Crimson Veil

Chapter Twenty-Two — The Informant

✦ Eve's POV ✦

The second informant came to us.

That was the thing that made Caine's jaw tighten when he told me about it — not the information itself, but the method. The first informant had been frightened into cooperating by the night attack. This one had sought us out deliberately, which meant either genuine conscience or a trap, and the difference between those two things mattered enormously.

"He came to Bowen," Caine said. "At the second hour this morning. Asked to speak to someone in Black Division command. Wouldn't give his name." He paused. "He's in the holding room now. He says he'll only talk if the healer is present."

I looked up from the ward record I had been updating. "He asked for me specifically?"

"He said — the healer who can tell if someone is lying." Caine's expression was carefully neutral. "Which means someone told him what you can do."

The implications of that settled over me in layers. Someone in the faction knew about my gift in enough detail to have communicated it to a lower-level member. Which meant Aldric's knowledge of me was more specific than we had assumed.

"It could be a trap," I said.

"It could be." Caine held my gaze. "The Commander wants you to make the call."

I thought about it for the span of three careful breaths. A trap would require me to be in the room, which I wasn't — I had operated from adjacent spaces every time. Whatever the informant knew about my gift, he couldn't know the specific method. And if he was genuine, the information he carried could be more valuable than anything we had gotten so far, because he had come voluntarily.

"I'll do it," I said. "Same protocol. Adjacent room, short burst, in and out."

~ ~ ~

The holding room was off the eastern corridor near Black Division's section — a small space, two chairs, a lamp. I was in the room next to it with Bowen and the thin wall between us and I extended carefully as soon as Caine began the questioning.

The informant was afraid. Deeply, genuinely afraid — but not of us. The fear was directed elsewhere, outward, toward something he was carrying into this room with him. Beneath it was the same quality I had felt in the first informant — the specific relief of someone putting down a weight.

He was real.

I signaled to Bowen. Bowen relayed it. The questioning continued.

What came through the wall over the next twenty minutes — in fragments I caught at the edges of my extensions, confirmed with quick bursts every few minutes — was worse than I had expected.

Aldric was not waiting for the war council.

He had moved the timeline forward. Two weeks, possibly less. The attack on the stronghold had exposed more of his operation than he had planned for, and he had recalculated. He was going to make his move before we had time to consolidate what we knew and act on it.

And there was something else.

The mirror. We had assumed it was still missing — taken from the vault and hidden somewhere beyond the stronghold. But the informant knew differently. The mirror had come back. It was inside the stronghold. It had been here for two weeks, moved through a supply channel that the faction still controlled despite the night attack's losses.

It was here.

I pulled back from the extension and sat for a moment with that information and made myself breathe.

Then I went to find Adam.

~ ~ ~

He was in the command room. He saw my face when I came through the door and was on his feet before I reached the table.

"Tell me," he said.

I told him.

The stillness that came over him as I spoke was different from his usual stillness — this was the specific quality of someone processing something that required immediate recalibration of everything they had been planning. His jaw tightened. His eyes stayed on mine throughout.

When I finished he was quiet for a long moment.

"Two weeks," he said.

"Possibly less. The informant wasn't certain of the exact date."

"And the mirror is inside the stronghold."

"Yes."

He turned to the map on the table — the one with Caine's careful notations, the identified faction positions, the supply routes, all of it. He looked at it with the specific focus of someone reading it differently than they had a minute ago.

"He's going to come to you first," he said. Not looking up. "Before he moves openly. He'll make the offer — join him, cooperate willingly. He needs your gift functional and unresisting if the mirror is going to work at full capacity." He paused. "He'll come within the week."

"I know," I said.

He looked up. "When he does—"

"I'll be ready." I held his gaze. "I've been thinking about what to say. How to give him enough to buy time without giving him anything he can actually use." I paused. "I can read him while he's talking to me. I'll know if he suspects anything."

Adam looked at me for a long moment. Something moved through his expression — complex, not quite readable, but present in a way that his expressions usually weren't.

"You're not afraid," he said. And then, immediately: "That's not an accusation."

"I am afraid," I said honestly. "I'm afraid in the background constantly. But fear and ready aren't the same thing and I'm both." I paused. "Are you?"

He blinked — a fractional, barely visible reaction, the closest thing to surprise I had ever seen from him. "Am I what."

"Afraid," I said. "You don't have to not be. Not with me."

The command room was very quiet.

He looked at me with those dark eyes and something in the quality of his attention shifted — opened, slightly, the way a door opens when the latch releases.

"Yes," he said. Quiet. The same one-word honesty he always gave me when I asked him things directly. "Not for the mission."

The implication of that — what he was afraid for, if not the mission — sat between us in the lamplight like something alive.

I held it carefully and didn't push, because he had given me something and pushing would have been a way of taking rather than receiving.

"Then we protect each other," I said. "And we end this."

He looked at me for a moment longer.

"Yes," he said. "We do."

~ ~ ~