**Blood of a Careless God**
The document was twelve pages.
She knew this because she counted them before she read them, which was a habit she had developed a long time ago in circumstances that had taught her that knowing the size of a thing before you entered it was a form of preparation even when preparation was insufficient. Twelve pages. She noted the number, set it aside, and began.
She read slowly.
That was also a habit — not because she was a slow reader but because she had learned that certain kinds of information required the pace to match the weight of it, that rushing through something dense was how you missed the thing inside the thing, the layer beneath the surface layer that was usually where the actual meaning lived.
