DANTE

The palace changed when there was a countdown running inside it.

Not visibly. To anyone outside the walls it looked the same, the same rotations, the same council meetings, the same ordinary machinery of a territory governing itself. That was deliberate. Marcus had been precise about maintaining the appearance of an unremarkable week, and his people were good at it.

But inside, underneath the ordinary surface, something had shifted. The quality of attention in every room was different. ...