It was four o’clock in the morning when Drajan heard his smartwatch vibrate on the nightstand.

Across the room, he and Quintessa were awake in their robes, eating at a small limewood table in the throw of a silver candelabra. From the beginning, they had recognized in each other the look of nocturnal creatures.

The watch hummed quietly again. He wondered who it might be.

“One moment,” he said, resting his fork on his plate.

She nodded slightly, her cool blue eyes trapping the candlelight. Famished after a night of lovemaking, they had ordered a servant to leave a tray at the door. Something to eat, sweet toast and Almas caviar, the golden roe extracted from a rare albino sturgeon between sixty and a hundred years old and found only in Caspian waters.

The cryptoprincess’s tastes were as expensive as her appetites were inexhaustible. Over the past months, Drajan had come to appreciate them all.

He rose, went to pick up the watch and saw the notification on its display.

There had been an intrusion in the Seven Winds Malaysia human resources network.

“Is something the matter?” she asked from the table.

He turned to her, noticing her eyes, enjoying how the orange light flickered within them.

Fire and ice.

“On the contrary,” he said.

At 9:07 p.m. on Thursday, Ki Marton was in his office on the third floor of the Terminal, indulging his current Pogues kick through his enormous headphones.

He was also exactly five minutes from the most important, surprising and perplexing discovery of his entire law-enforcement career.

Outside the sonic environment of his phones, Analytics was as quiet as a library reading room...so quiet, in fact, he could keep the door wide open and warble along to the music without drawing baleful stares from the hallway. At that hour the vast majority of Forcers were home with their partners, children, dogs, cats, or whomever or whatever usually waited for them at day’s end. Making it a perfect place to work for someone who had nobody waiting for him at home and no desire to be there with only the four walls for company. Better to put in some overtime and make himself useful. His gut told him that Fake Stephen Gelfland was at the very core of the disappearing cable ship mystery and that finding out his real identity was therefore crucial to moving the investigation forward.

And so he had stayed late to do what he did best. Which had the fringe benefit of helping him keep his head above the deep, sucking swamp of loneliness that was life without his best friend and partner.

The plan was simple. He would run a photo of Fake Gelfland scraped from the internet—a probe photo, in law-enforcement lingo—against the hundreds of millions of photographs stored in classified government identification systems and databases. Candidate photos, in the same lingo.