Chapter 223 The Arrival at Home
POV: Dante | Rookeries, Den and surrounding streets
The ribs are broken on the left side and the right arm is functional but wrong in the specific way that a joint that has been stressed beyond its tolerance is wrong, which is not broken but altered, and the healer who looked at me two hours after the Parliament steps told me three weeks of rest and I told him I would do my best, which neither of us believed.
I walk back to the Rookeries from the Parliamentary medical facility where they brought me after Callum cleared the steps, and the walk takes twice as long as it should because of the ribs and because the specific shock of the afternoon has produced the quality of slowness in me that shock produces, the quality of moving through something thicker than air.
I am expecting the Rookeries to have the quality of grief. I lost my sister at noon and it is now ten in the evening and I am returning to the place where she lived and worked and built something, and I am expecting the place to reflect what happened, to have absorbed the weight of it and be sitting under it the way people sit under things they cannot put down.
The Rookeries does not have that quality.
The Rookeries has the quality of preparation.
The Feral Den has lights in every room and people moving through it with the specific directed quality of people who have a task and who are executing it, supply checking and equipment sorting and the particular focused conversation of groups planning something operational. Tom is at a table with maps. Cormac is across the room with six people I recognize from the facility raids, running through something in the low quick voice he uses when he is briefing rather than discussing.
I stand in the doorway and I look at the room and I understand what I am looking at, which is a rescue operation being assembled, and the specific weight of what that means lands on me with the quality of something that has been suspended and has just been released.
Valentina died at noon. Her daughter is in a facility sublevel under an abandoned hospital in the south of the city. And the people who loved her, the people she built this community with and fought alongside and died for, are not sitting in the quality of grief I expected to find.
They are moving. They are moving toward her daughter.
Cormac sees me first and crosses the room without hurrying, which is the specific Cormac movement that means he has assessed the situation and determined that unhurried is the right approach, and he looks at my ribs and my arm with the evaluating eye of someone who has been injured often enough to read injury accurately.
"You look terrible," he says.
"I feel terrible," I say. "What are we doing?"
"Rescue," he says. He says it simply, which is the right way to say it. "Lucia. Tonight."
I look at the room. I look at Tom with the maps and the fighters being briefed and the operational energy of a place that has been through the worst thing and has decided to keep moving, and I think about Valentina on the Parliament steps, her last words before the stake, and I think about what those words were and who they were for.
Save our daughter.
"I'm coming," I say. "She's my niece."
Cormac looks at me with the expression that means he was expecting this and is not surprised by it and is also going to say the thing that needs to be said about my ribs.
"You can barely stand," he says.
"I can stand well enough," I say. "And I have nine years of facility entry experience, which is more than most people in this room, and I know Fell's documented behavioral patterns from the hunter network's files, which nobody else has. I'm coming."
He looks at me for a moment longer and then he nods, the nod of someone who has weighed it and arrived at the same conclusion.
Callum appears from the back corridor and he looks at me with the specific quality he has had since noon, which is the quality of something stripped down to its essential function, the grief still present but underneath something else, something that has more momentum.
"You're in," he says, which is not a question.
"I'm in," I say.
He nods and moves back toward the maps and I follow and the room closes around us with the specific quality of a team that is an hour from moving.
"We go at midnight," Callum says. "All of us. Twenty fighters, the six of us, and we end this tonight."