After midnight, the city turns on itself. Glass towers shed their daylight brilliance and sprawl into a thousand black panes, each one a cold mirror for the violence beneath. My office is a floating cell above this expanse, nothing but the pulse of my desk lamp and the scratch of rain against the windows to distinguish it from a prison. The rest of the firm’s lights have died, except for the blue glimmer at the security desk, which I can see reflected in the hallway glass: an island of protocol in an ocean of deserted space.
Lila sits at the conference table, hunched over a scatter of manila folders and legal pads as if assembling her own desperate shrine. She’s wearing the same navy skirt suit from earlier, but the jacket is now off, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a constellation of ink s
