Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
At dawn, I rise and run around the vast garden. I am accustomed to running in boots; trainers have never featured in my life. Mina bounds beside me the whole way and veers towards every interesting scent before she remembers that we are supposedly exercising.
Back at the house, I eat a slice of toast. Across the breakfast table, Cáel looks exhausted, and there is a careful stiffness to the way he holds himself.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Fine. How are you?”
He was awake all night. I heard him twice through the wall, his voice pitched too low for the words to carry, in the flat patient rhythm of a man reporting to somebody who outranks him.
Planning and telling his people what we intend to do today. Of course he was.
“Ready,” I say.
We split between several vehicles. I consider leaving Mina behind with one of Cáel’s people, but when I try, she whines so plaintively that the decision is made for me.
“We’ll keep her safe,” Cáel says.
When has this life ever been safe?
She has always been at risk beside me, a choice I have made each time. I would rather have her with me than leave her in a house we are about to vacate.
We set a countdown-release spell on the door to Preston’s holding room—six hours, long enough for us to be well clear. After that, the lock will release, and he can walk out. Now no one needs to stay behind.
We take everything, including Preston’s records, and go.
Through the car window, I watch the kennel staff, cleared and sent back to work, exercising the estate dogs on the lawn. The dogs’ dark shapes race through white morning mist.
We drive through the Immortal Zone towards the Aegis Spire.
Mother gave me one half of this puzzle in a basement: siphoned magic keeps the platform aloft. Preston handed me the other half last night: the Spire is where the network is regulated.
The Spire fills the windscreen. Knowing a thing and seeing it are not the same.
If we dismantle the network, the Immortal Zone might come down with it.
Will it drift, or will it plummet, and how much warning will anyone have? There is nobody left who will tell us the truth.
Every gardener and driver and dressmaker at the poorer edges, working for people who never have to.
Mina.
Cáel.
Thea.
And my sister.
I have spent my working life counting who gets hurt. So I count this, and put it where I put everything else, and keep going—because the alternative is the Districts below dying one person at a time, and I have witnessed quite enough of that.
If, of course, we can dismantle the thing at all.
That remains an open question.
Cáel’s team secures the building quickly and quietly, sealing it with their own wards before anyone can react. A cooperative security guard directs us to the locked lower level. He grumbles that he always knew that door would get him into trouble.
Two other guards attempt to resist and are confined, uninjured, in a conference room.
We pass through an ordinary door and descend the stairwell Preston described.
His keys take us as far as they can. Two of Cáel’s operatives go first, magic weapons raised. We follow.
The stairs are older than the building. Far older. If the Spire has anchored the network for fourteen hundred years, whatever lies beneath must predate every renovation above. The walls change around us; smooth modern plaster gives way to rough stone darkened by age.
Modern lights flicker on as we descend. Strips of harsh white trace our path downwards. Mina stays close to my leg, alert and silent. She pauses once to sniff, her ears pricked forwards. A ward shimmers faintly in the air ahead of us, bending the light like heat above tarmac.
Cáel’s people halt as well. They take out their equipment, work through the ward efficiently, and then we continue deeper and deeper into the building’s foundations until we reach a door.
A panel sits beside it, identical to the one at the Gilded Drop.
I understand what this means.
“I can do it,” Vivian says quietly behind me.
I know she can. The last door would open for the Morris heir.
“I’m all right,” I reply with a small smile.
This began with me. It might as well continue with me. I am part of it now, and I am done being dragged along for the ride.
I press my palm to the panel.
Nothing bites. No snap, no jolt, no wrenching through the shoulder. Only the same soft settling I felt at the Drop, as though something has stepped aside to let me past.
The magic knows me.
Of course it does.
I have been feeding it for thirty-two years.
The door swings open with a soft click.
We step through.