Chapter 156 Reflections
POV: Callum | Main Shelter, The Rookeries
He had the facility blueprint spread across the table but he kept losing the thread of it.
Not because the information was unclear. Silas's contact had been thorough, the sub-basement levels sketched in careful detail, the ward positions marked with the kind of precision that came from someone who had walked those corridors many times. The information was good. The problem was that every time he looked at the cell block on level two, the scale of the rooms registered in a way that his planning instinct couldn't fully override.
The cells were small. He knew what small cells did to adults. He knew it specifically, from six months of silver walls and guards who beat you for entertainment and a cellmate who died screaming from silver poisoning in the middle of the night.
Lily was five years old and she had been in one of those rooms for four days.
He pressed that down and looked at the ward positions again.
The facility ran four defensive layers. External wards on the hospital building itself, keyed to Hermetic Order members and registered allies. Internal wards on the sub-basement stairwell, requiring a specific magical signature to pass without triggering alarms. Cell block wards, individual to each cell door. And a final ward on the lowest level where the primary research operated, which was the most heavily defended and which Silas's contact had marked with a question mark because they hadn't been able to fully map it.
He needed inside help. That was the conclusion he kept arriving at no matter which approach he worked through. A frontal assault on a warded facility with twelve fighters he could reasonably trust in that specific environment, against Hermetic Order mages who had been building this operation for years, was a way to get everyone killed and Lily moved to a secondary location before they got through the second ward layer.
He needed someone who could get them past the first two layers before the alarm went up.
He was still looking at the blueprint when Valentina came in from the street, shaking rain off her coat. She read his expression the way she read most things, which was quickly and accurately.
"You're considering Mordaunt," she said.
"I'm considering every option."
"Mordaunt doesn't give information without cost and the cost is always more than it looks like upfront." She sat across from him. "And he'd want something that compromises the crew. That's the point of his costs."
"I know." He had been through this calculation three times already. Mordaunt as a source was a trap that looked like a resource. "I'm not going to him. I'm just running out of alternatives that don't get everyone killed."
She didn't offer reassurance, which was one of the things he valued about her. She looked at the blueprint.
They sat with the problem for a while in silence.
The anonymous message arrived at eleven that night, slid under the shelter's front door by someone who was gone by the time Tom checked the street. A sealed envelope, his name on the front in handwriting he didn't recognize.
Inside: a second blueprint. More detailed than Silas's, the ward positions mapped completely including the lower level with the question mark, which turned out to be a triple-layered construct requiring three sequential keys rather than one. The guard rotations were noted in the margins with shift change times. And at the bottom of the page, the ward keys themselves, rendered in the precise notation that Hermetic mages used to document their own work, which meant whoever had sent this had access to the Order's internal records.
He read it twice.
At the very bottom, in smaller writing than everything else, two letters.
Someone who remembers what imprisonment feels like. -A
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he looked at Valentina.
"We have everything we need," he said.