Crimson Veil

Chapter Nineteen — The Map

✦ Eve's POV ✦

Adam said no.

He said it the way he said most things — quietly, finally, with the quality of a door closing rather than a argument beginning. We were in the command room, the three of us — him, Caine, and me — with the maps of the stronghold spread across the table and the list of what the informant had given us laid out in Caine's neat handwriting beside them.

"It's too dangerous," Adam said. "If Aldric's watcher picks up your gift operating at that level—"

"Then we do it in short bursts," I said. "The way I read the informant. In and out fast, below the threshold of what's detectable. Mira confirmed it's possible."

"Mira also said extended use increases visibility."

"Which is why we don't extend it. We map in sections. Small radius, short duration, controlled." I kept my voice even because I had thought this through carefully before coming here and I needed him to hear the argument rather than the emotion underneath it. "Adam. You have two confirmed names from the informant. You have eleven in custody from the attack. You know there are more — the informant said at least thirty embedded total. That leaves seventeen unidentified people walking through this stronghold right now who know everything about your movements, your plans, your security arrangements." I held his gaze. "I can find them."

He looked at me for a long moment with that measuring quality.

"The risk—"

"Is mine to take," I said. "My gift. My choice."

The command room was quiet. Caine was looking at the map with the careful attention of someone who had removed himself from an argument he had opinions about but wasn't going to voice yet.

"If something goes wrong," Adam said.

"Then we stop immediately and reassess." I didn't look away. "I'm not asking you to send me into the field. I'm asking to sit in a room and breathe carefully and tell you which people in your stronghold are lying to you." I paused. "Let me help."

The silence stretched long enough to have a shape.

"Short bursts," he said finally. "Thirty seconds maximum per extension. I'm present for every session. The moment anything feels wrong you stop."

"Agreed."

"And you sleep between sessions. Properly. Not the two hours you've been averaging."

I blinked. "How do you know how much I've been sleeping?"

He didn't answer that. Which was, somehow, an answer.

"Fine," I said. "Agreed."

Caine looked up from the map with the expression of someone who had been waiting patiently for the adults to finish. "Shall I prepare the schedule?"

~ ~ ~

We started the next morning.

The method we developed over the first two sessions had a specific rhythm to it — Adam would identify a section of the stronghold and a group of soldiers operating in it, Caine would find a reason to move those soldiers through or near a space where I was positioned, and I would extend my awareness in the brief controlled burst we had agreed on and note what I found.

Most people read as ordinary. The emotional register of a soldier going about their day had a specific quality — the combination of physical focus and routine and the ambient social texture of someone embedded in a community they belonged to. I was learning to recognize it the way you learned to recognize a sound you heard every day.

What I was looking for was different. The particular quality I had felt from Perrin's mark and from the direction of Aldric's tower — managed, concealed, a deliberateness to the surface that suggested something was being kept underneath it.

I found the first one on the second day. A supply officer in Second Division, mid-thirties, who moved through his morning duties with exactly the right surface texture and something underneath it that was wrong. Cold and watchful and carefully pointed inward.

I told Adam that evening.

He listened without expression. Made a note. "Confirmed by morning," he said.

They were subtle about it — I never knew exactly how. But by the following afternoon the supply officer had been quietly reassigned to a post outside the stronghold's main operations, and Caine told me two days later that the reassignment had held long enough for a search of the man's quarters to produce a communication cipher that matched ones found on the night attack prisoners.

"You were right," Caine said.

"I know," I said, which made him almost smile.

~ ~ ~

By the end of the first week we had identified four more.

The sessions had a rhythm now — thirty seconds, careful and controlled, and then back behind the shielding to rest and reset before the next one. Adam was present for every session the way he had promised, which meant I spent a significant portion of my days in the command room or adjacent spaces with him nearby, and I was managing the implications of that with what I felt was admirable professionalism.

He had a way of being present that was different from other people's presence. He didn't fill space with noise — didn't talk unless he had something to say, didn't move unless he needed to. But the quality of his attention, directed at whatever he was working on while I worked on my own task across the room, had a weight to it that I was aware of the way you were aware of warmth from a nearby fire.

I was doing very well at not thinking about this.

"You're frowning," he said, on the fourth day, without looking up from the report he was reading.

"I'm concentrating."

"You frown differently when you're concentrating. This is the other one."

I looked up. He was still reading the report. "There are two?"

"The concentrating one is vertical. Between your eyebrows." He turned a page. "The other one pulls at the left corner of your mouth."

I stared at him.

He looked up. His expression was its usual quality — even, giving very little away. But something in his eyes had the almost-amusement I had learned to recognize.

"You've been watching me frown," I said.

"I've been watching the room," he said. "You're in the room."

I turned back to my work. I was extremely professionally composed about the warmth that moved through my chest and I did not acknowledge it in any way that he could observe.

"The left corner of my mouth," I muttered, mostly to myself.

"Mm," he said, and turned another page.

~ ~ ~