2 Sloane #2
The keys were warm under my fingers, greasy at the edges where a hundred hands had worn the letters half off.
My credentials were good—the Lodestone Underground’s forger was the best on the continent and I’d watched him build this Auditor identity layer by patient layer—but good credentials only opened the front doors.
What I wanted lived three floors down in the shadow-servers, behind magical and digital encryption the Conclave had spent three centuries refining.
The Lodestone Underground had sent me here because water flows downhill.
Find the Conclave’s master ledger, and I found the Order’s secrets.
There was exactly one way in that wouldn’t trip an audit flag: it had to look, for every single keystroke, like the reconciliation the Auditor was actually there to run.
So I ran it. Aloud, almost, my lips moving, the very picture of a woman deep in a spreadsheet. Intake variances, receiving logs, the boring capillary paperwork of an evil that thought of itself as a business.
And under the boring paperwork, riding the legitimate query like a remora on a shark, I threaded the real search down through the layers—a request that looked like it was reconciling transport manifests against intake counts, which it was, which is why it was allowed, except that the manifests I was reconciling were the ones the Conclave didn’t think an auditor had any reason to ask for.
The firewall met me at the third layer.
I didn’t force it. Forcing it trips the flag.
I found the seam instead, the place where the legitimate query I was authorized to make brushed up against the classified table I wasn’t, and I sat in that seam and waited, fingers still moving on the surface paperwork, a variance report blooming across the top of my screen for anyone who cared to look. Eighty-three. Every week, eighty-three.
Goddess, the Warden was right, somebody in receiving genuinely could not count.
The seam gave.
The shadow-server unfolded in front of me in a cascade of directories that no auditor’s badge should ever have touched, and my pulse kicked up hard enough that I had to breathe through it.
I was in.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The first thing I found nearly made me believe it.
SCORCHED EARTH — CONTINGENCY, ORDER OF THE ARBITER.
And under it, laid out with the cold thoroughness the Conclave brought to everything, a protocol for the mass elimination of the remaining dormant inventory across the western holdings.
Timelines. Disposal logistics. The euphemisms they used when they meant killing—decommission, sunset, close the ledger—stacked up in neat rows that would have made me sick years ago at the beginning of all this and only made me colder now.
The retreat had burned. The Ridgeline Hotshots had gutted a Verdant Order harvest site and walked two hundred and fifty souls out into the open air.
And the Arbiter’s answer—the Conclave’s administrative head, himself—the file said, had ordered the rest burned before they could be found the same way.
Cut the losses. Salt the earth.
My hand hovered over the trackpad. A fine tremor started in my fingers, traveling up my wrist, vibrating against the hot wire of the Ash Oath.
No.
The word echoed in the empty canyon of my skull. No, no, no.
The air in the Hub thinned to nothing. My chest seized. The seams of my cheap uniform blouse cut into my shoulders as I locked my posture rigid, refusing to let my body collapse.
They’re going to burn them. All of them.
The spreadsheet blurred. Hot, human terror spilled over my lower lashes and dropped onto the laminate desk.
The Verdant Order ran the day-to-day misery—the harvests, the transport, the cages—but they answered to the Conclave.
The Conclave held the purse strings, the ancient treaties, the master ledger.
This still didn’t tell me how much of the Conclave was involved, besides the Arbiter, in ordering a mass sunsetting of the dormant inventory, but the Order would obey.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of women. Thousands of my people, trapped, waiting for a rescue that was never going to come.
“I have to get out of here,” I whispered. The sound scraped against the back of my throat. My hands shook so violently I had to press them flat against my thighs under the desk. “I have to warn them. The Lodestone... we have to move tonight. Pull every safehouse, dump every ward.”
I shoved my chair back a fraction of an inch. The wheels caught on the industrial carpet. I needed to run. I needed to find a chalk mark, a magnetic dead-zone, any sign of an Underground runner to pass the message.
Calm down. I dug my fingernails into my own thighs until the pain gave me a tether. If you run now, the Proctor notices. The floor supervisors notice. You trip the audit flag. You don’t make it to the stairs.
“Think, Sloane, think,” I muttered. My lips barely moved. My eyes darted frantically across the screen. “The Conclave gives the order. The Verdant Order carries it out. The hierarchy is clean—”
It’s too clean.
I forced myself to pull the chair back in. I stared at the words SCORCHED EARTH. My pulse kicked a frantic, uneven rhythm against my collarbone. I pressed my palm flat against my chest, trying to push the panic back down into the dark where I kept my wolf.
It’s a slaughter. We don’t have the numbers to stop a coordinated purge across the western holdings.
The Fireline Pack took out one facility, and the Conclave’s response is to wipe the board?
It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s brutal.
It’s efficient. It’s exactly how vampires and old-world monsters would solve a leak.
I leaned closer to the screen. My breath fogged the plastic bezel of the monitor. “But they’re businessmen. Monsters, yes, but businessmen first.”
The panic started to recede, leaving behind a cold, hollow cavity in my stomach. Something was off. The terror had been so loud it drowned out the instincts I’d honed spending years undercover. I stared at the screen, the Auditor’s mask slipping entirely as the saboteur beneath took the wheel.
“The Conclave doesn’t panic,” I whispered to the empty air between me and the glowing spreadsheet. “The Order panics. The Order scrambles when a facility burns. But the Conclave? The Conclave plays centuries long. They don’t flip the board just because they lost a knight.”
Something in the shape of it was wrong. I ran the numbers again the way Maren used to run them at the kitchen table, out loud, teaching me: never believe the story a document wants to tell you, believe the ledger underneath it, because money doesn’t lie even when men do.
And the money didn’t add up.
Three hundred years. The Order had run this trade for three hundred years, and the whole architecture of it—the harvests, the suppressants, the black-market aurum latens flowing up into Conclave coffers to buy the silence of judges and the loyalty of kings and monsters—the whole thing existed because a dormant was the rarest, most valuable thing they’d ever learned to farm.
You don’t torch the vineyard because one buyer found the address.
Officials up and down the Conclave had their hands in this revenue.
They’d bled the world for centuries to keep it flowing.
They would not, could not, burn their single most irreplaceable asset in a panic over one exposed retreat.
It would cost them more than the exposure ever could.
So Scorched Earth was a lie. A beautiful, expensive, fully-documented lie, sitting right here in the shadow-server where a mole or a raid would be sure to find it.
It was an ambush.
They had laid a trap for whoever might be looking. Like the Lodestone Underground.
Or the Fireline Pack who had just burned their retreat.
The Conclave was going to feed them intel that the dormants were being executed at a specific site, wait for the pack to breach the doors, and slaughter them all.
I opened a secondary command window, threading it through an unmonitored seam the Lodestone used for dead-drops. My fingers flew across the keys, encoding the warning into the underground network. Scorched Earth is bait. Trap. Do not breach.
I hit send. The packet vanished into the dark network. A hollow ache swelled in my chest. I prayed the man whose voice I had heard on the comms was on the receiving end.
I prayed to the moon goddess who had created all wolf shifters that he would read it and keep his pack away from the fire.
I had warned them. Now I needed to find the real target. I put my head down and dug.
Under the reconciliation, under the manifests, under three false-bottomed directories that each cost me a minute I didn’t have and a bead of sweat that ran cold down my spine—there.
A black box. No name on it, or a name that was itself a joke: CONTINUITY OF SUPPLY.
I threaded the last seam. The file opened.
Severance.
I stared at the word. It sat in the manifest like a bloated tick, fat and still.
“Severance?” I mouthed the syllables, testing the weight of them. The word meant nothing. In all my years deep undercover, in every dark corner of the Verdant Order I’d mapped, I had never heard a whisper of it.
Is it just a rebranding? I wondered, my eyes scanning the endless rows of logistics that surrounded the term. Maybe they’re just putting a new label on the old nightmare.
Just weeks ago, I’d helped dismantle the Alchemist’s rig—the horrific machine designed to force active, fully shifted wolves to bleed aurum latens. The Alchemist was dead. The rig was ash. I’d walked away from that believing we had fundamentally crippled their R&D division.
“They can’t have rebuilt the rig already,” I whispered, scrolling down. The hum of the server banks seemed to grow louder in my ears. “The Alchemist is gone. You can’t run that machine without him. Severance has to be a leftover file. A defunct code name for the rig project.”