Some cosmic mistake or cruelty, to work cases together when Finch had once worked for Wyte as a courier for Hoegbotton. Each a reminder to the other of better times. Since then, Wyte’s wife, Emily, had left him. He’d taken up in a crappy apartment just north of the station. Never saw his two daughters. They’d been smuggled out to relatives in Stockton before the Rising. Finch couldn’t work out how old they might be now.

Someday Wyte will be a silhouette on the horizon. Someone familiar made distant.

And Wyte sensed it.

“You can help with the fieldwork going forward, Wyte,” Finch said. If you don’t become the fieldwork.

“No problem. Be happy to.”

“I’ll put my notes in order,” Finch said, “and after I use the memory bulbs, we’ll start in on it. Tomorrow.”

Wyte wasn’t listening anymore. Gaze far away. Disengaged. Apocalyptic thoughts? Or maybe he was just registering the inside of the building. They all conducted an unspoken war against the station. It tried to make them forget its strangeness. They tried not to forget.

Finch turned back to his desk and started sorting through the mess. Hadn’t organized it in a week. Hadn’t had the energy.

Mirror. Pills to protect against infection. Spore mask for purified breathing. Writing pad. Pencils. Telephone. Broken telephone. Folders on open crimes. Folders on closed crimes. Paper clips across the bottom of drawers. A list he’d made of complaints from people who had called him, thinking he could help. Usually he couldn’t.

Maybe once, early on, he had convinced himself he could do some good, sometimes even imagined he was a mole, getting close so he could strike a blow. Imagined he was in it to defend Ambergris from the enemies that surrounded it. Imagined he was protecting ordinary citizens.

But the truth was he’d been tired, had stopped caring. Broken down from too much fighting, too many things connected to his past. And when that spark, that impulse, had returned, it was too late: he was trapped.

“I’m not a detective.”

Heretic: “You’re whatever we want you to be, now.”

If he just left one day, what would happen to Wyte? To his other friends? To Sintra?

And: Did they know about Sintra?

Nothing seemed missing from his desk. Still, a good idea to take stock. Lots of things disappeared during the night, or were replaced by mimics. More than one detective had screamed, picking up a pencil that was not a pencil. Finch took out the piece of paper he’d found in the dead man’s hands. Placed it in front of him. What could the words mean? Finch took out a writing pad, scrawled

Never Lost.

Bellum omnium contra omnes

across the top. Stared at the strange symbol. It looked oddly like a baby bird to him.

two bodies

fell