Viktor had never owned an office.
Offices were addresses, and addresses were the beginning of every mistake he had ever exploited in other people. Umbrythm rented floors the way other guilds rented equipment: a few months here, a quarter there, always in buildings full of insurance brokers and shipping agents and the kind of quiet companies nobody ever wondered about. This month it was the nineteenth floor of a tower in Avalon's merchant district, behind a door that said Calder & Wight, Strategic Consulting.
There was no Calder. There was no Wight. There had never been.
He sat by the window with tea going cold and the city spread out below him in winter light. On the desk in front of him was a single crystal data shard, delivered five nights ago by a courier who had been paid not to know what she was carrying.
Helena Voss's map.
