Selah had bought them an evening, and by the time the evening arrived Soren had spent most of it working out what she'd bought it for.
He wasn't writing any of it down.
He'd stopped writing anything down after Dani had shown him the shell and its billing line.
A page was a thing that could be pulled out of a drawer.
A page could be read by an office he was watching from a distance.
So he did it in his head.
One count for the tech leaving the stands early.
One for the doors closing behind the tech without Marsh noticing.
One for the delegate touching his own throat.
One for the empty fourth seat that had been empty since the guest list posted.
Four more entries by nightfall.
He worked through them one at a time, checking each entry against the pattern, seeing whether it wanted to sit next to another entry he'd already logged.
That was the trick with a pattern that hadn't finished forming.
