Kali collected hands for four days.
That was how she described it in her reports, and by the second day I had stopped finding the phrase unsettling and started finding it accurate. Every message that went out through Orrin Pell's channel was true enough to tempt and tagged deep enough to follow. Every time Umbrythm reached for it, another hand showed itself.
A lawyer whose firm was eleven days old. Two journalists who had been receiving quiet payments for three years. A courier service with four employees and forty-one vehicles. A consulting firm with no clients and six offices. A shell company in the southern provinces that owned nothing but a single post box and a very expensive encryption licence. And, behind all of them, a web so fine and so old that Jin said it reminded him of the threads he used to bind his sparrows: nearly invisible, and holding up everything.
By the fourth night, Kali's map of Umbrythm covered an entire wall of the operations floor.
