[center][h2][color=D4AF37]Locke[/color][/h2][/center]

[hr]
[color=silver]The girl was still talking, which suited Locke fine. It meant he didn’t have to. She was pointing at something near the stage, breathless and delighted, and he was making the right noises at the right times while his attention did what it always did in a crowd. Faces. Posture. Hands. You learn to read a room before the room reads you, or you don’t last long in his line of work.

That was when he saw the woman.

She stood in the thick of the crowd the way a nail sits in a board, fixed and out of place. Her gaze swept across the plaza with the kind of focus that, had it been steel, would have left bodies sliced open on the cobblestones. She wasn’t watching the coronation. She wasn’t marveling at the banners or the Venators or any of the hundred little spectacles the city had put on for the occasion. Whatever she was here for, it wasn’t this.

Their eyes met.

It lasted less than a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat something cold and sharp split him open from crown to navel. The same feeling that had slithered up his neck when the executioner with the twin battleaxes stepped into the daylight. Only this time it came from a silver-eyed stranger across the plaza.

So the moment she looked away, he closed his eyes and reached.

[i]Agitation. Fear. Worry layered over doubt layered over more fear, all of it trembling like a wire pulled too tight. And underneath, almost smothered by the rest, a thin and reckless thread of hope.[/i]

His eyes shot open, and the girl from Barkrend was gone. No sound, no trace, like she’d never existed.

Locke’s head snapped left, then right.

[i][color=D4AF37]Shit.[/color][/i]

He turned and walked away. [i]Fast.[/i][/color]