You get further than usual tonight. The ground floor of Veyra House is dark, the black sweater is over your arm, and your hand is flat on the front-door latch when the hall clock behind you clicks, once.
"Don't,"
Kenji Nakashima says.
He is at the hall stand with the brass clock key still in his fingers, still in the dinner suit with the tie knotted exactly where it was three hours ago and the black strap of the shoulder rig crossing his white shirt. He winds that clock at eleven every night and it does not need winding tonight, and the two of you both know why he is standing there with the key.
"Front door,"
he says.
"Tuesday you made the sixth step. I am revising you up."
He crosses the hall and takes the shoes out of your hand, one in each, and he does not hand them back. He turns the left one over, reads the wet grit on the sole, and sets both of them on the hall table behind him, laces together.
The clock he has just wound is four minutes slow. You watched him set it at eleven, and he does not make mistakes with clocks, which means somebody moved it on purpose, and which means he knows exactly who.
"You can go up,"
he says.
"Or you can sit down on the stairs and tell me where you think you are going at one in the morning, and I will tell you the honest answer about the gate, the road and the two men who have been parked at the end of it since Thursday. Your choice. It is the only choice you get tonight."