Now everybody would know. Staff and students lined the corridors, stepping aside to allow her to leave, their own business suspended, the atmosphere strange. She wondered how much they knew. If there was anything they didn’t know, rumors would fill the vacuum.

As she walked out of the school doors and began the journey to the Bureau of Order, a small crowd of familiar faces watched her go. What did they think of these events? As usual, Iona had very little idea what other people thought.

* * *

Iona had designed the bureau herself. A broad, four-story cylinder of a building, like a pillar with nothing to support, it lay in the shadow of King’s Tower. The rooms at the center had no windows. This was to permit discussions of a sensitive nature to take place. As Iona was in one of those rooms now, she presumed she was about to take part in a discussion of a sensitive nature.

Iona sat at the table in the center of the room. The room was lit only by a fire at one side, the heat from which was captured and put to work elsewhere in the building. But not all the heat could be captured and there was enough left over to make the room uncomfortably warm. This was deliberate—she had been asked to design it this way. Iona removed her jacket and hung it on the back of the chair.

A guard stood at the door. This seemed unnecessary. Why would she escape? Where would she hide?

The door opened and in walked a woman in her fifties with close-cropped black hair, a hawk-like face, and black clothes. She was a little taller than Iona. Iona didn’t recall having met this woman before, but then she’d had very little contact with the bureau beyond designing their offices. Was she in charge here?

The woman carried a briefcase that she placed on the table as she sat down opposite Iona. She opened the case and brought out paper and a pencil. Some of the sheets of paper had already been written on.

“Your name please,” she said, looking at the paper, not at Iona.

“Iona Taylor.”

The woman wrote this down.

“And you are?” Iona asked.

“We’ve met before.”

“But you asked my name.”

“Because that’s procedure.”

“Right. Well, I’m afraid I don’t remember yours.”

“Saori Kagawa. I’m head of operations.”

“This is about the fire, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

Iona wondered whether the head of operations was tackling this personally because the case was particularly important or because the bureau had nothing better to do. There was rarely any trouble in the city—she couldn’t recall the last time she’d read about any in the newspaper. (Although she remembered how the newspaper had not reported the incident at Weston’s funeral.)

“What do you want to know?” said Iona.

“I’m afraid we didn’t bring you in for your expertise, Ms. Taylor.”

Iona swallowed, inwardly saying good-bye to her faint hope that they had brought her in for her expertise. At this point she should probably admit she had been to the site of the fire just hours before it started. But what good would it do her now?