Whatever Happened to Cadence Rhymer?

Tooker builds a magic system with the patience of someone who has thought through its plumbing, not just its poetry. The 'shunt' travel that 'only worked when the path had been used enough to remember itself' is a small worldbuilding rule that pays off structurally — it explains why Rick and Tsen land rough in a garden shed, why Detroit's anomaly cluster feels engineered rather than random, and why a street that 'learned how to stay open' becomes the book's central mystery. The Archive itself, carved into a canyon wall behind stained glass, with an agent cleaning his nails while pendants get issued like ID badges, has the bureaucratic-numinous texture of Le Guin's Ekumen crossed with a very American occult DMV. Psychometry is handled with real specificity — Sera's thumb catching the glove's seam, 'a small, stupid snag that made it hers for one beat' — and the vision-sharing mechanic (Ozaka handing over 'the afternoon... whole') is used consistently enough across three separate scenes that it reads like a rule rather than a convenience.

Hathor is the book's dialogue engine, and she's terrific — 'bang out of order,' 'chock-a-block,' 'proper sloppy,' 'mithered' — a British voice dropped into a 1978 Denver occult college that never once slips into caricature because Tooker gives her real teeth: she's the one who says the quiet part about Heller's motives out loud. The banter between Rick, Tsen, and the cats ('Don't start a religion') keeps the density of invented terminology from calcifying into lecture.