She was already outside Ren's building when they arrived at seven fifty-eight. Not waiting nervously. Standing with her back against the wall and her arms at her sides and her eyes on the street — watching the approach from forty feet with the patience of someone who had made a decision and was committed to it but had not yet decided what the decision would produce. She was twenty-eight. Shorter than Hunter had expected. Her forearms were visible below her jacket sleeves and the discoloration ran from both wrists to the elbow — not the palm-focused mark Hunter and Carver carried but a sleeve of changed skin that indicated a different kind of event, a sustained contact with a heat source that had moved through her rather than from her. She looked at Hunter as he approached. You sent the

