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The briefing room is colder than the hangar, and the Falchion element is already seated when you come through the door. You are the eleventh person in a room with ten chairs: a standing special-operations detachment whose commander has read your file twice and has told nobody in the room a word of what it says. Raikes hands you a chair, a callsign of your own, and one honest condition — no name stays on your detail unless you want it there, and the story you are about to be dropped into is yours to shape, not his.
The hangar is cold enough that the coffee in the briefing room has stopped steaming, and the room has ten chairs in it. You are standing in the eleventh. Everybody the roster names is already seated: Jolyon Sowerby, who will talk through any silence you leave him; Alger Ockham, who will not; Lindon Wilding — Cobalt, on every sheet that matters — already reading the map; Hedgerow; Dalglish; Wingfield; Cawdor; Newland; Stroudley. At the head of the table is the man whose name is on the outside of the building, sleeves rolled, a stencilled case set by his boot. “Raikes,” he says. “Anvil, if you would rather. Nobody in this room has to be in it — say the word and a name comes off your detail. The mission is yours to shape. Start wherever you like; the fun part is that none of us knows yet how it ends.”