Chapter 198 Ellen and Katherine
POV: Isla | The Shelter, then Katherine's workroom
Katherine Wilmot arrives on a Thursday morning with a bag over her shoulder and the specific look of someone who has been surviving outside any official structure for long enough that they have developed a particular quality of self-containment, the quality of someone who has learned not to need anything from institutions because institutions have consistently failed to provide it.
I recognize her from the trial. She was sentenced that day to magical suppression and community service, which she clearly did not complete, having escaped during the chaos of the Order's exposure. I know I should report her. I also know that I am not going to report her, because the person standing in the doorway of my shelter has the look of someone who came to help and I have been running on borrowed sleep and inadequate staffing for three months and the help is standing right here.
"I heard about the children," she says. "The hybrids." She sets the bag down. "I can find the ones still missing. The ones not in your shelter. I have a locating spell that responds to hybrid blood markers."
I look at her for a moment. "You escaped sentencing."
"I did," she says, without apology or elaboration.
"And you came here."
"They took my magic once," she says. "The Order's suppression protocols, before the trial. A warden with a dampening cuff and twelve hours in a holding cell, and the magic was just gone, quiet, like a door shut in a room I had lived in my whole life." She looks at me directly. "I won't let them do that to anyone else. Especially not to children who never had a choice about what they were."
I understand her then, in the specific way you understand a person when they have told you the true thing under the official thing, the reason behind the reason.
I show her the medical files on the hybrid children, the ability profiles the fae healers have been building, the gaps where children are presenting markers consistent with activated magic that we do not have the training to assess or support. She reads through them with the focused attention of someone who is genuinely skilled and who is applying that skill, not performing it.
Her workroom is three streets from the shelter, a flat above a pharmacy that she has been using for two months and which has the quality of a working space rather than a living space, the surfaces organized around function. She works while she talks and talks while she works, which is the rhythm of someone whose thinking happens in parallel with their hands.
"You're a medic," she says.
"I'm a healer," I say. "Packless community training and two years at a supernatural clinic before the war."
"Between your biology and my magic we can build a complete picture of each child's ability profile," she says. "Which means we can train them safely. Which means they are not walking around with things they cannot control."
"Like Estella with the blocks," I say.
"Exactly like Estella with the blocks," she says. "Untrained fae magic in a child who has been traumatized does not produce safe outcomes. It produces crises." She looks at me. "I know what I'm doing. And I think you do too. We just need to be doing it together."
The tracking spell she builds over the next hour is intricate in the way that real magic is intricate, which is to say it does not look like anything in particular, it looks like a woman moving her hands in specific patterns over a map of London while speaking under her breath, and then the map has marks on it that were not there before.
Katherine looks at the marks and then at me and her expression changes.
"The embryo in Fell's facility," she says. "I can read her signal. She's alive. She's healthy." She puts her finger on a point in Clerkenwell. "And she is going to be born in approximately three months. Fell is accelerating the gestation."