Avery
Ifeel the others trailing after me through the tunnel.
Almost no sound. But somehow I hear them anyway.
Every vampire on this team follows me, though Aldric’s jaw is tight enough to crack teeth and Marta keeps looking at the side tunnel like it would be simpler without me.
My light catches a waterline on the brick, a green-black stain at shoulder height.
"Slack water for maybe twenty minutes," I say. "Then it floods to here." I touch the stain. "We don't have margin."
"Then let's not waste it," Dorian says behind me. Close. Not crowding.
Greer's voice crackles in my ear, half static. "—movement near the square — can't get a count — losing you the deeper you—" Then nothing.
"We're past his range," Celeste says.
I'm still leading, and it's because I know the water like I know myself.
The vampires may see in this dark better than I ever will, but they can't understand things that I can.
Rust blooms downward where pipes weep, streaks sideways where the tide drives.
A faded two stenciled on a junction box tells me we're under the fish dock, not past it.
Dorian steps in next to me, tense as a drawn line. When I choose the lower branch over the wider one, he just follows, and so do the rest.
"The wide one's newer," I say. "Newer means used. Used means watched."
Celeste makes a small sound that might be approval. The passage opens up, fungal on the walls, and bones of the whale-processing storehouse above. Unmoving dark figures arranged waiting.
"O," I breathe, running toward him without thinking.
He lifts his head. His lip is split, one eye swelling, and he still tries to grin. "Took you long enough. I was about to chew through these myself. But, you know. Cardio."
Nora's beside him, wrists bound to a pipe, and she isn't crying — she's furious. "Get them off Tracy first," she snaps. "She's not right, Ave, whoever they were did something to her—"
Tracy. Pale, swaying, conscious but barely, two raw marks at her throat. Fed on. Again. My stomach turns over.
I reach for O's cuffs and stop. The latch isn't a lock. It's a trigger — a thin wire run from the cuff off into the dark, taut.
"Don't pull," I say, catching his wrist. "Dorian. There's a line."
He follows it with his eyes, finds the spool, eases the tension off. The cuff opens clean.
We free them fast after that. I work Nora's bindings while she watches the passage like she'll bite anything that comes through it.
Celeste lifts Tracy as if she weighs nothing.
O sways up, his jokes dying as the cold hits him, and I get a shoulder under his arm.
That's when he presses the paper into my hand.
"Took it off a table," he whispers. "While they were busy with her. Ave — it's some sort of plan."
I unfold it under my light, and the chamber goes very quiet.
A map of the harbor square. Tunnels drawn beneath it in red. Crates sketched along one wall, marked only with inventory codes. A schedule pinned crooked to a beam, a single day circled. Friday. And in one map corder, inked careful, a small open eye.
The understanding lands cold and complete. They didn't want to get back at Dorian. They were never going to take me. They took them so we'd come here, down, have us busy inside the shadowed tunnel, while whatever this is gets built up there. They're bait.
"This is bigger than getting at you," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine.
Water starts to rush near us. Dorian shouts before he's even processed what I said. "Out. Now."
A grinding boom comes from somewhere ahead, then the floor-sound changes — a hiss building to a roar, and the air shoves past my face, pushing into the tunnel from the seaward side when slack water should be dead still.
"Back—" the last ally starts.
The tide herds us toward the side passage that looks collapsed, the obvious bolt-hole. Rogues appear. Dorian and Celeste meet them in a blur I can't track. Aldric takes a hit that throws him into the brick.
But I'm not watching the fight. My hand's on the pipe, and it's shaking — vibrating.
The surge isn't coming through the tunnel mouth.
It's coming through a drain that Lucien must have dammed and released, a wall of tidewater aimed straight down to drown us.
I stick my head through the collapsed passage.
"The gate!" I shout. Above the rubble, half-buried, an old whale-house winch, its chain green with age. A sluice. "Aldric — the chain — pull it, now—"
He hauls. The rusted gate screams up its track, and the surge, when it hits, finds the open mouth instead of us — slams sideways into the overflow and away, and the roar drops to a churn at our ankles instead of over our heads.
The rogues, caught wrong-footed by their own flood, break.
Dorian takes me over his shoulder. The others are taken by the group, and we all move at speed.
The wind rushes past my face, stone flicking by, and we emerge through the drain hatch into open air.
I'm soaked, shaking, behind us the tide is eating the tunnel we just left.
Aldric stands dripping, glaring at me. Not warm. Just clear.
"She saw it before we did," he says to Dorian. Then he looks away, almost like he's ashamed to hold trust in me.
I'm still holding what O gave me with ink run at one corner.
The small eye hasn't. The others are watching me now — the ones who doubted me, seen me as Dorian's weakness without admitting it.
They glance to me, and before turning away they nod their heads.
Showing me courtesy, showing me kindness.
I now know I'm in this war with them. I'll never be against them because the one I'm connected to will always be one of them.