Chapter 17: Marcus Vane Requests a Conversation

The messenger arrives at dawn — or what passes for dawn here, the light source activating at the same precise moment it always does, a switch rather than a sun, revealing the arena in flat sections rather than gradients.

Hamlet hears her before he sees her. Three sharp knocks against the catwalk's eastern support strut, then a pause, then two more. Not a pattern from Rue's signal vocabulary. Something else. Something that has been designed to sound deliberate rather than threatening, which in his experience amounts to the same problem with different presentation.

He is already awake. He has been awake since the light switched on, sitting with his back against the junction platform's western beam, watching Rue's chest rise and fall and listening to Mira work her way back along the eastern section with the particular quality of silence that competent people make when they are trying not to disturb others. It is a different silence from incompetent quiet. He has learned to distinguish them.