Caleb stayed in the alcove for thirty seconds.
The napkin was still folded in his hand. The handwriting had not changed in the time it took him to read it twice. The shape of the letters was old. The slope was a teaching from a school that did not exist anymore. He had spent eleven years in disposal yards reading carcasses, and the principle was the same. You did not look at the wound. You looked at the body around the wound. You looked at what was missing.
What was missing here was the layer he had not seen.
He had walked into the gala with one job. Find a face for a routing entity. He had assumed the routing entity was the deepest piece on the board. The napkin said otherwise. The napkin said the man with the eyes was already on a board with at least one other player, and that the other player was watching them both, and that the man wanted Caleb to know it before Caleb did anything stupid.
Caleb folded the napkin smaller and slid it into his breast pocket.
