HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 26

Ada opened the door before Silas finished knocking.

She had known it was coming. That was the thing about Ada — she had always known things slightly before they happened, the way certain people do when they've spent enough years inside a world that runs on anticipation. She stood in the doorway in a grey shirt and bare feet and looked at Silas with the expression of someone who had rehearsed several versions of this moment and was now selecting between them.

Silas said nothing. He held out the key.

She looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked past him, down the corridor, and found me standing at the far end of it.

The selection process ended.

She stepped back and let us in.

Her room was spare. Not prison-spare — chosen spare. A woman who had been inside the compound long enough to understand that objects accumulated meaning and she was careful about what she let mean something. A single photograph on the desk that I didn't look at directly. A jacket on the back of the chair that had seen significant use. The smell of coffee gone cold.

"Nyra Voss," she said. Not a greeting. A recognition of what the name meant now, in this room, with Silas behind her and the key already given.

"Ada."

"Your father said you'd come back."

"When?"

"Three weeks before he died." She sat on the edge of the desk. Her hands were steady. The rest of her was doing the work of being steady. "He said you'd use his name at the gate and it would move through the compound before you reached the main hall. He said that was how I'd know the timing was right."

"Right for what?"

She looked at me with something that wasn't quite patience and wasn't quite grief. The particular expression of a person who has been carrying information they weren't certain they would ever be able to deliver.

"He told me where Fen's secondary terminal is," she said. "The one Croft's people don't know about. The one your father built into the compound infrastructure eight years ago and never documented."

The room was very quiet.

"He told you," I said.

"He needed someone inside who Croft's network hadn't identified as significant." She held my gaze. "I was useful because I was invisible. Fen knows me. We have a history that Croft's people logged as personal and discarded." A pause. "They were wrong about what it was."

"What was it?"

"Insurance," she said. "Your father's."

I looked at her for a moment. The photograph on the desk that I had not looked at directly was of two women, younger, outside somewhere with a lot of light. I looked at it now. One of them was Ada. The other one I recognised from compound records as a woman who had been removed from the payroll fourteen months ago under administrative restructuring.

Fen.

Not just a dependency. A relationship with a history long enough to have survived what the compound had done to it.

My father had not just identified a lever. He had protected the thing the lever was attached to and waited to see if his daughter was perceptive enough to understand the difference.

"He didn't tell you to offer this," I said. "He told you to wait until I asked the right question."

Something moved in her face. "Yes."

"And I asked it."

"You knew to look at the photograph," she said. "That was the question."

I sat down across from her. Not because I was tired. Because the conversation required the kind of level that standing over someone didn't produce.

"I need Fen at the secondary terminal before the compound moves to alert status," I said. "I need her there willingly, with full knowledge of what she's helping close, and I need her there before Cord's next transmission window."

Ada's hands were still on her knees.

"She'll want to know about Marcus," she said.

I hadn't expected that. I kept my face even. "What about him."

"She was the one who flagged him. Fourteen months ago. She ran his background against the compound's internal records and found the thread." Ada looked at me directly. "Your father told her to stop. To leave it alone. She didn't understand why until she understood the whole picture."

Until she understood the trap.

Fen had found Marcus and my father had told her to bury it, because the moment Marcus knew he was identified the fourteen-month construction collapsed. She had spent fourteen months sitting on the knowledge that the man engaged to his daughter was working for the network that was killing him.

The weight of that settled into the room and neither of us commented on it.

"I'll tell her," I said. "When this is over. Everything."

"She'll need to hear it from you directly."

"She will."

Ada was quiet for a moment. The compound moved around us in its evening sounds and outside the window the last of the light was going and nightfall was becoming a fact rather than a direction.

She stood. Picked up the jacket from the chair.

"I know where her room is," she said.

"I know you do."

She paused at the door. Looked at me once more with that expression that had finished selecting.

"He was proud of you," she said. "He didn't say it that way. He never said anything that way. But I was in the room enough times when your name came up to know what his face did."

I didn't answer.

She left.

Silas looked at me from the doorway with the expression of a man recalibrating how much he had underestimated the architecture his employer had left behind.

I picked up my phone. Sent Raze two words.

Ada. Done.

His reply came back in under a minute.

Fen's moving.

I set the phone down on Ada's desk and looked at the photograph and let the room be quiet for a moment before I stood up and walked back out into the compound.

Forty-four hours.