BVM allowed himself a thin smile. "The most skilled conductor, my dear, knows when to allow the orchestra its moments of… passionate reinterpretation. It doesn’t mean the symphony is lost. Merely that it is evolving. This analogy may be imprecise - possibly more jazz than orchestral.”

After a pause, “More wine, dear?” He didn’t wait for an answer and poured more Sancerre into her glass….

The study in Bernard von Moravek’s Rue Fresnel townhouse was an exercise in controlled modern aestheticism compared to the stone 19th Century exterior of the building, a two-minute walk from the Trocadero. Walls paneled in prohibitively rare and CITES-listed Brazilian rosewood absorbed sound, creating a hush that was almost liturgical…..

Four encrypted terminals ran in parallel, their collective light casting Lena in fractured blue. Kite, her personal AI, operated from one, its usual quiet background chatter now focused, parsing signal drift from archived ForgeMind training logs Lena had acquired via the code Jax had given her. She was hunting for vulnerabilities, for the root of ForgeMind’s unsettling awareness of her movements…

From the outside, the house at 24 Charles Street looked like any other in Mayfair: Georgian gleaming white stone, wrought iron railings, and black-gloss doors with a brass door knocker polished to a diplomatic sheen. A placard just down the street noted the area’s status as a conservation zone, and the house itself was technically Grade II listed—protected under UK heritage law. But Bernard von Moravek had a particular talent ….

The flight from Seattle to Heathrow was ten hours of synthetic air, espresso jitters, and existential dread. Somewhere over Hudson Bay, Morgan dry-swallowed a benzo and chased it with a plastic tumbler of Scotch, his stomach a war zone of tequila residue and airline pretzels….