Ava's POV
Her eyes adjusted by degrees.
The headlights were too bright for direct looking so she worked the edges of them, the way you looked at something too bright slightly away, letting the peripheral vision do the work that the direct vision couldn't. Shapes resolved slowly out of the white. Figures. Four of them, spread across the parking lot in the patient arrangement of people who had arrived with a plan and were executing it without urgency.
She knew that arrangement.
She had seen it on a dock. In a tunnel. In a warehouse with a river on one side and men with flashlights working toward them.
The particular geometry of Vitelli's people.
Beside her she heard Leo exhale. One slow breath. Not surprise she understood he had suspected it from the moment the lights came on, that he had run the calculation in the white and arrived at the answer before she did. The exhale was not surprise. It was the sound of a man accepting a configuration he had hoped was wrong.
