Kori moved through it slowly, head down, reading it the way she read everything, and the dry voice in the back of her head kept failing to find the threat it was looking for. There was no threat. There was just warmth, music, and about a hundred dangerous people having a genuinely good night.
And then, off near the new extension, she noticed that one corner was louder than the rest.
A small crowd had gathered there — denser than anywhere else in the room, old and young, men and women packed in close, all of them facing the same point and all of them laughing. Whatever was at the center of that knot of people was the thing the whole corner had organized itself around. The sound coming off it was the warmest in the building — the laughter of people enjoying someone they liked, leaning in, jostling for a better spot, throwing in comments or questions to someone important and getting answered.
Kori changed her heading, and started walking, slowly, toward the corner.
