Chapter 183 CLXXXIII

Chapter 183 CLXXXIII
Levi's POV

I did not sleep for the first forty-eight hours. There was no conscious decision behind that. Sleep simply did not present itself as an option when Isabel was somewhere I could not reach, in a room I could not identify, with people whose full capability I was still mapping. 

The body did what it did under those conditions, which was run on whatever reserve it had available, and I ran on mine.

Xavier and I worked from the kitchen table of his house because it was the most defensible location I was comfortable with that was not in the pack territory, and because Aria was there, and neither of us was willing to be far from her.

Xavier's resources turned out to be considerably more extensive than I had known. In the two days following Isabel's disappearance, people arrived at the house in ones and twos, individuals I did not recognize who were clearly known to Xavier, who set up equipment in the two spare rooms and the garage and began working with the focused efficiency of people who had done this kind of operation before.

Analysts trackers, both digital and physical. Two individuals whose specific capabilities I could not fully categorize but whose value became clear within the first twelve hours, the kind of people who found things through methods that did not involve standard surveillance channels.

"Who are these people?" I asked Xavier on the first morning, standing in the doorway of the garage watching three of them work over a digital map of the territory and surrounding region.

"People I've worked with," he said. 

"Over the years they know what they are dealing with. The Covenant situation is not new to all of them."

"Pack affiliated?"

"Not in the traditional sense," he said.

"They operate outside pack structures. Which makes them useful in situations where pack channels are compromised."

Which the current situation was. We had a spy who had been active in the pack for months, and while Hall had been identified and contained, the possibility of a second source was still active. 

Using pack resources for the search created the risk of that information reaching whoever was holding Isabel.

Xavier's people operated outside that network.

I accepted them without further question and brought my own resources into the operation alongside theirs. 

Marcus coordinated from the pack side, managing the border security and the ongoing rogue threat while directing information from the pack's intelligence channels to me as it came in. 

He came to the house each day for briefings and left with assignments that fed back into the search Jack arrived on the second day.

He had driven four hours from where Zoe and he had relocated, and he arrived at the house looking like someone who had been moving fast since he decided to come. 

He stood in the doorway with a bag over his shoulder and looked at the operational setup in the rooms beyond me and said, "Tell me where to start."

"Perimeter surveillance," I said.

"Marcus has coordinates for four locations that fit the facility profile we're working from. I need eyes on all four."

"I will take two," he said. "Give me a partner."

I paired him with one of Xavier's people, and they left within the hour.

Zoe arrived the same afternoon she arrived with the twins and a volume of practical supplies that told me she had packed with the intention of staying for a significant period. 

She came through the door and looked at the house and looked at me and then went directly to find Aria, which was exactly right.

Aria had been sick since the second night not seriously, not in the way that required medical intervention beyond what I could manage.

But the combination of standing in rain for an extended period at four-thirty in the morning while in a state of significant stress had done what that combination did to small bodies, and she had developed a fever and a deep cough that had required consistent management for two days.

She had not complained, that was the thing that sat in my chest like something heavy. She had the fever and the cough and the disrupted sleep that came with both, and she did not complain about any of it. 

She asked, every morning when I came to check on her, whether we had found her mother yet. I told her we were looking. She nodded with the same steady seriousness she applied to everything, and then asked whether she could have the yellow cereal.

I bought three boxes of the yellow cereal.

When Zoe arrived and went to Aria's room, I heard the conversation from the hallway. Zoe introduces herself and the twins, Aria's voice responding, and then the sound of Lily and Rose in the room, which was a specific kind of sound that was only possible when two four-year-olds entered a space simultaneously.

Within twenty minutes I heard Aria laugh. It was the first time since the pavement.

I stood in the hallway outside the room and listened to it and felt something in my chest ease by a fraction.

Zoe came out eventually and found me there and looked at me with the expression she reserved for when she was assessing the current state of a person she cared about and was not happy with what she was seeing.

"When did you last sleep?" she said.

"I'm functioning," I said.

"That is not what I asked."

"I'm functioning," I said again.

She looked at me for another moment, then said, "I'm staying, I will handle Aria, the twins will stay with her, you focus on finding Isabel."

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't thank me," she said. "Just find her."

The operational picture developed over the following days in the way intelligence pictures developed, slowly and then with sudden acceleration, gaps filling in as information arrived from multiple directions simultaneously.

Xavier's analysis team identified seventeen locations within a hundred-kilometer radius that fit the profile of the facility we were looking for.