Lu Chen was not a man you would notice in a crowd. That was, I suspected, precisely the point.
He lived in a narrow, two-room dwelling on the western edge of the Ink Brush Quarter, wedged between a paper merchant and a fortune-teller's stall. The street smelled of wet stone and old ink, and the lanterns that hung over the doorways were dim and yellow, like the eyes of someone who had not slept well in a very long time.
Shen Bao sat across from me in the carriage as it rocked over the uneven cobblestones. He had managed to compose himself during the ride, though his eyes still held that haunted, panicked quality that made me nervous. Shen Bao was rarely nervous. It was one of the reasons I trusted him.
"Are we certain it was him?" he asked in a low voice, his gaze dropping to the supplement memorandum I had folded and placed into the inner pocket of my cloak.
