Chapter 30
Irish
The first thing I noticed about fire inside an old stone building was how deceptive it sounded.
Saint Brigid's had spent more than a century collecting timber behind plaster, beneath floors, inside roof spaces, and through partitions added by generations who probably believed thick masonry made the place nearly indestructible.
From the corridor outside the chapel, the fire itself still sounded distant, more like a hard wind moving somewhere above us than the kind of danger capable of taking an entire building apart.
The smoke told the truth. It rolled beneath the ceiling in thickening gray layers, carried through passages the modern plans insisted didn't exist, while heat began pressing through walls far ahead of the visible flames.
Harrow hadn't needed to burn the stone. He only needed to ignite enough of what people had hidden inside it and let the architecture carry destruction where he wanted it to go.
Trigger moved ahead of Skye and me toward the old sacristy while I listened to three different voices fighting for space through the radio.
Storm was counting residents as they reached the tunnel.
Raze was trying to locate the last person from the lower register.
Cipher was swearing at Saint Brigid's control system because whoever had triggered the fires had also started locking internal doors behind the evacuation routes.
Somewhere outside, Hawkeye kept giving updates on the grounds with the same maddening calm he used whether he was watching a rabbit cross a field or armed men move toward us.
"Boy's name?" I asked.
Grace's mother had called after us from the stairwell, but smoke swallowed half her answer. Skye remembered what I'd missed. "Daniel. She said he's seventeen."
"Location?"
"Old sacristy."
Trigger glanced toward the plan displayed on the small screen strapped to his wrist. "Public plan puts it east of chapel."
"The public plan is wrong," Skye said immediately.
Under any other circumstances, I might have smiled. Tonight I believed her before she finished.
She pointed toward the wall ahead. "Original sacristy was here, but they narrowed the chapel when they built the residential wing. If they kept the old footprint, there's another room behind this partition."
Trigger looked at the smoke gathering above us.
"Fast."
Skye crossed to the wall and ran one hand along the paneling.
Her breathing was heavier now, partly from the smoke and partly from the pace we'd kept since leaving the archive, but her attention remained exactly where it always did when architecture stopped matching expectation.
I stood close enough to reach her without crowding the work, watching the corridor behind us while she checked molding, flooring, and the narrow decorative panels running beside what looked like an ordinary recessed cabinet.
"There."
She pressed against one section and frowned when nothing moved, her attention immediately shifting upward as she reconsidered where the latch might have been hidden.
"Latch is probably higher."
I followed the line of her gaze and saw a carved wooden molding above the cabinet that sat slightly farther forward than the rest.
I reached up and felt the trim shift beneath my fingers before a mechanism released. The panel opened inward less than two inches before catching against something on the opposite side.
A voice came through the narrow gap, young enough and terrified enough to change the urgency of the room immediately. "Hello?"
"We've got him," I said into the radio.
Then I leaned closer to the opening.
"Daniel?"
Silence.
Skye moved beside me.
"Your mum sent us."
That got him.
"She's here?"
"She's out of the lower wing," Skye said. "We're getting you to her."
The panel jerked from inside.
"It's locked."
Of course it was locked. I shoved harder against the panel until something solid and metallic on the other side stopped it from moving farther.
Trigger looked at the hinges.
"Bar on the other side?"
Skye shook her head. "Furniture."
Daniel heard her.
"They put a cabinet against it."
I swore.
"Step away from the door."
"I can't."
The answer changed everything.
"Why?"
"My ankle."
Skye's face tightened.
"What happened?" she called.
"I tried climbing the window."
There were no windows on the public plan. Trigger stepped back.
"Can we breach?"
"Not safely through the panel," Skye said. "Old joinery, but the wall beside it is later construction."
Raze would've been delighted by the prospect of breaking through another wall, although I was considerably less enthusiastic with fire spreading somewhere behind us.
"Which side?"
She pointed.
"Here. Stud wall over older stone opening."
Trigger pulled a compact pry tool from his equipment.
I joined him.
The first section of paneling came away with less resistance than expected.
Smoke curled through the gap behind us, making my eyes burn as we exposed plasterboard and timber framing installed where the original sacristy doorway had once existed.
Whoever converted Saint Brigid's had hidden the old opening rather than rebuilding the stone, exactly the kind of shortcut Skye had taught all of us to recognize.
"Daniel," I called. "Cover your face."
"Okay."
We broke through.
The room beyond was barely larger than a storage closet.
A narrow bed sat against one wall, a chair had been pushed beneath a high window no wider than my shoulders, and a tall cabinet had toppled partly across the concealed door.
Daniel sat on the floor beneath the window with one leg stretched awkwardly in front of him, his face pale beneath dark hair and one sleeve held over his mouth.
He stared at the three of us.
"You're not staff."
"No."
I climbed through the opening and watched as his eyes dropped toward my cut.
"Are you police?"
"No."
"Then who are you?"
"People your mother asked to find you."
That was enough explanation.
I crouched beside him.
"Can I look at your ankle?" He hesitated briefly before nodding.
It was swollen badly, but the angle looked more like a severe sprain than a break. I wasn't willing to trust that inside a burning building.
"Can you stand if I help?"
"I tried."
"And?"
"Fell."
"Right."
I turned slightly.
"Then I'm carrying you."
Fear flashed across Daniel's face, and I realized it wasn't the fire frightening him in that moment; it was the fact that somebody else had just made another decision about his body without asking.
I caught it.
"Unless you want Trigger to do it."
Daniel looked toward the opening where Trigger filled most of the gap before turning back to me. "You."
Fair enough. I slid one arm behind his back and the other beneath his knees, waiting until he nodded when I asked if he was ready before carefully lifting him from the floor.
The kid weighed less than he should have, another quiet piece of evidence showing exactly what the Order considered acceptable treatment of the people under its control.
Skye crawled through the opening first, Trigger followed her, and I passed Daniel carefully into their hands before climbing through myself.
By then the smoke had dropped several feet lower in the corridor, and Cipher's voice came sharply through the radio before any of us had time to pretend the situation wasn't deteriorating.
"Irish, your chapel route is closing."
"Define closing."
"Fire just reached the east electrical chase. Temperature sensors are spiking between you and the main stairwell."
Skye looked toward the opposite end of the corridor.
"Tunnel route?"
"Still open," Storm answered. "But smoke's starting to enter lower hall."
"We're coming."
Then Hawkeye spoke.
"Movement east grounds."
Trigger stopped.
"What movement?"
"Two vehicles. One leaving service lane. One stationary near old gate."
I adjusted Daniel against my chest.
"Vale?"
"Negative. Vale vehicle still tracked south."
"Who?"
A pause.
Then Hawkeye's voice changed just enough that I knew the answer mattered.
"Cipher's sending face match."
My phone vibrated inside my jacket.
I didn't need to look.
Cipher said it anyway.
"Harrow."
Everything inside me went still.
Skye looked at me.
"He's here?"
"Was," Hawkeye corrected. "Black sedan leaving east gate now."
For fifteen years, Gideon Harrow had existed as a name in my father's papers, a voice on a phone, and the shadow behind men who walked into our farmhouse and left four bodies behind.
He had been close enough to Saint Brigid's to watch the evacuation, trigger the building's destruction, and then drive away while the people whose lives he'd controlled were still inside.
Every part of me wanted to turn, hand Daniel to Trigger, get outside, and put myself on that road before Harrow had the chance to disappear again.
The impulse arrived so violently that my body shifted before thought caught up. Then Daniel's fingers tightened in the front of my jacket.
"Don't leave me."
The words hit harder than anything Harrow could have said.
I looked down at Daniel and saw how gray his face had become with fear, his fingers still tangled in the front of my jacket while smoke gathered steadily above us.
Skye stood beside me without saying anything because she knew me well enough by then to understand exactly what I wanted to do and exactly why I couldn't do it.
I touched the radio instead. "Hawkeye, keep eyes if you can. Nobody compromises extraction."
"Copy."