The market with the broken clock smelled like wet cardboard and old spices.
It was the kind of place that had been dying slowly for so long that it had achieved a kind of permanence, stalls half-empty, owners who'd stopped expecting customers and started treating the space like a living room.
The clock above the entrance had stopped at 11:42.
Nobody had fixed it.
Nobody remembered when it had stopped.
Mara walked in first, three minutes early, the way she did everything that frightened her.
Aiden and Kael followed two minutes behind, separately, from different angles, the way Kael had insisted and Aiden hadn't argued with.
They found her at a stall selling canned goods nobody bought anymore, pretending to read the label on a tin of something grey and unidentifiable.
