The room Sera had commandeered for the interview was a border customs office, a mile back from the pylon line where she had intercepted him. They had walked the distance in silence, Valerius's breathing ragged in the charged air, until she unlocked the functional, stripped room lit by a single aether-lamp that buzzed at the wrong frequency. There was a desk with a cracked surface. Two chairs. A window with iron shutters that Sera had not opened.
She had dismissed the duty agents. She had closed the door. She had placed the gold-and-iron mantle — retrieved from where Valerius had left it draped across his chair that morning in Ashenveil — on the desktop between them.
She did not sit behind the desk. She sat in the chair beside it, at right angles to Valerius, the way an administrator takes a meeting rather than an interrogator conducts one.
