The whole city was silent.
They stood everywhere as we walked—hundreds of them, frozen upright in the roads, on the pavements, crowding the mouths of every alley. Heads hanging. Arms slack at their sides. Mouths slightly open. Eyes open and empty, catching the weak yellow spill of the streetlamps.
Not one thing moved in the capital except three people and the sound of their own boots on the asphalt.
Ingrid beside me. Code behind us, whistling low through his teeth.
"Do you remember what you said on those stairs?"
"Mm."
"You told me the Donmans had no right to ask me for anything else." She turned her palm over, looked at it, let it fall. "Nobody had ever said that to me. Not once in my life."
I let her have it and didn't answer.
My eyes worked the street. Every standing body, every shadow between them. My hearing stretched past the lamps, out into the dark, and found nothing but our own footsteps and the soft creak of leather.
