She took a deep breath, then darted down the stairs lightly, her gun raised. Nobody shot at her from concealment. She reached the bottom step and paused for a couple of seconds before stepping off the metal staircase onto dusty wooden floorboards, then duck-walked over to the side of the site office, out of sight from its windows and the door. Creeping again, she sidled around the wall of the trailer and crouched next to the short flight of steps leading in to it. She spent about a minute staring at the threshold, then stood up slowly, lowered her gun, and carefully returned it to her jacket pocket. She rubbed her forehead, then turned. “You can come down now, as long as you come right over here. Don’t touch anything with your hands!”

Brilliana stood up and dusted herself off, lips wrinkling in distaste as she tried to shake the warehouse cobwebs from the sleeve of her Chanel suit. Then she walked down the stairs slowly, not touching the guard rail. Her back was straight, as if she was making a grand entrance rather than a low-life departure.

Miriam pointed at the steps to the trailer. “Don’t, whatever you do, even think about going in there,” she warned. Her expression was drawn. Brill sniffed, conspicuously, then pulled a face in disgust.

“What happened there?”

“Someone was killed,” Miriam said quietly. Then she bent down and pointed to something in the threshold. “Look. See that wire? It’s hair-thin. Don’t touch it!”

“What wire—oh.”

A fine wire was stretched across the threshold, twelve inches above the floor.

“That wasn’t here when I came this way three hours ago,” Miriam said tonelessly. “And nobody’s been to clear up what’s inside. Going from what Roland was telling me, that means that first, this is a trap, and second, it’s not the kind where someone’s going to jump out and start shooting at us, and third, if you touch that wire, we probably both die. Wait here and don’t move or touch anything. I’m going to see if they’re belt-and-suspenders people.”

Miriam shuffled gingerly over toward the big wooden doors of the warehouse—there was a smaller access door set in the side of one of them—with her eyes focused on the ground in front of her, every step of the way. Brill stayed where she was obediently, but when Miriam glanced at her, she was staring up at the lights, an odd expression on her face. “I’m over here,” she said. “I’m really on the other side!”

Miriam reached the inner door, bent low, looked up, and made a hissing noise through her teeth. “Shit!”

“What is it?” called Brill, shaking herself.

“Another one,” Miriam replied. Her face was ghost-white. “You can come over here and look. This is the way out.”