Maren Doss looked like she had walked through the silver forest at speed for several hours, which she had.
She sat in the gate room wrapped in a blanket one of the guards had found, her gray coat torn and her composure damaged but still present, the way a well built structure remains recognizable even after something has taken out a wall.
She looked up when I entered and the relief in her face was genuine and brief and immediately replaced by the characteristic directness.
“They know what they were building,” she said, without preamble. “The Hollow Court leadership. I was told I was the architect of the plan. I was not. I was the face.
The people behind me understood the secondary protocol from the beginning.”
“We know about the secondary protocol,” I said.
“Incomplete convergence
