The awning was gone and the colors had changed, but the rest was familiar enough in the cold, wet drizzle that she found her way.

She recognized the door soon as she saw it—door and postage-stamp garden, which wasn’t so much a garden as a few flowerpots and a trimmed-up hedge—and the ornamental gate that set the entry off from the sidewalk.

The only thing that had changed was the graffiti.

Even nice neighborhoods like this couldn’t escape the graffiti.

Or the dog shit.

That, too, was a thing with Berlin, the dog shit on sidewalks.

She loved this city. Had loved it then and loved it now, place of outcasts and misfits, where no one belonged and everyone did, where anarchists and old Nazis, hipsters and club kids, street artists, actors, slackers, and thieves should all be at war but weren’t, because the city never let you forget what happened when intolerance set in.

The wall was right there, and Stasi headquarters, in the starkest reminders.

Of all the cities they’d traveled, this was the only one that had drawn her back, but never this neighborhood.

She made another pass, searching for signs the place was no longer be Clare’s. Best as she could tell, nobody was there right now.

That was good enough.

Patience had never been her thing.

She pushed through the ornamental gate, moved the largest flowerpot, and traced a finger in the grooves between the garden stones. The dirt was compact, a lot of rain, a lot of heat and cold and passing seasons since anyone had last messed with it.

Fingers were all she had to do the work.

She’d left the suitcase in a storage locker at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof—regrettable but unavoidable. Luggage was difficult to disguise and impossible to hide, and last thing she needed was to draw attention to this door.

She’d go back for it if she had to.

But if all went the way she hoped, then even what Jack had given to her for safekeeping would become redundant, because this was Berlin, and Berlin had stuff most cities they’d lived in didn’t. Well, had in the past tense.

Seventeen years was a long, long time, even for someone like Clare.

The groove in the dirt got deeper.

The center stone loosened. With a bit of prying, she got it free.

Beneath the stone was the silicone sleeve; and inside the sleeve, the key.

Jill slipped the metal into the dead bolt.

The lock turned, and the lever gave way.

She opened the door a crack, did a quick check, caught a whiff of stale, dusty air, and knew even before she saw that this was exactly what she wanted.

She shut herself inside the dark, flipped the light, and got nothing.