CHAPTER 16 #2
Adrian does not let his face move ahead of the facts. "Standing Order Four."
"Standing Order Four. We pulled everyone. Bartender was last out the back. The bar is theirs now. They are inside it. They have found nothing."
I let my breath out.
"Casualties," Adrian says, and the titanium ring goes still against the table edge under his thumb.
"None."
He does not take it on the first pass. "Repeat."
"None. Senna confirmed. All six runners accounted for; her brother; herself. The bar is gone and not a single one of ours has a scratch."
Adrian lets his eyes fall shut for the length of one finger-count and no longer. The lattice along his forearm drops one shade cooler; his human hand opens against his hip and lets go of something I have not seen him pick up.
"Senna," I say, because Marcus has not said her own state and I have begun to read the spaces in his sentences. "How is she."
The pill-case turns a slow quarter-circle in his closed palm. "She is angry."
"And."
Marcus's pale green eyes touch mine across the table. Something works once in his jaw and goes still. "And she said: Marcus. Don't lose me twice."
I do not ask what the first time was. I will not ask. He nods at me once like he has heard the not-asking and is grateful.
"The cut on our parapet was a test for response," Adrian says. "We didn't respond. They got six hours of confirmation that nobody is watching from above, then went for the only Syndicate location they had. They burned the bar to see if we'd come out of the woodwork to defend it."
"Standing Order Four," Marcus says softly.
"We didn't defend it."
"So now they know we are not where they thought we were and we are not where the bar is. Now they widen the search. We have a window. The window is small."
"How small."
"I want six days. The strike is six days out. If the search widens past Sector-6 in seventy-two hours, we move the schedule."
He squares the half-degree back, deliberate, and brings his attention onto me the way he brings a weapon to bear — all of it, at once, and nowhere else.
"Quinn."
"Vale."
"The Trace falling is what we expected. The Trace existing as bait is the reason it had to fall. We will not avenge it. We will avenge what they have already done."
The we. I have been Quinn in this room for thirteen days and am now a we in a sentence about avenging, and I sit with that for exactly as long as Adrian needs me to.
"We are locking down hard," he says. "Nobody leaves the bunker for any reason until the strike. That is six days, possibly seven. Are you with us?"
"Yes."
"Good. Renner — perimeter sweep. Every sensor. Don't trust the cobalts. Run them by hand. Cade — close every external channel. Quinn — with me. Planning."
Marcus brings the pill-case to his mouth, takes a single white mint, and seats the case back in his jacket pocket beside the lighter with the small unhurried ceremony he gives every object he sets down, as if the day will be judged on whether the things were put away properly.
Then he lets his pale green eyes rest on me, without hurry.
"Darling," he says, low. "I would like to ask you a question. Later. Not now."
"Later."
"Yes."
He goes to his office. Eleven years ago his father was killed by a wire in the back room of a noodle vendor; today his father's bar has burned; and the white pill-case of mints is the only ritual he will let himself keep.
---
Adrian pulls the projection up to standing height so my five-foot-five can read without craning. He has done it once before, on Day Three. I did not comment then and I do not now.
I touch Sector-7 first, because that is reflex, and let my hand drift up to Sector-3.
"Three entry points to the Vexis Annex. The corporate plaza on the west; the loading bay on the south; the maintenance shaft from the rooftop transit corridor on the east. I came out of the east on Day One."
"That corridor will be a kill zone."
"Yes."
"We go in the south."
"You go in the south. I go in the south. Renner stays at the auth packet console — he runs the Mk-VII backdoor from here when you give the call. Marcus stays on comms because he's the only one of us who can do three voices at once without dropping a line."
Adrian's mouth starts toward the thing it does instead of smiling. It gets a hair and no farther.
"You have been listening."
"I have been listening for thirteen days."
"It shows."
He turns the schematic on its axis and brings up the south loading bay, and we work.
I have spent thirteen days half in the kitchen in Sector-12 where my mother kept her hands on a bowl of soup.
The cold blue light makes that second room recede a step, and for the first time since I walked into the antechamber, I am present.
Luca comes in at six with the sweep. Every sensor clean except the dead camera.
He has brought something back with him: a forearm length of severed cable-bus, the steel sleeve peeled and the bundle inside sheared flush, and he sets it on the brushed-steel border of the table in front of me without a word, because he knows whose hands this is for.
I pick it up. This part is mine — signal is the one room in this bunker I built before any of them.
The cut is the first thing the metal tells me.
Not torn, not arced; an arc leaves a melt-bead and a burn-stink, and there is neither.
The strands are bevelled clean on a single plane, the way a good blade leaves a thing — a fine-edged shear, worked slow so it would not snap and ring.
Whoever did it had time, and used it to be quiet.
The second thing is the part that puts a cold finger on the back of my neck.
There is frost-grime along the sleeve, six hours of it, an even gray skin over the steel — and broken into it, near the cut, the ghost of a gloved thumb pressing the cable flat to brace the shear, and snagged on a burr of the peeled steel, one short fibre of matte-black weave.
I roll it between two fingers. Combat-rig cloth. The kind with no insignia on it.
"Someone was on the roof," I say. "On foot.
Braced left-handed against the parapet, leaned in over the sleeve to work the shear.
He knelt long enough to leave a knee-print they'll have lost to the snow by now.
" I hold the fibre up to the cold blue light, a black thread no longer than an eyelash.
"And he was careful, and he still left me this. "
Adrian comes around the table and looks at the thread in my fingers, and does not take it from me.
"Black Cell rig," he says.