Miriam hitched her day sack into place and checked her right pocket again, the one with the gun and a handful of spare cartridges. She didn’t feel fine: There were butterflies in her stomach. “If there’s a problem, I’ll stay the night on the other side, safely out of the way. But I need to know. I want you to wait half an hour, then take Kara around to Olga and sit things out with her there. With your gun, and Olga, and her own guards, in a properly doppelgängered area, you should be safe. But I don’t want her tripping and falling downstairs before we learn who gave her that note. D’you understand? Matthias promised to sort me out some guards tomorrow, but I don’t trust him. If he’s in on this—or just being watched—there’ll be an attempt on my life tonight. Except this time I think they got sloppy, expecting me to turn up for it like it’s an appointment. So I’m going to avoid it entirely.”

“I understand.” Brill stood up. “Good luck,” she said.

“Luck has nothing to do with it.” Miriam took two steps toward the door, then pulled out her locket.

Dizziness, mild nausea, a headache that clamped around her head like a vice. She looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed in the warehouse attic, other than the dim light getting dimmer and the bad smell from somewhere nearby. It was getting worse, and it reminded her of something. “Hmm.”

Miriam ducked behind a wall of wooden crates, her head pounding. She pulled the pistol out, slightly nervous at first. It was a self-cocking revolver, reliable and infinitely reassuring in the gloom. Stay away from guns, the training course had emphasized. But that was then, back where she was a journalist and the world made sense to rational people. But if they’re trying to kill you, you have to kill them first, was another, older lesson from the firearms instructor her father had sent her to. And here and now, it seemed to make more sense.

Carefully, very slowly, she inched forward over the edge of the mezzanine floor and looked down. The ground floor of the warehouse was a maze of wooden cases and boxes. The mobile home that constituted the site office was blocked up in the middle of it. There was no sign of anybody about, none of the comforting noises of habitation.

Miriam rose to a crouch and scurried down the stairs as quietly as she could. She ducked below the stairs, then from shadow to shadow toward the door.

There was a final open stretch between the site office and the exit. Instead of crossing it, Miriam tiptoed around the wall of the parked trailer, wrinkling her nose at a faint, foul smell.