiar certainties, his mind had moved like water finding gradients: continuously, without effort, always downward toward the answer. Here it kept finding edges where edges should not be, and stopping.