Rook did not begin with a chart.
He began with a woman holding a child’s shoe.
The photograph filled the screen behind him. In it, the woman stood outside a station entrance with her hair plastered to her forehead and one bare foot on the pavement. The shoe in her hand was too small for her. Beside her, a hunter Eli did not recognize carried a sleeping boy against his shoulder.
“The lower district outbreak,” Rook said. “This is the western station exit, eleven minutes after the first alarm.”
Eli watched the delegates stop arranging their papers.
He had expected maps, deployment times, perhaps one of the smooth simulations Aegis liked to show recruits. A hand-drawn clinic log had required an explanation of every category. A sleeping child needed none.
Tessa sat beside him with her hands folded around an unused pen.
“The child survived?” she asked.
