Fair enough. Move on. Realized that he needed to take more care with her. She’s not one of the detectives at the station.

“It must have been,” he said. “Imaginary, I mean.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else. Just the piece of paper that symbol was on the back of. Some words. Never Lost. And then bellum omnium contra omnes. Ever heard those words before?”

“No,” she said. Still, Finch sensed interest.

“You don’t know what it means?”

“How would I know what it means if I’ve never heard it before?”

Couldn’t bring himself to say “sorry” again, so he said nothing. “Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Bellum omnium contra omnes.” Rathven said it like an echo from another world. As if it had no meaning at all.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, does it matter what it means? Why did he have words on a scrap of paper when he died? Pretend for a second that it’s any word. Any word you know: city, cow, apartment, saucepan, book, paragraph.”

“A code? A password?” Felt foolish for not seeing it before. “Might not mean anything at all.”

She pointed at him. “And that’s what makes it valuable.”

“But why? Why have part of it in gibberish?”

She shrugged, gave him an impish look. “I’m not the detective.”

I’m not a detective either.

“We should be detectives together.” Relaxing into their time-worn call and response.

“They’re here and then they’re there, and sometimes they don’t know the difference, and if you let them, they’ll keep making that the whole point of everything they’re doing to the city. They’ll break you down by not telling you what you already know, should already know, because that’s the way they operate. Knowledge is the lack they seek in us, and when they find it, they turn the key, open a window, and it’s all back to where we started.”

Finch endured the rant from the madman outside the hotel, then made his way back to the station.

The suspect from yesterday wasn’t in the cage. Instead, an old woman with light blue eyes staring from a face crisscrossed with wrinkles. As if from behind a fence of her own making. She could’ve been a thousand miles away for all the help Finch could give her. Ignored her as a casualty. Ignored Albin quietly feeding her questions like he was at a zoo. Continued on to his desk.

More of the same from the detectives around him. Indifference, absence, fear, boredom. Blakely and Gustat as always inseparable, whether in agreement or argument. Skinner out on a call, about to tell a man his missing wife was probably dead. Dapple drawing something on a piece of paper. Lost in another world.

Wyte had turned away from him for once and was hunched over as if Finch were trying to cheat from him on a test. He looked bulky, blotchy.

Finch leaned over. “Don’t let your pencil burn up.”