Chapter 191 You're Like Her
THIRD PERSON POV
Leo noticed the change before anyone told him anything.
It was in the way the guards moved. He had been tracking guard behavior since his second day in the facility and he knew their patterns with the thoroughness of someone who had nothing more important to do than observe. Variation from pattern was information.
He told Daphne.
“They’re moving us,” he said quietly.
She looked at the guards near the door and then back at him. “How soon?”
“Tonight or early morning. Look at the one on the left — he’s wearing his outdoor gear. That’s not standard for an inside shift.”
She absorbed this with careful consideration.
Leo had been right because they were moved before sunrise.
Blindfolded this time, all of them. The first time, not blindfolding him had been a statement of confidence, an assertion that it didn’t matter what he saw because he wasn’t going anywhere. This time, the blindfold said something had changed. Someone was worried about what he might observe and use.
He counted the time and the turns and the sounds and the smells, building the new route in his head with the same systematic attention.
They arrived somewhere smaller. He could tell by the way the sound changed when they were brought inside, very little to no echo, and it wasn't as cold. It had to be a repurposed building because it wasn’t in the palace.
When the blindfolds came off, Leo looked around. The other children were doing the same. Taking stock and adjusting to new surroundings with the speed of people who had become practiced at adaptation.
Daphne appeared by his side, slightly leaning in so no one could hear them.
“This is an entirely different place,” she said.
He nodded, “Yes. It is by the edge of the territory, I think. We traveled about forty minutes and the road changed texture about halfway through. Which suggests we left the main routes.” He kept his voice below the ambient noise of thirty children settling into a new space. “We’re not in the palace anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means something changed.” He looked at the guards, who had taken their positions with the efficiency of men executing a familiar drill. “Something happened that made them move us quickly.”
He thought about Brianna. About whether she had made it home, whether the necklace had reached his mother, whether his parents were coming. He had no way to know. He had not had a way to know for weeks and he had made peace with that, made peace with the fact that his job was to stay ready on his end and trust that his parents were doing what they did on theirs.
But the move suggested something had disrupted Landon’s timeline.
That was either very good or required careful navigation.
“You’re thinking,” Daphne said.
“I’m always thinking.”
“You’re thinking harder than usual. Your jaw does something when you’re thinking hard.”
He was briefly annoyed and then set it aside because she wasn’t wrong and it wasn’t useful to be annoyed about true things.
“I need paper and something to write with,” he said. “When they bring dinner, see if you can get something from the guards. Tell them I want to draw something for the king.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“He likes to say that I’m creative,” Leo said. “It’s the one thing I’ve been willing to give him. He’ll say yes.”
She nodded.
They settled in and Leo spent the hours watching the new space with the same systematic attention he had applied to the old one, mapping it, looking for the things that mattered. The exits. The blind spots in the guard rotation. The structural features that might be relevant. He was building toward something and he was almost there — almost at the point where the pieces he had assembled would be enough to act on rather than merely observe.
They brought the food not very long after that conversation, and the guard said yes to paper and ink, which confirmed that Landon had instructed them to keep Leo comfortable even in transit.
Landon’s attachment to him remained operative even in the chaos of the move.
Leo drew carefully the face of the little girl Daphne and the others had described, the one used as bait, the one who had appeared on the road outside school and started crying and led them toward the men who were waiting.
He asked three more children for their description of her that evening, cross-checking details, refining the image.
When he was satisfied, he looked at the result.
The girl was perhaps eight or nine. He had asked enough people to be confident in the broad accuracy of the portrait even if the finer details were approximations.
He would need to get this to his mother.
One thing at a time.
When the dinner invitation came for him. He confirmed one thing, Landon’s schedule was personal and not dependent on the facility. Leo smoothed his expression into something cooperative and followed the guards.
Landon was already seated, which was his habit.
“I apologize for the disruption,” he said, as Leo sat. “I received concerning intelligence and I had to respond to it. I hope the children aren’t too unsettled.”
“They’re resilient,” Leo said. Which was true and which was not an answer to what Landon had asked.
“Like their Luna.”
Leo did not respond to that.
“Eat something,” Landon said. “You look tired.”
“I’m always tired,” Leo said. “The floor isn’t comfortable.”
“I’ve offered you a proper room.”
“And I’ve explained why I’m not going to take it.” Leo looked at him steadily. “You know why.”
Landon looked at him with the same expression he always wore when Leo said something that confirmed a belief he had about him. Something that looked like pride and was something else entirely.
“You’re remarkably like her,” he said.
Leo kept his face still and thought about his mother standing in a gathering with her power moving through her and holding it back because she had decided to, and thought about strength that looked like stillness, and decided that being told he was like her was the best thing Landon had said to him in weeks.
He did not say so.
He just picked up his fork and began the careful work of appearing to eat while actually eating almost nothing, and let Landon talk, and listened to everything.