The handwriting was not a clumsy imitation or an amateur tracing. It was an exact, terrifyingly flawless reproduction of Len Vey’s personal script.
Len stared at the ink. He knew every stroke, every slant, and every habit of his own hand. There was the sharp, forward-leaning crossbar on the capital L, formed by a habit he had developed at age fourteen when writing against a moving wagon dashboard. There was the tiny, characteristic hitch on the tail of the y in his surname, caused by an old scar across his right index knuckle that dragged the nib slightly to the left. There was the exact, tight spacing of the digits, matching to the numbers he had inked into Cira’s station ledger for five winters.
It was his hand. The muscle memory had been captured down to the cellular level at the moment of the First Transfer on Day 1 midnight. Then he refined through five days of reading the notes, receipts, and personal logs in the stolen route book.
Len reached out his sound right hand. His thumb unconsciously rubbed the white, puckered scar that crossed his right index knuckle. He had earned that scar five winters ago, during a sleet storm on the northern pass, when an iron trace-chain had snapped and whipped across his hand, tearing through tendon and skin. The joint had healed crookedly. That left him with a permanent, five-degree hitch on every downward flourish of his pen.
