The basement had a different quality tonight.
During her first visit it had been lit and assessed and filed—the long table, the finished walls, the secondary door at the far end that she had catalogued without looking at directly. Tonight it was working space. The overhead lights were on but dimmed to the specific register of a room being used for something that didn't require full brightness, and Aurora had been down here for forty minutes before Ray arrived, which was exactly the amount of time she had needed.
The planning wall occupied the length of the far surface—a corkboard she had asked Ray to have installed, framed by the particular organized intensity of something that had been assembled with genuine care and deliberate misdirection in approximately equal measure. Photographs. Index cards. Keywords in her precise, controlled handwriting. Red thread connecting the nodes in the specific visual language of a serious operation.
