Chapter 7: The Emergency Session

The coffee in the Round Table room had been sitting for forty minutes before anyone touched it.

Arthur had arrived at eight-fifteen, which meant he had been standing in that windowless space alone for forty-five minutes before anyone else came through the door, and the coffee had been there when he arrived, set out by someone from facilities who had read the calendar alert and acted without being asked. The small efficiency of that should have steadied him. It didn't. He stood at the window that wasn't there — the blank wall where a window would have been, if the room had been designed to let in the world rather than to keep it out — and read the Chronicle piece for the fourth time on his phone, trying to find the seam where it was wrong.

He could not find it.