Chapter 20
931 Words
The conversation I staged for Fen took four minutes.
I chose the corridor outside the communications room, the one with the thin wall and the window latch that had never closed flush. My father had known about that window. I had known about it since I was twelve. Whether Fen used it or simply passed what she heard through her terminal didn't matter—the compound's acoustics did the work either way.
Silas played his part without being asked to play it. That was the thing about Silas: he had been in this world long enough that when the shape of something was right, he moved inside it without requiring the full explanation.
"Marcus is being moved tonight," I said, loudly enough. "North corridor. Eleven o'clock."
Silas looked at the window once, so briefly it would not register to anyone watching except me. "Understood."
That was all.
I tried for 30 minutes. I attempted for 30 minutes. I then went to look for Marcus.
He looked better than he had two days ago, which meant he had slept and was still calculating. The East Room had not broken him. That was consistent — Marcus had never been a man who fell apart when circumstances turned. He had simply been a man who made choices and then made others and had kept making them long past the point where any of the choices were good.
When I came in there, he looked up. Read my face.
"You want something specific today," he said.
"The handler above you," I said. "Not the faction's name. Yours. The person you reported to directly."
A muscle in his jaw moved. "I told Raze—"
"You gave Raze the chain," I said. "I'm asking for the person. The specific human being who recruited you, ran you, and gave the order you were not informed of."
The ensuing silence was not like the silence he had before. Not calculated. A fixture that has some impact.
"His name is Voss," he said finally. "He runs two assets in this region. Maybe three now." He paused. "He was the one who threatened you."
The room was quite silent.
"By name," I said.
"By name. By address." His jaw tightened. "I didn't know until after he had already done it. When I found out—" He stopped.
"When you found out, you stayed anyway," I said. Flat. Accurate.
I didn't get out.
"No," I said. "You never do."
He gazed into his hands. This was the same gesture that he had made in this room two days ago, when he was deciding on how much to give and in what order. It was a different day today. Less strategic.
“
“Voss will find out tonight that something has gone wrong here," he said. He watches his own stockings: For a week and ten days at least, I have silently asked no word from him.
“Then he will come move," I said.
"He's already moving." He met my eyes. “It's not a guess; he works like that. If an asset is broken in, he’ll cut the thread and he'll send someone to clean it up.”
“Which of you is not clean?" I said.
"Clean up means anything connected to me." He held my gaze. "Including everyone in this compound who knows his name."
The cold moved through my chest, familiar now. I had been carrying it from the cellar. I was learning to work inside it.
"How long?" I said.
"Forty-eight hours. Sixty at the outside."
I stood. He watched me the way he had always watched me — with the specific attention of someone who had never fully stopped being on my side, even when every other choice argued against it.
"Marcus."
"I know," he said. “I know what you'd like from me.”
“Full cooperation”—no rationing, no sequencing.
"Yes."
I looked at him for a moment. The man I had sat across from at a thousand ordinary tables. The man who had known what he was giving up and had chosen it anyway and had never once been simple about any of it.
"I heard you," I said. "In the cellar. What you said."
"I know you did."
"It doesn't give you anything."
"I know that too."
I went to the door. Stopped with my hand on the frame.
"We're moving you tonight," I said. "A different room. Not where they think."
He nodded. Did not inquire about the “misdirection”. He understood it without needing it explained, which was one of the things about Marcus that had always been true regardless of everything else.
I walked out.
Raze was at the end of the corridor. Not waiting — moving toward the operations room with Silas at his shoulder, something in his hand that looked like Carver's perimeter report. He glanced at me as I fell into step.
“Voss,” I whispered.
He took no slowness, but went on as usual in his gait. "I've heard that name."
"Forty-eight hours."
His jaw tightened once. "Then we don't wait for them to arrive."
"No," I said. "We don't."
We pushed through into the operations room and the maps were already open on the table and outside the compound's afternoon was running its quiet routines and above all of it Voss was already moving and I spread my hands flat on the table and looked at the map and started thinking.
My father had left me a weapon.
It was time to learn how to use it.
- Writer
