A New Normal - Chapter 2

Cassandra woke to silence.

For a moment she lay still beneath the wool blanket, her body rigid, her eyes open in the grey half-dark of a room she did not yet recognize. The ceiling was too close. The walls were papered instead of bare. There was no sound of breathing from adjacent bunks, no distant rumble of artillery, no sentry's bootfall on frozen ground. Only the faint tick of the boarding house contracted in the cold, and beyond the window, the first pale suggestion of morning above the Thornfield rooftops.

Her boots were beside the bed, aligned heel to heel, toes out. She had removed them at some point in the night, though she did not remember doing it.

In the dark she dressed with the efficiency her body had memorized across a hundred different rooms and dugouts, her hands finding buttons and fastenings without sight, lacing each boot by touch alone. The collared shirt. The long skirt. When she stood, the room had lightened enough to show the table, the chair, the empty windowsill.

Downstairs, the boarding house was silent. The kitchen sat at the back of the ground floor — a coal-burning stove, a deep sink, shelves of jars and tins. A basket of eggs and a cloth-covered loaf waited on the table beside a ceramic jug of milk.

Cassandra rolled up her sleeves and began to cook.

From the loaf on the table she sliced bread and set it on the warming plate, then cracked eggs into a pan. In the regiment, someone had to cook. Soldiers needed to eat, and hot food kept a unit functional in ways cold rations could not. Jean had assigned her the role during her second winter with the 42nd, and she had learned it with the same thoroughness she brought to everything. She could feed twelve from a field kit and whatever the supply line had left behind. A civilian kitchen with a full pantry and running water was a simple operation.

By the time Mrs. Caulfield appeared in the doorway, Cassandra had set two places at the table, plated the eggs, and poured two cups of tea.

Mrs. Caulfield stood in the doorway for a long moment, her dressing gown cinched at the waist, her grey hair pinned loosely from the night before. She looked at the table, at the two plates, at the girl standing beside the stove with a cloth over her shoulder, and her expression moved through several things before settling on something Cassandra could not read.

"Good morning," Mrs. Caulfield said.

"Good morning, ma'am."

They sat. Mrs. Caulfield unfolded her napkin across her lap and lifted her fork carefully.

"This is very good," Mrs. Caulfield said after several bites, gesturing at the eggs with her fork. She said it reluctantly. "Where did you learn?"

"In the service," Cassandra said.

"Raiden told me you'd served. He didn't say much beyond that, though." Mrs. Caulfield cut a piece of bread and buttered it. "He's a very reserved man. May I ask what you did?"

"I was attached to the 42nd Combined Regiment," Cassandra stated. "Northern theater. Front-line infantry."

Mrs. Caulfield's knife stopped moving.

"Front line," she repeated.

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Seven years."

The dining room went quiet. Mrs. Caulfield set her knife down and looked at Cassandra with an expression that had lost its firmness. Cassandra stared at her, attempting to figure out what it was that had begun troubling Mrs. Caulfield. She had answered the questions directly, as she had been taught. She had given the relevant information in order of specificity: unit, theater, role, duration. The answers were correct. She did not understand what about them had changed her mood.

"Seven years," Mrs. Caulfield said softly. "You couldn't have been more than — how old are you, dear?"

Cassandra lifted her teacup and drank.

"I'm unsure of my exact age, however I have been told previously that I should be seventeen," she said, lowering her cup.

The silence held between them. Mrs. Caulfield's eyes moved briefly to the newspaper on the table between their plates, and then away, and then back to Cassandra's face. Whatever she saw there made her pick up her knife again and return to her bread.

"The pyrethium prices went up again this week," Mrs. Caulfield said after a moment, finding safer ground. "Third time since the armistice. Third time! And the Assembly sits there promising stabilization while my heating bill doubles. Have you seen what they're charging for the new pyrethium cells? How on earth do they expect us working class to afford those?"

Cassandra said nothing. She was not certain what a pyrethium cell cost, or what Mrs. Caulfield expected her to know about it. In the regiment, pyrethium had arrived in sealed canisters carried by the supply corps. It heated the field boilers and charged the generators and fed the steam engines that drove the armored walkers. No one paid for it. No one discussed its price. It was simply there, issued and consumed, and whatever economy existed around it had never reached her.

Mrs. Caulfield looked at her, waiting for a response, and when none came her brow creased slightly.

"You do know what pyrethium cells cost, don't you?" she asked.

"No, ma'am," Cassandra said.

Mrs. Caulfield set down her butter knife. She studied the girl across the table with an expression that was recalibrating something, adjusting whatever picture she had been assembling to accommodate a new and unfamiliar piece.

"Fourteen pennies a unit," she said, more quietly than before. "It was nine before the war. The Assembly promises the supply lines are open, the Kaelish provinces are shipping freely, but the prices climb and climb and I'd like to know where the money goes, because it certainly doesn't come to this street."

"The eastern provinces are independent now," Cassandra said flatly. "They set their own export terms."

Mrs. Caulfield looked at her with faint surprise. "Well. Yes. Exactly. And what does the Assembly do about it? They debate. They form committees. Meanwhile Mrs. Aldiss across the street — lost her husband at Karenholt — she's running his printing shop alone now, and she can barely keep the presses warm."

"Karenholt was early in the war," Cassandra said quietly.

"Year two," Mrs. Caulfield confirmed. "He enlisted the first week. Patriotic. They all were, that first year." A sip of tea. "And now they're extending the memorial wall again. More bodies found in the eastern provinces, matched to the registry. That wall in the Centrum is going to stretch to the river at this rate."

"Have many come back?" Cassandra asked.

"To Thornfield?" Mrs. Caulfield set down her cup. "Some. Sadly, not enough. The boy at the grocer's is missing three fingers on his left hand and still stacks crates faster than anyone on the street. The men on the bench outside the hardware shop — you'll have seen them last night — they sit there every evening and don't say a word to each other. And the Serathine refugees in Greyport, that quarter has doubled since spring. I feel for them, a terrible thing what happened to the Confederation, but the housing stock isn't there, the jobs aren't there."

"The Confederation was bombed by both sides," Cassandra said.

Something in Mrs. Caulfield's expression tightened, as though this were information she preferred not to examine. "Well. It's a mess. The whole thing is a mess." She looked at Cassandra again, and the look carried weight. "You said front-line infantry."

"Yes."

"You must have seen a great deal."

Cassandra set her fork and knife parallel on her plate, handles to the right.

"May I be excused?" she asked.

Mrs. Caulfield blinked. A flicker crossed her face — regret, perhaps, at having circled back to the place she had already been told to leave.

"Of course," she said quietly. "The cook will handle dinner. But if you'd like to make breakfast again tomorrow, I won't object."

As she passed the table, the edge of the Courier's front page was visible where it met the wood, two words in heavy black type truncated by the fold.

CHILDREN USED

Outside, the morning air was cold and sharp, carrying coal smoke and the metallic edge of pyrethium exhaust from the east. Thornfield was awake. A woman swept her shop's threshold. A man hauled bottles from a cart into a pub's cellar door. Two children in school uniforms walked quickly past, their breath white behind them.

At the corner with the clock tower, the number four tram was waiting.

The number four tram carried her east through Thornfield and into the Gearworks district, where the streets narrowed and the air thickened with the taste of metal and coal steam. Through the fogged windows the city changed. Shopfronts gave way to warehouses, townhouses to factory buildings, and above the rooflines the smokestacks of the industrial quarter rose in dark columns against the pale morning sky. Pyrethium smoke — lighter than coal, faintly iridescent in direct sunlight — drifted from the taller stacks in thin ribbons that dissolved before they reached the street.

Through the tram window the Aethelgard campus came into view — a sprawl of buildings behind an iron fence, some old brick darkened by decades of exhaust, some newer construction in clean stone and polished brass. The company name appeared on a water tower above the main complex in letters large enough to read from three streets away. During the war, those factories had produced the artillery shells her regiment fired, the armored plating that kept the walkers upright under sustained bombardment. The gun barrels that Aethelgard milled had tighter tolerances than any other manufacturer in the Republic, which meant they fired straighter, lasted longer, and killed more accurately. Now the same factories produced prosthetics.

At the Brennick Street stop she stepped off and walked the remaining distance on foot. The clinic sat at the far edge of the campus — a converted factory building, three stories of old brick with tall arched windows reframed in polished brass. It looked like a place that had decided to become something other than what it was built for, and had spent considerable money on the decision.

Inside, the waiting area was warm and quiet. Upholstered chairs lined the walls beneath soft lighting. Fresh flowers sat on the reception counter in a glass vase — white and yellow, recently cut, a detail someone was paid to maintain. Behind the counter, a woman in a pressed blouse looked up from a ledger as Cassandra approached.

"Good morning," the receptionist said with a practiced smile. "Do you have an appointment with us today?"

"I'm here to see Mr. Leithenman," Cassandra said. "I'm a prosthetics technician. I'll be working here."

The receptionist's smile faltered. Her eyes moved over Cassandra — the pale skin, the military boots beneath the civilian skirt — and the professional composure gave way to something less certain.

"You're — I'm sorry, how old are you?" the receptionist asked, then caught herself. "Forgive me. Let me take you through to his office."

She led Cassandra down the corridor, knocked twice on the last door, and left without waiting for Cassandra to go inside.

Raiden's office was rather small for a boss, Cassandra thought. A wooden desk took up most of the room, buried under intake forms, scheduling sheets, a half-empty cup of coffee that had gone cold. On the wall behind him hung a chalk scheduling board, columns of names and appointment times in neat handwriting. Raiden sat with a newspaper spread open before him, reading glasses low on his nose, his coat draped over the back of his chair. The headline facing Cassandra read: KAELISH REPARATIONS PAYMENT DELAYED — ASSEMBLY CALLS FOR COMMISSION REVIEW.

He looked up when she entered, and his face shifted into the quiet warmth she was beginning to associate with him — not quite a smile, but a loosening around his eyes that made the room feel less official.

"Cassandra," he said. "Good. Come in."

She stood in front of his desk with her satchel at her side. Her shoulders began to square. Her spine straightened. Her right hand lifted an inch from her skirt before she caught it and forced it back down, her fingers curling against the fabric.

"Good morning, Mr. Leithenman," she said. Then, quieter: "Raiden."

His name came out bare and uncertain, missing the rank that should have preceded it. Hearing it in her own voice felt like stepping onto a staircase and finding one fewer step than expected — a brief lurch, then the correction, then the awareness that something familiar was no longer where it should be.

A small crease appeared at the corner of Raiden's mouth. He folded the newspaper closed, set it aside, and stood.

"Good morning, Cassandra," he said. "Let me show you around."

Raiden led her back through the corridor and into the waiting area, which had filled since her arrival. A dozen people sat in the upholstered chairs along the walls, and Cassandra's eyes moved across them before she could stop the habit — assessing, cataloguing, reading each body for information.

A man in a heavy coat sat nearest the door, his left trouser leg pinned above the knee. Beside him, a younger woman held a numbered ticket in her remaining hand while her other sleeve hung flat against her side. Farther along, an older gentleman stared at the pamphlet rack without reading, his mechanical arm resting on the chair's armrest, its brass joints tarnished and clicking faintly with each small movement of his fingers. A boy of perhaps twelve sat beside his mother, his right arm ending just below the elbow, wrapped in clean bandages that looked freshly changed.

Every chair held someone who was missing something.

Raiden paused beside her. He had noticed where her eyes went.

"This is what seven years looks like," he said, his voice low enough that only she could hear. "Every person in this room lost a part of themselves to the Conflagration. Soldiers, civilians, children. The war didn't distinguish, and neither do we."

They walked through the waiting area, past the reception counter, and into the main corridor that led to the workshop floor.

"Aethelgard's prosthetics division started as a military programme," Raiden continued as they walked. "Year three of the war. The original idea was crude — bolt a mechanical arm onto a wounded soldier, get him back to the front. The early models were brutal. Powerful, yes, but painful. No articulation to speak of. Soldiers called them iron fists." A brief, humourless smile crossed his face. "The civilian programme came after the armistice. Same engineering, completely different purpose. The precision we used to make gun barrels — the tight tolerances, the machining — turns out that's exactly what you need to build a finger joint that moves like a real one."

"Pyrethium-powered?" Cassandra asked.

Raiden glanced at her, a flicker of approval in his expression. "Miniaturised steam hydraulics. Each prosthetic runs on a pyrethium cell about the size of a pocket watch. It heats a sealed water reservoir, generates steam, drives micro-pistons in every joint. The fingers, the wrist, the elbow — each one has its own hydraulic channel. The client controls it through muscle contractions in the residual limb." He pushed open a set of double doors. "When it works properly, and when the technician has done their job right, the result is something close to a functioning hand. Not identical. But close enough that a man can hold his wife's fingers again, or a woman can write her name."

Beyond the doors, the workshop floor opened before her.

It was larger than she had expected — a high-ceilinged space with tall arched windows running along both walls, flooding the room with morning light. Five workstations occupied the floor, each with a heavy table, precision tools mounted on wall racks, a padded fitting chair for clients, and locked storage cabinets. Waist-high partitions separated the stations, enough for workspace definition but not enough for privacy. At three of the stations, technicians were already working — a woman adjusting a socket mould at the nearest bench, two men conferring over a schematic at the station beyond her.

The air smelled of machine oil and warm brass and, beneath it, the faint mineral tang of pyrethium.

From the far end of the workshop, a voice carried across the floor.

"Raiden, the Voss shipment is three gaskets short again. Third time this quarter. I'm going to start billing them for my patience!"

The woman who emerged from behind the last partition was perhaps thirty, broad-shouldered, wearing cargo trousers and a sleeveless top that left her arms bare despite the morning chill. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses sat slightly crooked on her nose, and her dark hair was pulled back in a knot that looked like it had been tied in a hurry and forgotten about. There was an ease to her stride that filled the space around her before she reached them.

Then Cassandra saw the tattoo.

It ran along the woman's left forearm, dark ink on brown skin, partially obscured by a leather tool belt strapped above the wrist. But the lines were unmistakable. A regimental crest, bordered by campaign marks, with the crossed-chevron insignia of a Captain in the Valdren Combined Forces inked beneath in precise, deliberate strokes. Field tattoos. The kind soldiers got in forward camps when they were young enough to believe the ink would outlast them.

Cassandra's hand snapped to her temple before thought could intervene. Spine straight, shoulders square, fingers aligned with the precision of someone who had performed the gesture thousands of times and meant it every one.

The woman stopped walking. Her eyebrows rose above the rims of her glasses, and then a laugh broke out of her, sudden and warm, filling the workshop with a sound that made the two technicians at the far bench look up from their schematic.

"Where did you find this one?" she asked, turning to Raiden with an expression balanced between amusement and genuine curiosity.

Raiden let out a short breath through his nose that might have been a laugh. "Na'la, this is Cassandra Hawthorne. She's joining us as a technician," he said. "Cassandra, this is Na'la Mashi. She runs the station at the end and handles most of our veteran intake."

"Hawthorne," Na'la repeated, turning back to Cassandra. The salute was still holding. Na'la's eyes narrowed on it, reading the angle of the wrist, the alignment of the fingers, the locked elbow, and something shifted behind her expression. "Raiden tells me you served," she said.

"Cassandra was front-line infantry," Raiden said. "42nd Combined Regiment. Northern theater."

The amusement left Na'la's face. Her gaze moved over Cassandra again, slower this time — the pale skin pulled tight over young bones, the military boots beneath the civilian skirt, the hand still locked at the temple.

"Front line," Na'la said quietly. She looked at Raiden. "She can't be older than eighteen. How long did she serve?"

"Seven years, ma'am," Cassandra answered.

Na'la went still. Her eyes moved to the floor for a moment, and when they came back up, the amusement was gone entirely. She looked at Cassandra again, at the young face, at the hand still locked at the temple. Seventeen years old at most. Seven on the front line. Na'la had read the headlines. Everyone had read the headlines. But the headlines had been abstractions, names and numbers in a parliamentary inquiry, and now one of them was standing in front of her.

Na'la stepped forward, reached up, and pressed Cassandra's hand down to her side. Her grip was firm and careful.

"None of that in here," she said, her voice warm and steady. "I'm Na'la. Just Na'la." She held Cassandra's gaze, and the expression on her face had changed from amusement to something Cassandra could not name.

"And you can start by telling me whether you've had any tea this morning, because the answer is going to determine how the rest of your day goes."

"I have not had any as of yet," Cassandra said.

"Ka'Eayel," Na'la muttered.

Na'la matched her gaze with Cassandra. "We need to fix that" she said, and walked toward the supply room.

Raiden led her past Na'la's station and through a doorway at the far end of the workshop floor. The room beyond was small, with a heavy worktable set beneath a tall arched window that let in the full weight of the morning sun. Precision tools hung on wall-mounted racks in neat rows: files of varying grades, calipers, small hammers, screwdrivers with interchangeable heads, soldering irons, a set of pliers with jaws fine enough to grip a pin. A padded fitting chair sat opposite the worktable, its leather cracked but clean. Locked cabinets lined the far wall, their glass fronts showing shelves of components — brass rods, steel pins, copper tubing, rubber gaskets, leather strips, sealed pyrethium cells in their protective casings.

On the worktable, arranged with deliberate care, a complete prosthetic arm lay disassembled. Every component had been separated and labeled, laid out from shoulder joint to fingertip in the order of assembly. Beside them, a technical diagram was pinned flat with brass weights at its corners.

"This is yours," Raiden said, leaning against the doorframe. "Your office, your bench, your clients when you're ready for them." He nodded toward the disassembled arm. "For now, I want you to learn the parts. Handle them. Understand how they connect. There's no rush on this — take the day."

Cassandra looked at the components spread across the table. Brass phalanges, each one smaller than her little finger. Steel pin joints, machined to tolerances she could feel with her fingertips. Micro-hydraulic pistons no larger than a pen nib. Rubber gaskets for sealing the steam channels. Copper tubing, thin as wire, connecting the pyrethium cell housing to the water reservoir at the elbow. Leather padding cut to line the palm and the inner socket.

Her hands recognized the logic before her mind named it. Every mechanism was a system of parts in relation, each one dependent on the ones beside it, each one useless without the whole. She had seen this before. She had lived inside this principle for seven years, in a different shape, with a different purpose.

Raiden watched her looking at the components and seemed to read something in her expression, because he stayed in the doorframe instead of leaving.

"I want to tell you something about this line of work," he said. "Something beyond engineering."

Cassandra looked up.

"When a person sits in that chair," he said, nodding toward the fitting seat, "they are giving you the most vulnerable part of their body. The place where their normal lives end. The scar, the stump, the absence — whatever the war left them with. They sit down and they let a stranger touch it." He paused. "That takes courage. More courage than most things I saw in the field. And what you do with that trust matters. You're not just assembling components. You're telling someone, with your hands, that their body can work again."

He was quiet for a moment, his arms folded loosely across his chest.

"The best technicians I've seen don't just build arms or legs, Cassandra. They build with love. The prosthetic is a machine. What it gives back is not."

Love.

The word settled into the room. Raiden continued talking — something about the calibration process, about client intake, about the schedule for the week — but Cassandra had stopped hearing him. The word had caught somewhere inside her chest, and the thread it pulled led backward through years and cold and mud to a voice she had been trying not to remember.

Jean's voice.

He had used that word. In the dark, in a dugout, during a night when the shelling had stopped and the silence was worse than the noise. She had asked him something — why he called her by that name, why he treated her differently from the others, why he stayed close when staying close made no tactical sense. And he had answered with a word she had filed alongside her rank and her rifle serial number and every other piece of information the military had given her.

I want you to live a free life. A life of emotion. A life of love.

He had said it plainly, because Jean said everything plainly. And then he had told her he loved her, and she had looked at him with the blankness of a child who has been given a key without knowing which door it opens, and she had said nothing, because she did not know what the correct response was.

She still did not know.

"Cassandra?"

She blinked. Raiden was looking at her from the doorframe with patient attention.

"The mechanics are simpler than you think," he said gently. "If you can strip and rebuild a service rifle, you can build a hand. Same principles. Same precision. Same attention to how parts meet." He straightened from the frame. "It's all right not to understand everything today. I just want you to get a feel for it. Train your hands on the components. I'll be back around lunch."

He left. His footsteps moved down the corridor, and then there was only the workshop noise drifting faintly through the walls — a murmur of voices, the clink of tools, the low hiss of a bench-top boiler — and the room, and the light, and the arm laid out in pieces on her table.

Cassandra sat down and began to work.

Her fingers found the shoulder joint first — a complex ball-and-socket assembly in polished brass, with three hydraulic channels feeding into the rotational housing. She turned it in her hands, testing the range of motion, pressing her thumb into the socket to feel the tolerance. It was machined to within a fraction of a hair's width. In the regiment, a soldier who could not strip her rifle in under forty seconds was a liability. Under fire, with mud in the mechanism and your hands shaking from cold, the difference between a clean reassembly and a jammed chamber was the difference between living and not. She had learned to read a weapon's internals by touch alone, to feel when a pin was seated and when it wasn't, to know from the resistance in a spring whether it would hold or fail.

These parts were smaller, finer, built for movement rather than force. But the language was the same. Tolerances. Clearances. The relationship between components under pressure. Her fingers spoke it fluently.

From the shoulder she moved to the elbow — a larger hydraulic cylinder, its piston smooth and precisely bored. Then the wrist, with its rotational bearing and the copper tubing that carried steam from the reservoir. Then the hand itself: five brass fingers, each containing its own micro-piston, each joint requiring individual assembly, the thumb opposing the others at an angle that mimicked the natural geometry of a human grip.

She worked without stopping. Her hands moved steadily, connecting components, seating pins, threading copper tubing through channels no wider than a bootlace. The technical diagram sat untouched beside her — she had looked at it once, memorised the assembly order, and not looked again.

Outside the window, the morning passed. The light shifted across the worktable as the sun climbed above the factory roofline, warming the brass in her hands until the metal held a faint heat of its own. From the workshop floor, filtered through the walls, came the sounds of the clinic at work — the murmur of a technician talking to a client, the tap of a small hammer on a fitting, the hiss of steam being tested through a hydraulic line.

And beneath her hands, the arm took shape.

She thought about the war as she worked. She thought about the sound a rifle made when its bolt seated correctly — a particular click, clean and final, that told you the weapon would fire true. She thought about Jean's hands over hers, adjusting her grip on a stock that was too large for a child's fingers, his voice calm and unhurried while the artillery pounded the ridgeline behind them.

And she thought about what came after. The two years in the military home, where the silence had been so total after seven years of shelling that she would lie in her bunk and listen for sounds that were no longer there. Eleven other beds in the room. Some empty. Some holding children who had come through the same machine she had.

The discharge papers had arrived on a morning she could not precisely place. She packed her kitbag, signed the forms, and walked out through the front gate.

Raiden was waiting at the station.

Now she sat at a bench in a room full of tools, and her hands were building something that was not a weapon, and the brass in her fingers was warm, and her hands kept working because her hands had always known what to do even when the rest of her did not.

Her hands kept working, and by the time a shadow fell across the doorway, the arm was complete.

It lay on the worktable in the afternoon light, fully assembled, from shoulder joint to fingertips. Brass and steel and copper and leather, arranged in the shape of something that had once been flesh and bone. She had not connected the pyrethium cell — she did not know if she was authorised to use live fuel on her first day — but the mechanical assembly was finished. Every joint moved freely. Every piston seated cleanly. Every hydraulic channel was sealed and pressurised and waiting for steam.

Na'la stood in the doorway with a cup of tea in each hand, her glasses pushed up onto her forehead. She had come to check on the new girl, or to offer tea, or both, and instead she was standing very still, looking at the arm on the table.

"Raiden," she called over her shoulder, without taking her eyes off the worktable.

His footsteps came down the corridor. He appeared behind Na'la, looked past her into the room, and stopped.

Cassandra sat at the bench with brass filings on her fingers and a calm, focused expression that neither of them had seen before — not the blankness of the train platform, not the rigid composure of the morning's introductions, but something quieter and more settled, as though she had spent the morning in a room where the world finally made sense and had not yet stepped out of it.

"I finished the assembly," she said. "I haven't connected the fuel cell. I wasn't sure if I should."

Raiden stepped past Na'la and approached the table. He examined the arm in silence, running his thumb along the shoulder joint, testing the elbow's range of motion, flexing each finger individually. Na'la set the tea on a cabinet and leaned in to inspect the wrist assembly where the copper tubing fed into the hydraulic manifold.

They looked at each other.

"How much of this had you done before?" Raiden asked carefully.

"None of it," Cassandra said. "But it is no different from a rifle. The components are smaller. The tolerances are finer. But the principle is the same — parts in sequence, each one dependent on the next, assembled to function as a single mechanism." She looked down at the arm on the table. "A rifle that doesn't fire will get a soldier killed. I imagine an arm that doesn't move is not much different for the person wearing it."

Na'la let out a slow breath through her nose. She picked up one of the tea cups, took a long sip, and looked at Raiden over the rim with an expression that said a great deal without using any words at all.

Raiden placed his hand on the table beside the arm. His fingers rested there for a moment, close to the brass ones Cassandra had built, and when he looked at her, his face carried the same expression she had seen at the train station and again in the doorway that morning. The one that did not belong to an officer or a boss but to something else, something she had no name for.

"Tomorrow," he said quietly, "I'll show you how it moves."