Chapter 20 chapter 20

Chapter 20 chapter 20
Convergence

Soren came back through the door at seven forty-three in the morning with the expression of someone whose perimeter check had produced information they weren't happy about.

"Solenne's operatives are in the city." He said. "Civilian configuration, moving in pairs. I saw three of them in the two blocks south of here. They're working a grid search from the last known position, which puts them approximately forty minutes from this location at their current pace."

Nyx didn't look up from her device. "I know. I picked them up on the movement feed six minutes ago."

He stared her down in a 'So you know, and you sitting so quietly there?'
"Then you know we have a shrinking window."

"I know."

Soren looked at Elias. Elias was sitting at the table with the disc in front of him and his hands flat on either side of it.

"Tell us," Nyx said. She put her device down. "What was in the message?"

He'd been waiting for them both to be in the room. He looked at Nyx, then at Soren, then he began.

"She told me what I am, though not differently from what you've told me, but in more detail, the parts that come from someone who carried the Void for long enough to understand it from the inside rather than from documentation." He paused. "She told me about the transfer and what it cost her. What she expected it to give me."

He wasn't going to give them all of it. Some of what the message contained was his, and was going to stay that way. He gave them what they needed.

"She told me about the seal. That she placed it herself, at the transfer, and built it to hold until I was old enough and grounded enough to survive the waking without destroying everything around me." A pause. "She said nineteen years was longer than she'd planned for. She said she was sorry for that."

The flat was quiet.

"She told me she'd been trying to reach me for two years. The signal was the third attempt. The first two didn't get through."

Nyx's expression shifted by a fraction. She'd been running the monitoring protocol for two years. The first two signals hadn't registered on her equipment, which meant they'd been sent in a frequency she hadn't been calibrated for, which meant whoever was holding his mother had been interfering with the transmission, and the third attempt had found a way around the interference.

His mother had found a way around eighteen years of captivity to send her son his name in a frequency only he could receive.

He picked up the disc and put it in his jacket pocket next to the folded paper.

"She told me where she is."

Soren was very still.

"It's not outside the city," Elias said. "It's not in the demonic consortium's territory or the divine order's district or anywhere on the treaty's geographic map." He looked at both of them. "It's in the part of Caelis that isn't on any map. The territory that both orders have removed from every record they control."

Nyx didn't go pale. But she set both hands flat on the table in front of her, and her posture changed.
Soren sat down, the weight of the information too much for him, and he needed to process it. He didn't sit with his usual controlled manner. He plopped down on the seat, like his legs were suddenly too heavy to carry him.
He put both elbows on the table and looked at the surface. Nyx gave him some minutes to process the information before she spoke again. 
"How specific were her coordinates?" She asked Elias.
"It's specific enough. She's been there for eighteen years. She knows exactly where she is."
"And she told you in the disc?"
"Yes," Elias confirmed.
Nyx looked at Soren. He was still looking at the table. The color hadn't come back to his face.
Outside the safe house window, the city was moving through its normal morning. People were going to work, the street traffic building toward the mid-morning peak, the ordinary business of four million people who had no idea that twelve of Solenne's operatives were moving through their streets in a grid pattern or that the oversight council had been processing an emergency disclosure since six in the morning or that the three people in the flat above the dry cleaning business were sitting with information that was going to require all of them to go somewhere none of them wanted to go.

Nyx's device signaled. She looked at it.

"The oversight council has issued an emergency suspension of my father's operational authority." She said it without expression. "It's a pending investigation , and it's effective immediately."

"That stops the retrieval operation," Elias said.

"It stops him from authorizing new operational activity. The twelve already in the field are mid-deployment. It'll take time to recall them." She put the device down. "We have less of a window than we did ten minutes ago."

Soren finally looked up.

"You said the unmapped territory." He said it quietly, to Elias, directly. "You mean the specific zone. The one that doesn't appear on the treaty maps, the pre-treaty surveys, or the historical geographic records. The one that both orders removed simultaneously from every document they controlled."

"Yes."

"You understand that both orders don't agree on anything. They haven't agreed on anything in fifty years of managed non-war except the treaty terms and two minor boundary adjustments." His voice was very controlled. "The fact that they agreed to remove something from the record means they both looked at it and decided that pretending it didn't exist was preferable to the alternative."

"I understand that."

"And you want to go there."

"My mother has been held there for eighteen years," Elias said. "Yes. I want to go there."

Soren looked at him for a long moment. Then he said the name.

He said it the way you said the name of something you'd spent a significant portion of your life hoping you'd never have to say out loud. 

The name sat in the air of the flat.

Elias looked at him.

"Yes." He said. "That one."

He looked at Nyx, then back at Soren.

"We need to go there tonight."