polishing and fixing continue

chapters/book2/ch07-final.md

@@ -182,7 +182,7 @@ Ledger looked at me with the particular expression of a man who believed me and
 
 I told Mere the next evening.
 
-Day seven. The victim's death had been sitting in my chest for a full day, settling into the specific gravity of something that couldn't be undone. The case was murder. The word had changed the shape of every thought I'd had since Ledger's office.
+The victim's death had been sitting in my chest for a full day, settling into the specific gravity of something that couldn't be undone. The case was murder. The word had changed the shape of every thought I'd had since Ledger's office.
 
 Mere was at the kitchen table with her herbalism texts when I sat down and gave her the full picture. Not the summary — the picture. Kae's chronic pain. Elara's role and death. The crystal dependency. The engineering of it — someone removing Kae's only alternative to guarantee addiction. The two Compact operatives. Carson. The victim who'd died.
 
@@ -244,7 +244,7 @@ We sat with it. Two people in a kitchen, processing a case that had become a mur
 
 The fish fry started at fourth bell on Godsday and I arrived at fifth.
 
-Fashionably late was not the intent — I'd spent the morning with the case map, tracing the pattern of victim locations against Ledger's latest pin placements, looking for the geometry of Kae's movements. The northeast vector was consistent. The extraction pathways all pointed the same direction, which meant the crystal's collection point — wherever Kae went after draining — was somewhere in that quadrant. The arcane district, or near it. I filed the analysis and walked to the warrens.
+Fashionably late was not the intent — I'd spent the morning with the case map, tracing the pattern of victim locations against Ledger's latest pin placements, looking for the geometry of Kae's movements. The northeast vector was consistent. The extraction pathways all pointed the same direction, which meant the crystal's collection point — wherever Kae went after draining — was somewhere in that quadrant. The arcane district, or near it. I folded the map under one arm and walked to the warrens.
 
 Carson's chapel had been transformed. Not fundamentally — the workbenches were still there, the tools still hung on the walls, the ugly shrine still presided from its corner with its expression of divine indigestion. But the space had been rearranged around a long table made from planks on sawhorses, and the table was covered in food.
 
@@ -274,7 +274,7 @@ I found Carson after the meal had shifted from eating to drinking. He was leanin
 
 Carson's face shifted. The Godsday warmth didn't leave — it settled, like sediment, and something heavier rose to the surface.
 
-"Saw him," Carson said. "Three days ago. He came by the workshop — not the fish fry, just the workshop. Wanted to talk." He rubbed his jaw with one heavy hand. "He looked worse, Locksmith. Whatever's eating him is eating faster. Eyes wrong. Hands shaking. He sat where you sat last time and talked for maybe twenty minutes and I don't think he heard half of what I said back."
+"Saw him," Carson said. "Two days ago. He came by the workshop — not the fish fry, just the workshop. Wanted to talk." He rubbed his jaw with one heavy hand. "He looked worse, Locksmith. Whatever's eating him is eating faster. Eyes wrong. Hands shaking. He sat where you sat last time and talked for maybe twenty minutes and I don't think he heard half of what I said back."
 
 "What did he talk about?"
 
@@ -294,7 +294,7 @@ Something in my chest went still.
 
 The noise was loud now. The realization had the quality of a lock opening — not forced, not picked, just the right key in the right ward, turning with the inevitability of a mechanism doing what it was designed to do.
 
-Kae was not a monster. He was a man in agony who needed someone to tell him it was okay, and he found the one person whose belief system guaranteed that answer.
+Kae was not a monster — or so I thought, standing there with Carson's warmth at my elbow and the pattern clicking into place. He was a man in agony who needed someone to tell him it was okay, and he found the one person whose belief system guaranteed that answer.
 
 "He stopped bringing the questions recently," Carson said. "The last couple visits, he just… sat. Didn't talk much. Looked through the wall." He took a drink of his beer. "I'm worried about him, Locksmith. Really worried."