The Art of Invisibility
The alarm went off at 3:52 a.m., eight minutes before Karim needed it to, because he had long ago stopped trusting mornings to behave themselves. He silenced it before the second chime, swung his legs off the narrow bed in his equally narrow room, and sat for a moment in the dark, letting his body remember that it was, in fact, supposed to be awake.
His quarters occupied a modest corner of the palace's east wing, tucked between the laundry stores and a disused music room nobody had played in since King Aldric's mother died. It was not glamorous. A single window looked out over a service courtyard where delivery vans unloaded crates of lemons and bottled water at odd hours. But it was his, and it was quiet, and at 3:52 in the morning, quiet was worth more than gold leaf.
He dressed quickly—black trousers, white shirt, the charcoal waistcoat that made him look, Eric liked to joke, "like a man who'd arrested someone recently." Then he moved to the small desk by the window, where the day's schedule sat waiting, printed and highlighted the night before in three colors: yellow for mandatory appearances, pink for photo opportunities, and a furious red for anything involving Ambassador…
