Marcus's office was not what Zeph expected.
He had built a mental image during the Northern Bastion stay—the information broker's workspace, functional and sparse, the aesthetic of someone who traded in knowledge and kept the décor minimal to match.
What he found instead was a library. Floor to ceiling on every wall. Books, stone tablets, alien artifacts in sealed cases, maps layered over maps covering two full walls—dungeon locations, Sanctuary distributions, System anomaly reports, incident markers in three different colors whose coding system Zeph did not yet understand.
CV's compound eyes moved across the room with the systematic attention of something cataloguing. Zeph understood the impulse.
"You missed theTwelve's first meeting," Zeph said.
"I sent my apologies." Marcus was at his desk, closing a file. "How did it go?"
"You want the summary or the details?"
"Summary."
