Chapter 15: The Conspiracy's First Body

The knock came before the city had finished deciding whether to wake.

Three raps, measured and quiet — not the pattern of urgency but the pattern of someone who had learned, the hard way, that urgency announced itself too loudly in hallways like these. Elizabeth was already awake, had been awake since the fourth hour by her rough calculation of the darkness, lying with her eyes open and the ceiling's water stain for company. She had been thinking about the Thursday letters. She had been thinking about the map of northern roads. She had been thinking about the way Vane had smiled at her across the small dinner table three nights ago with the warm, considered pleasure of a man examining a piece of furniture he was deciding whether to acquire or burn.

She crossed the floor in bare feet and opened the door.