The assembly hall looked different at sunrise than it had in daylight two mornings ago, the windows still holding onto the last blue of night, the pack filing in bleary and confused, summoned at an hour that told everyone something urgent had cut through whatever sleep they'd had left.
I found Thorne already at the front when we arrived, standing in exactly the spot my father had occupied at the last assembly, and something about the easy way he'd claimed it made my stomach turn before he'd said a single word.
Edmund Thorne was smaller than I remembered, older, the kind of unremarkable that made you understand instantly why nobody had thought to watch him carefully for twenty-six years. That was its own kind of camouflage, I was starting to understand. The most dangerous people in this p
