Chapter 4: Assassination Logistics

The courtyard smelled of mineral water and something else underneath it, something that Cael could not name until he was already kneeling in the sand beside his father and by then the name did not matter.

He had woken at the particular hour when Durath's dark was still absolute — the hour before the false gentleness of dawn, when the recycled air in the family quarters cycled through its coldest phase and made a sound like shallow breathing. He had lain still for eleven seconds, which he knew because he counted them, and during those eleven seconds the feeling that had pulled him from sleep did not resolve into any specific dread. It remained general. Atmospheric. The kind of wrongness that has no object.

He rose anyway. He dressed. He was his father's son in that much, at least.