An encampment of journalists had sprung up outside the front door of twenty-four by the time they arrived. Didn’t they have anything better to report on, besides her family’s comings and goings? Saeger would be eager to talk to any one of them; with a month and a half to go ’til the election, she needed to reach the voters by any means available. She’d wrangled a slot on Backchat the day before and issued a scathing rebuttal to the verdict that the Catwalk had bombed Frye’s warehouse.

“I think it says more about her than it does about me,” Saeger had said. “Is she afraid of me? Worried folk like what Forward Gedda stands for, more than they like what she’s proposing? Worried her gambit with these tribunals won’t pull her far enough ahead? We didn’t bomb that warehouse, but I’d like to know who did. And I’d like to know why the hounds are lying about it.”

Lillian could have given her a hint. Or several.

Why didn’t they cover the rallies at the university? When she woke the next morning she could hear them from the house. Hordes of students backing Saeger, screaming their lungs out over the accusations.

Of course, as Jinadh would remind her: there were more than ten pen-fencers in the city of Amberlough. The ones clustered outside the door of Coral Street just happened to have drawn her straw in that week’s editorial meeting.

The other reason they’d come back to the city—the obvious reason—was that Cyril had been locked away just at the edge of town. Shearan-Sterner Penitentiary, south of the city limits, would have been the more appropriate option, but it had been one of the Catwalk’s later targets. They’d steered clear of the cell blocks and mainly taken out the administrative wing. Denied bail but not yet arraigned, Cyril was being kept in the city jail attached to the Department of Corrections, and looked likely to remain there for some time.

So when Lillian awoke in the city to the sound of not-so-distant rhythmic chanting, her first order of business was to ring up Rinko Higata about the possibility of seeing her brother in prison.

In the badly lit visiting room, its walls painted an unattractive shade of green, Cyril looked not just pale but sick. She sat across from him and asked, “Are you all right? Your color isn’t good.”

He brushed her concern away with a wave of his hand. The knuckles were chapped. It was cold even here; the cells likely weren’t much better.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” he asked.