With a tug at his heart that he hadn’t felt for a long time, the elf remembered holding a terrified young woman outside a restaurant full of corpses in San Francisco. Closing his eyes, he sank into the welcoming warmth of the water as a wave of memory brought back the sweet smell of her fresh-washed hair against his face. Serrin rarely thought about women, nor did he linger on the topic now. He leaned back against thedeep tub, turning his thoughts to business and to the fact that the accommodations the suits had chosen for him did not reveal much about them. The Crescent Hotel was neither real class nor the fake kind for Americans and Japanese with more money than true discernment; it was simply a reasonably good place to stay. He guessed that the pair would not give much away in the breakfast meeting, either, that there might be some cat-and-mouse about this job. I’ll worry about that later, he thought. Right now, it’s time to soak these bones and get out some of the jet lag.

“Thank you for being so prompt, Mr. Shamandar.” The pudgy hand gripped his with routine corporate strength; not weak, not strong, just an in-between reassurance.

The Chippendale Suite could have seated twenty in ample comfort, so whoever was behind Messrs. Smith and Jones wasn’t worried about their expense credsticks. The serving table groaned under the weight of a very traditional British breakfast: bacon, kidneys, smoked herring in butter, scrambled eggs in a great silver bowl, poached eggs in salvers, acres of toast that would be as cold as the chill gray morning, yellow butter in white dishes, thick and distressingly dark marmalade, preserves, urns of tea the color of boot polish, and silver pots of Colombian coffee, enough to feed an army of the urchins roaming the streets of the South London Squeeze zone. They’d have died young from gamma-cholesterol furring up their arteries, but then those urchins had a very low life-expectancy anyway.