She liked Grange, trusted him in a professional capacity, but he was still the son of one of Draconium’s most notorious social climbers. She wasn’t about to admit to her nightmares in front of a Grange, even if the bags under his eyes, and the short tempers and sallow faces of the men and women who served her, suggested to Helena that she wasn’t alone in her suffering. The Grange family hadn’t got to where they had without an aptitude for exploiting weakness.

She had no desire to usher in the reign of Captain Grange just yet.

Instead, Helena rose from her desk and snatched a rolled parchment from a nearby shelf. Gathering up the reports and piling them in a loose stack, she unrolled the map of Draconium across the top of her desk and pinned its corners down with lead weights. Helena took a wooden pot of brass pins and jabbed them, one by one, into the map.

‘Lieutenant, send a runner to the short archives and have them yield all the reports of major crimes please. I want to add them to this.’

‘Should we ransack the long archives, also?’ asked Grange.

Helena considered.

‘No, I think we can both agree this a relatively recent phenomenon, yes? There’s nothing in the long archives less than a year old. But you could do worse than to request some breakfast for us.’

Grange saluted and hastened to the door, opening it a crack and conversing with the runner that waited outside. Helena tuned them out, focusing her entire attention on the map as she drove pins in to mark each incident that had occurred the night before. Everything else faded around her as she frowned down at the map, tracing lines between the pins, totting up crimes-per-district, furiously seeking any kind of pattern to what seemed just an anarchic upswell of violence, theft and mutilation.

Helena jumped when Grange cleared his throat beside her. She realised that he held a silver tray on which sat spiced breakfast pastries, rashers of salted runti-flank, two crystal glasses of jashbin juice, two drake-glaze cups and a pot of steaming metha. There was a heavy satchel hanging from one of Grange’s broad shoulders, scrolls protruding from its top in neat rows.

‘That’s a lot of reports,’ she said.

‘Captain,’ agreed Grange, setting the tray down on a corner of the desk and pouring her a mug of metha. Helena gratefully took the hot herbal infusion and sipped at it, accepting slightly scalded lips in exchange for the invigorating tingle it sent through her body.

‘Best get started then, hadn’t we?’ said Helena.

An hour later, Helena stepped back from the map. She frowned down at it, ignoring the drift of reports scattered on the floor and the crumb-strewn tray that had been shoved aside until it teetered on the desk’s corner.