2 Sloane
The dropper wouldn’t stay steady, and that was the wolf’s fault.
I had it pinched between two fingers, tilted over my left eye, and my own hand kept betraying me with a fine tremor that ran up from somewhere under the breastbone. I braced my elbow against the cold edge of the sink.
Better.
The single bulb over the mirror buzzed and threw everything the color of old teeth—the porcelain, my knuckles, the face I’d built for this job and hardly recognized between the brown lenses that drowned what I actually was.
Head back. Ceiling tiles, water-stained, a rust bloom shaped like a new continent.
I squeezed.
The drop hit and the scream started somewhere behind my eyes and rolled down through my whole nervous system.
My knees wanted the floor. I locked them.
I gripped the sink with my free hand until the porcelain edge bit a white line into my palm, and I rode it, breathing out slow through my teeth in one long unbroken hiss while the dead-magic reached down my optic nerve and found the gold and started eating it back down into the dark.
Not yet. Not yet. Go back to sleep. Please, go back to sleep.
The wolf had been asleep for years and then a stranger’s voice had come off a comm channel—drop the wards, even if it means killing me—and she had stood straight up out of the grave I’d dug for her and she had not lain back down since.
Every dose was a fresh murder I committed against the best part of myself, and she knew it, and she made me feel every inch of it going down.
The pulse points went next. They always did.
Both wrists first, twin brands lighting up under the skin where the Ash Oath sat coiled, the vow I’d sworn at fourteen to keep the safehouses invisible—and it was singing tonight, a hot wire drawn taut from the inside of each wrist and the hollow of my throat, all three points aimed the same direction the wolf was aimed.
West. Toward him. Whoever he was.
The Oath had never done this before he spoke. Years of silence and then one man’s voice and now my own binding-magic strained toward him like it wanted to slip its knots and run.
I pressed the heel of my hand hard against the inside of my left wrist and held it there until the burn dulled to something I could stand.
The second eye was worse. It’s always worse when you know what’s coming.
I tilted my head back again and told myself the thing I always told the intake girls their first night in a Hearthward, when they were shaking apart from a scent-flood they had no name for: it passes, sweetheart, everything passes, just breathe until it does.
I told it to myself in my mother’s voice because my own wasn’t steady enough to be believed.
I squeezed.
White. Then nothing. Then the slow crawl back, the room reassembling itself around me tile by jaundiced tile, and the tears that ran down and dripped off my jaw into the sink were faintly gold going clear as they hit the porcelain, the last of her, scorched out and rinsed away.
I straightened up. Ran the tap. Watched the gold thin to water and swirl down.
In the mirror the Conclave Auditor looked back at me—brown-eyed, mild, forgettable, a woman with a laminated badge and a tension headache and absolutely nothing to hide. I’d built her from the ground up, the ultimate urban nothing, and she was flawless, and I hated her.
I braced both hands on the sink and looked at her and let myself have exactly three seconds of the truth underneath.
He’s out there. He heard me and I heard him and I put poison in my eyes to keep from finding him.
Three seconds. That was the whole allowance.
Fifty dormants and hundreds of potentials had walked free out of that Verdant Order hell hole they’d styled as a retreat center and there were hundreds more I hadn’t reached yet.
I straightened my collar. I smoothed the tremor out of my hands by sheer stubbornness. I picked my clipboard up off the back of the toilet where I’d wedged it.
A knuckle rapped the frame of the restroom entrance, brisk, entitled.
“You about done in there? We’ve got the mid-shift reconciliation in nine and Broca wants the ledger tie-out on his desk, not the floor.”
A Proctor. Charcoal suit, clipboard of his own, the impatience of a man who’s memorized a rule for every occasion and loves each one like a child. His pallor was just a little too waxy, his blinking rhythm a fraction too slow. Yesterday, I’d pegged him as a reanimated corpse.
My shoulders rolled loose, my chin came up, a warm crinkle stamped itself around my eyes.
I turned from the mirror and left the bathroom with a laugh already halfway out of my mouth.
“Nine minutes? Oh, you’re a saint for the warning, I’d have been in here reorganizing my highlighters till noon.
” I clicked my pen and tucked it behind my ear, all bustle, harmless.
“Reconciliation, right—tell me it’s not the Q-three intake variances again, because I swear on my mother somebody in receiving cannot count to a hundred without losing the plot around eighty. ”
His mouth twitched. Give a rules man a fellow sufferer to complain with and he’ll forget he ever wondered who you were. Or maybe a low-level thrall, I thought, watching his stiff posture. Some poor human drained of blood and personality, doomed to push papers for eternity.
“Eighty-three, specifically,” he said. “Every single week.”
“Eighty-three!” I threw my free hand up like he’d confirmed the location of buried treasure.
I walked toward him instead of away, because a person with something to hide keeps her distance and a person with nothing to hide crowds you a little, touches your sleeve.
“See, this is why I love working with people who actually pay attention. Walk me down? You can tell me exactly whose head to bite off.”
My blood was still turning to slush in my veins.
My wrists still burned where the Oath strained west. My molars were locked so hard against the shudder that my jaw ached clear up into my ears.
He didn’t clock a single beat of it. He fell into step beside me, already three sentences deep into the sins of the receiving department, and I made all the right noises and steered us both out onto the Hub floor.
I’d been undercover in maybe a dozen different Verdant Order facilities by now, but this wasn’t one of them.
This time, Lodestone Underground had sent me straight into the throat of the beast—a Conclave administrative hub—to pull intel on the Order from the top down.
The Conclave didn’t smell like the Order’s cheap bleach and sad, fake lavender.
It smelled like the dust inside an antique clock, dry and suffocating, layered over burnt coffee and the faint, copper tang of blood scrubbed out of expensive wool.
Exits. Two obvious—the badge doors north and east. One less obvious, the freight lift in the southwest corner behind the pallet racks, keyed but old, the kind of lock that predated the good wards and never got upgraded.
Three cameras I could see, dead cone under the second one where the ceiling truss blocked the sweep.
The Proctor beside me kept talking. I kept nodding. A mind-flayer trapped in middle management? A goblin wearing a tailored suit?
Sightlines. Broca’s office glassed off on the mezzanine, blinds half down, a shape moving behind them.
The floor supervisors clustered at the standing desks by the north wall where the light was best. The terminal bank I wanted sat along the east run, mid-row, angled so its screen faced the wall and not the mezzanine glass—whoever’d laid this floor out had done me one free favor and never known it.
And on the desk I was steering us toward, in a little magnetic tray meant for spare styluses, a single paperclip had drifted off the pile and stood on end, turning. Slow. Steady. Counter-clockwise.
My stomach dropped a floor.
I didn’t break stride. I didn’t look at it twice. I laughed at whatever the Proctor said—something about the receiving manager’s parking habits—and I set my clipboard down on the desk beside the tray, casual, and let my sleeve brush the little magnetic dish as I leaned in to log on.
Under my breath I did the math a Lodestone Underground Chalk-Runner does before her feet ever move.
Counter-clockwise meant a dead-zone bloom.
Somebody’s tracking-magic had gone blind in a hundred-yard radius, and metal remembered it, spun toward a north that wasn’t there.
It could mean the Underground had a runner close, spoofing the Seekers to move a dormant through.
It could mean a safehouse two blocks over had gone dark.
Or it could mean nothing.
Cheap magical magnets do cheap things. I filed it and let it go, because a woman who stares at a spinning paperclip is a woman with a secret, and I had nine minutes and a firewall to get through.
“You know what, you’ve saved my whole morning,” I told the Proctor, dropping into the chair, sliding my badge across the reader.
“Go head off Broca before he works himself up—tell him the tie-out’s coming, I just have to pull the intake variances so I’ve got receiving dead to rights.
Then we crucify them together at reconciliation. ”
The magic word. Crucify.
He beamed like I’d made him employee of the month, a jagged, vicious delight lighting up his dead eyes, and I finally had it.
Not a zombie. Not a thrall. Some breed of minor demon, summoned from the pit purely to audit ledgers and revel in the punishment.
He peeled off toward the mezzanine stairs, and I turned to the screen and let the warmth drain out of my face by degrees, not all at once—somebody might glance over and a face that goes blank too fast reads wrong—just a slow settle into the mild concentration of a clerk doing clerk things.
Inside, the exhausted thing that was actually me put its head down and started to work.