T hanks for meeting on such short notice," said Meredith Overton, seated in the armchair directly beneath the rack of narwhale tusks. She wore a tweed jacket that might have come from Tanky & Tojo, if they cut things for women. She’d phoned on Hollis’s way back from her meeting with Bigend, in the strange, high, surgically clean silver pickup driven by Aldous, one of the tall black minders.