She’d get the rest of what she needed along the way, because the only way to avoid the mark of being an outsider was to buy local, and besides, most of Clare’s stuff was old. She slid another envelope with another thousand euros beneath the boarded-up door, bookending her stay for those on the other side, them strapped on her bag of borrowed treasures, and stepped out into the deep, dark cold. Six kilometers stood between her and the rendezvous point, a two-hour walk if she didn’t hurry. She locked the front and reburied the key and followed shadows along mostly empty streets and piss-fragrant underground walkways.

The need for sleep faded.

Anticipation took its place.

The early morning dark, when the straitlaced and normies slept, and the freaks and artists and addicts roamed, and the raves and parties were just getting started, these were the hours in which she truly came alive. Berghain was where she would have been, high on music and ecstasy, if this purer rush hadn’t come to fill that restless space.

The club was inside a former power plant in the middle of an industrial old East Berlin estate. People traveled the world in order to try to get in. Rich people, cool people, famous people, beautiful people, turned away by tatted and pierced doormen who could smell fake and taste fear. She’d never been denied.

Berlin, Berghain, these were places she belonged, but she belonged to the thrill of a life-or-death hunt more, and so she strode on to meet it.

An hour and fifty brought her to the edge of Savignyplatz. In theory, the place was a good place for the suspicious to meet. It was easy to find, had plenty of foot traffic, and offered multiple access points. But this time of year, with leaves mostly fallen, a tightly defined space surrounded by multistory buildings was a literal canyon gorge. Any kid who’d watched any old Western knew what that led to, and her idiot savant brother planned to set up camp down there anyway.

The part of her that loved him hoped for the small but existing chance that this whole thing with Dmitry was true, that the real Dmitry was alive and had been searching for his children and genuinely wanted to get to know them.

The rest of her preferred just about any other possibility.

It was easy for Jack, the Golden Son, to want this.

It was easier for her to not.

She reached the northwest corner.

Hook pick and torsion wrench let her inside the building, and she took the stairs up until she reached the ladder, and followed the rungs through an access hatch to a rooftop bathed in a half-moon glow that came and went with the clouds.