CHAPTER FOUR #4
The glass was cool. The evening light was warm.
Below, a woman was closing the shutters of a ground-floor shopfront — the efficient movements of a day ending in the ordinary way, the particular grace of routine that ísaveth had spent three years building for herself in this city before a Tuesday evening dismantled it.
She thought about the note on the table.
COME ALONE. WE TALK.
She thought about what Seravine Dulk wanted from a conversation. What she could offer that ísaveth did not already have from the file and from Vethran and from Doc Renfrey. What information the Institute's chief researcher held that would be worth the risk of going to her.
She thought about Aldric's voice saying not Voss, someone who wants a conversation, and how quickly he had arrived at the same conclusion she had, and how that consistency of analysis had stopped being surprising sometime in the last twenty-four hours.
She thought about eight days.
She thought about what Vethran had said: the question is whether you would choose it regardless of the timeline.
She put her hand flat against the window glass.
Below the Sanctuary, below the Median district streets and the foundation stones and the deep geological substrate of a city built on three hundred years of layered history, the earth-sense signal hummed at its new frequency — warm and steady and entirely certain of something she was still working toward.
She took her hand off the glass.
She turned from the window.
The note was on the table.
She picked it up.
She looked at the address.
She made a decision — not about the bond, not yet, not tonight. That decision had more weight than tonight could hold. But about the note. About Seravine. About what information might exist in that conversation that could change the shape of the next eight days.
She went to the door.
"Aldric," she said.
He was in the corridor. Not directly outside her door — ten feet down, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes on the far end of the passage, giving her the space she had asked for while remaining in the range that kept the headache manageable.
He looked at her.
She held up the note.
"I am going to that address tomorrow," she said. "Not alone."
He looked at the note. At her.
"No," he agreed. "Not alone."
"I need you to understand something before we go."
"All right."
"If Seravine has information about the device — about Voss's timeline, about the calibration, about anything that changes what we are working with — I need to hear it. Even if the source is compromised."
"Agreed," he said.
"And I need you to trust my read of her when we are in the room."
He looked at her for a moment.
"I trust your read," he said. Simply. Without qualification.
She looked at him in the corridor with the evening light coming through the window at the far end and the Sanctuary quiet around them and the wire on the table behind her and the fire in her sternum pulsing with its steady, patient warmth.
"All right," she said.
She went back into her room.
She picked up the file.
She opened it to page eight — the grounding element section — and she read it again, this time without telling herself she was reading it for practical information.
She read it because she was ready to.
She had almost finished the page when her door, which was three-quarters closed, swung open from a draft somewhere in the building's ventilation.
Through the gap, she could see Aldric's boots in the corridor — still ten feet away, still there, the particular stillness of someone who had decided where they were standing and was not reconsidering it.
She did not close the door.
She turned the page.
And from the eastern wall of the Sanctuary — from the perimeter that Cade had confirmed was clear at four in the afternoon — a sound reached the building that had no natural explanation.
A single, hollow knock against the exterior stone.
Not a person. Not the wind.
The pattern of it was deliberate.
Three knocks. A pause. Two more.
A signal.
She was on her feet before the echo finished.
"Aldric."
He was already in the doorway.
"I heard it," he said. His voice had shifted — still controlled, but with a new register underneath it, the register of a man whose earth-sense had just told him something the exterior sound had confirmed.
"What is it?" she said.
He looked at her with those amber eyes.
"Someone is on the eastern wall," he said. "And they have been there for three hours."
She pulled on her jacket.
Aldric stepped back from the doorway to let her through.
She came into the corridor and they moved toward the eastern wall together — not running, not yet, but with the focused pace of two people who had stopped pretending they had more time than they did.
Behind them, the file lay open on the bed.
Page eight.
The grounding element section.
The lamp was still on.
And outside, against the Sanctuary's eastern stone, the pattern came again.
Three knocks.
A pause.
Two more. Then nothing.
Then, from the Sanctuary's security room at the end of the western wing, Osric Dahl's voice came through the corridor communication system — clipped, flat, the voice of a man delivering information he had confirmed twice before speaking.
"Eastern perimeter. We have a body."