Chapter 22
“Yo, team.”
Cara had been back down in headquarters barely ten minutes when Piper appeared at the top of the stairs with an overstuffed backpack hanging off one shoulder and her dark hair escaping its braid in at least four directions.
“Janelle and I finally finished getting ready for our pre-calc final. Dad’s been here all day, which led me to conclude there’d be no food at home.
” She dropped the backpack beside the stairs with a thud.
“Also, I figured the bakery fridges contain actual vegetables that haven’t fossilized. ”
“And you missed us,” Wade added, tossing her an unopened bag of pretzels.
Piper caught it one-handed. “If that’s what you need to think.” The teasing words came packaged with a grin.
Wade muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Too smart for her own good.”
Piper ripped the pretzel bag open while crossing the room, assessed the seating options with visible calculation, then selected the chair beside Owen like she was claiming territory. “Hi. I’m Piper.”
Owen looked at her the way he’d been looking at most things since Skye explained the kill calculus earlier — carefully, thoughtfully, as though the world had become slightly less predictable than he preferred. “Owen,” he said. “I’m having a rough few days.”
“Oh, same.” Piper reached into the pretzel bag. “What are we working on?”
“We,” Tom said, “are working. You are eating pretzels.”
She sniffed. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Reagan passed behind Piper, snatched the bag neatly out of her hands, and kept walking. “You need actual food, girl. I’ll be back.”
Piper looked betrayed. “That’s community property.”
“It’s sodium,” Reagan called over her shoulder as she disappeared up the bakery stairs.
Cara watched Piper settle comfortably into the noise and movement of the room and felt something shift again inside her chest. There were truths she’d been carefully avoiding for months now — the fact that the bakery basement had stopped feeling temporary, the fact that the people in it no longer felt like allies she worked beside but people she instinctively counted when she walked into a room.
People who were hers.
Piper Nakamura showing up on a Saturday night because she missed everyone felt dangerously close to family, and Cara still didn’t entirely trust herself around concepts like that.
She turned back toward the center monitor.
Gabe had Svalbard pulled up on the main screen.
Longyearbyen looked impossibly small at that scale, a handful of labeled roads and clustered buildings wedged between dark water and glaciers large enough to make Oregon feel civilized.
Tom had just finished running the flight windows and travel timing when Gabe finally said what the entire room had been circling for the last ten minutes.
“Neptune is going to know we’re coming.”
Nobody disagreed.
Neptune held every advantage: lead time, infrastructure, a preselected venue, an operation already in motion. Going wasn’t boldness. It wasn’t bravery. It was simply the only move available that put them on ground they could still influence.
“What’s the latest?” Piper asked. Her gaze landed immediately on Skye.
Cara hid a smile. From the moment the former art thief broke into the bakery, Piper had attached herself to Skye with the focused intensity of somebody discovering a fictional character had accidentally become real.
In Piper’s defense, Skye did seem assembled from several incompatible genres at once: polyglot art thief, cryptography expert, survivalist, terrifyingly competent disaster gremlin.
Skye, currently perched cross-legged atop a file cabinet with an ice pack balanced against the bruise at her temple, looked back at Piper with the patient resignation of someone slowly realizing she’d acquired a teenager.
“Owen teaches very boring things about the Middle Ages,” Skye said solemnly. “He’s going to a boring conference in Norway. The bad guys are expecting him, so we’re going too.”
Owen frowned. “It’s a very prestigious conference. I’m a lead presenter.”
“Cool.” Piper turned immediately toward him. “What’s your paper on?”
Owen visibly brightened, which Cara suspected was a reflex no academic could fully suppress when offered an audience.
“Fourteenth-century merchant syndicates operating across Northern Europe,” he said. “Specifically how distributed financing structures allowed politically disconnected states to coordinate military campaigns.”
Piper blinked once.
Owen continued anyway. “The prevailing scholarship focuses on kings and territorial conflict, but the real story is liquidity. Armies aren’t ideological entities.
They’re logistical systems. You can’t sustain conflict unless someone is moving money, underwriting supply chains, and stabilizing trade routes. ”
He leaned forward slightly now, fully engaged. “The Hanseatic League essentially created a transnational economic framework centuries ahead of modern statecraft. That financial coordination shaped regional power balances for generations.”
Piper stared at him for a beat. Then another.
“This is the stuff that shaped nations,” Owen added earnestly. “You can’t gather an army or amass weapons unless you can pay for them.” He shook his head with genuine sadness. “No one gets that.”
“Sure,” Piper said faintly.
Then she pulled out her phone, visibly retreating toward safer intellectual territory. “Oh, hey. These conference people have an Instagram account.” Her expression brightened. “Very cool.”
Sophie drifted over and glanced down at the screen. “The graduate student registration is still open.”
Piper looked up sharply. “The caption’s in Norwegian. I think. You can read that?”
Sophie straightened with suspicious innocence. “Sure.”
Piper narrowed her eyes. “How do you even learn Norwegian?”
“Private high school.” Sophie shrugged. “Most of the kids were diplomatic corps families. Norwegian happened to be the language du jour.” Her mouth curved slightly. “Also, those Nordic boys were seriously cute.”
“No joke,” Piper said wistfully.
Tom looked from Sophie to Piper with the faintly alarmed expression of a man watching several future complications unfold simultaneously. “Haven Cove High will have to do,” he said. “Sorry. Not sorry.”
Reagan came back downstairs balancing a sandwich, apple slices, and a glass of milk. She deposited the plate in front of Piper with the calm authority of someone who’d raised younger siblings and expected compliance. “Eat.”
Piper sighed heavily. “You people are oppressively nurturing. Which I like. A lot.” She bit into her sandwich.
Across the table, David closed his laptop. “I’m coming with.”
Sophie gave him serious side-eye. David cleared his throat. “I mean, we’re coming.”
Gabe raised one finger like he intended to object, but his brother kept right on talking. “Sophie and I have press credentials and a legitimate reason to attend. Also, hello? Our own private interpreter? It’s a complete no brainer. We’re coming.”
Gabe glowered. “Not happening.”
“Yeah, it is,” David repeated.
“Me too,” Piper announced.
Every head at the table turned.
Piper set down her sandwich with deliberate care.
“I’ve read everything publicly available on Neptune.
I know the cipher history, the Colloquium scholarship, and at this point I weirdly understand, like, forty percent of Owen’s terrifying medieval money lecture.
” She looked around the table. “Also, statistically speaking, nobody notices teenage girls. I am basically operational camouflage. And none of you can do social media. You’ll need my skills. Trust me.”
“That’s a hard no.” Tom's eyes stayed on his screen. “School. Band. Grades?”
Piper rolled her eyes. “School is a social construct.”
He shrugged, still typing. “So is your allowance.”
Piper opened her mouth. Closed it again. Then she picked up her sandwich with visible resentment. “Fine. Stunt my personal growth.”
While Piper ate under Reagan’s watchful supervision, the room settled into travel logistics.
Wade already had most of the breakdown prepared. Owen, David, and Sophie would travel commercial as legitimate academic and press attendees with conference registrations and minimal operational footprint. Wade would play bodyguard, in case Neptune decided to strike early.
That left Gabe, Cara, Reagan, Tom and Skye.
A charter out of a small field near Hillsboro would get them north faster and with fewer records. Wade had a pilot contact — former SEAL, currently doing highly questionable aviation favors for people. Wade trusted him.
“What do we call him?” Gabe asked.
Wade considered this for exactly one beat. “Nomad.”
Nobody asked follow-up questions.
Reagan had been building the Norwegian firearms paperwork on the far monitor for nearly an hour. She looked up now and focused directly on Owen. “I’ll need your sizes,” she said.
Owen blinked. “For what?”
“Svalbard in late May. Around zero Celsius. Wind chill off the Barents Sea.” She glanced once at his shoes and visibly reconsidered his survival odds. “You brought a carry-on from Southern California.”
A pause followed while Owen mentally reevaluated every packing choice he’d ever made. “I have a layering system,” he said carefully.
Skye studied his suspiciously wrinkle-free button-down shirt, worn poly-pro jacket, and battered shoes with deep concern.
“Is that rayon?” She shuddered. “Do you have any idea how many chemicals you’re wearing?
” She focused on Reagan. “Owen is clearly overdue for an upgrade. Not to mention a detox.”
Owen turned toward her immediately. “I have a system—”
She shuddered. “A rayon system. The fashion-industrial complex is far more dangerous––”
“The moisture-wicking properties of quality poly-pro are genuinely—” Owen interrupted her, his voice rising in clear panic.
Cara caught Reagan’s eye across the table.
Reagan smiled. “On it.”
Skye, meanwhile, had no equipment problem whatsoever.
She’d arrived at the bakery with a fully prepared go-bag before she trusted any of them enough to stay.
Cold-weather layers. Backup documents. Cash in three currencies.
Emergency medical supplies. Svalbard was farther north than she’d originally anticipated running, but only by degree, not principle.
Owen’s presentation was already loaded onto his laptop. Fourteen months of work formatted, rehearsed, and ready.
He was still, Cara noted, deeply unsettled about the clothing situation.
By the time full darkness settled outside the bakery windows, the Svalbard map still glowed from the center monitor and nobody had moved to close it.
Longyearbyen. Seventy-eight degrees north latitude.
According to Tom’s research, in late May the sun barely set there — only a few hours of pale maritime dusk before morning returned again.
Cara tried to picture herself standing that far north and found the idea strangely difficult.
She’d grown up in Brooklyn. She’d run to the Oregon coast when she needed somewhere to disappear.
Her personal geography of the world had edges, and Svalbard existed considerably beyond them.
She had never been this far north of anything in her life.
The room had gone quieter now, the specific quiet of people who had made a hard decision and were finally letting it settle into place. They didn’t need to leave for Portland until Monday morning. Tomorrow could still be for sleep.
Cara reached for her coffee and thought about Dom’s phone somewhere east of Haven Cove, waiting.
She turned the mug slowly in her hands and looked at the ice.