The strategy session began the way all the important ones did — in the sitting room, with tea nobody drank, and the specific gravity of seven people who had learned, over seven weeks, how to be honest with each other quickly because there was rarely time not to be.
Lena told them everything Vane had said. She told it precisely, in order, without softening it — she had learned that softening things for this group was its own kind of disrespect, that they could handle the full weight of information and resented having it pre-digested for them.
When she finished, the room was quiet for a moment.
Then Cade said: "Leave."
Everyone looked at him.
"Not permanently," he said. His voice had the flatness it took on when he was working through something operationally, the management he'd been le
