She picked a coffee place in the mid-district, the kind that had been there long enough to have regulars and didn't try very hard about anything except the coffee, which was good. He got there first and took a corner table out of habit, the porter's instinct of always knowing what was behind you, and ordered something hot and waited.
She came in four minutes later, and he watched her cross the room with certain awarenes, the layered perception reading her the way it read everything, pressure and warmth and the subtle spatial confidence of a Pathfinder moving through a room she'd already mapped in the half-second she stood in the doorway.
She sat down across from him and looked at him the way she'd looked at him last night, the assessment running underneath the surface of a more neutral e
