Chapter 4: Three Names AXIOM Will Not Explain

We arrived back at Southwark Precinct just after ten, and the building received us with the particular indifference of institutions that process too much to feel any of it. The duty desk officer logged our credentials without looking up. The corridor lights cycled through their standard sequence — amber, white, amber — tracking our movement with the quiet efficiency of a system that had never been asked whether it wanted to.

Holmes went directly to her desk without stopping for coffee, without speaking to the two officers who attempted to make eye contact with her in the corridor, and without acknowledging the small queue of notifications pulsing in the air above her workstation's interface panel. She sat, pulled the paper dossier from the inner pocket of her jacket, and opened it flat on the desk.

I found an unoccupied chair near the window — the window overlooking the service road, not the courtyard, which I understood after a moment was not accidental: less glass, fewer drone transit corridors, less surveillance density — and sat in it and watched her work.