Chapter 141 The Confidence
POV: Sarah | The Rookeries
Three months was enough time to become someone.
Sarah had learned that early, working for Mordaunt. Not pretending to be someone, which was performance and could be read by anyone paying attention. Actually becoming them, which meant letting the edges blur until the role and the person wearing it were genuinely hard to separate. She had been a grieving ex-girlfriend seeking redemption. She had let herself feel the guilt that version of Sarah would feel, let herself mean the apology she'd delivered to Callum, let herself be moved by the shelters and the wolves and the community that Isla had built.
The problem, three months in, was that some of it had stopped being performance.
She set that thought aside. She was good at setting thoughts aside.
She was patching a section of roof on the main shelter with Drez, who was nineteen and enthusiastic and had no idea she'd reported his daily schedule to Mordaunt's contact three weeks ago. The work was physical, which she preferred to thinking. Pass the material, press it flat, seal the edge. Rain came sideways through the Rookeries in winter and the shelters leaked in four places and there was never enough time or supplies to properly fix them.
Which was getting worse. Isla had mentioned twice in the last week that the supply applications weren't moving. Callum had gone quiet in the particular way he went quiet when he was angry and didn't have a target for it yet. The crew was feeling the slow pressure of it, not dramatically, but in the way that constant small shortages wore at people. Shorter tempers. Longer silences over meals.
She filed that in the part of her mind that was always working.
"You've been here three months," Drez said, from his side of the roof. He said it conversationally, not accusatory.
"Feels longer," she said.
"Good longer or bad longer?"
She considered. "Good. I think." She pressed the sealant flat along the edge. "I spent a long time running from things. This is the first place I've stayed because I wanted to."
It was mostly true. That was the trick of good cover: mostly true, with the parts that mattered adjusted.
Drez nodded like it made sense to him. He went back to work.
She'd been careful with Callum. Patient. She understood that his trust was not given quickly and that rushing it would end her access entirely. She had let him set the pace, taken whatever role he offered, proved herself useful in combat and logistics both. She was genuinely a good fighter. That part required no performance.
Valentina still watched her. Not constantly, but in the way that a good operative watched someone: occasional, unannounced, measuring. Sarah had been careful to give Valentina nothing to find. She changed her reporting days. She never used the same route to her contact point. She had stopped making excuses for her absences and started simply being absent less, which was a calculated sacrifice of information flow for the sake of survivability.
What she'd sent in the last month had been careful, measured, exactly useful enough to maintain her position without triggering the kind of alert that got someone like her removed from the field.
Last week had been different.
She had been in the wrong corridor at the wrong moment, which was not something she let happen by accident. Isla had been talking to one of the new shelter arrivals, a young wolf girl who had been at the battle and had stayed. The conversation had been about medical care, about the child, about the ongoing work of keeping the most vulnerable residents stable.
The child.
She had been hearing the name for weeks. Hybrid child. Fell's target, pre-battle. Isla had moved her after the battle, which meant her location was not common knowledge.
But Isla trusted her now.
Not completely. Isla didn't trust anyone completely, which was why she was still alive. But enough to talk near her. Enough that when Sarah had asked a careful question three days after that corridor moment, phrased as concern rather than inquiry, Isla had answered it.
She knew which building. Which floor. Which room had the reinforced lock.
She had sent the report that night.
She sat on the roof and passed Drez the sealant and listened to him talk about a girl he liked in the northern shelter and felt the specific quality of something she didn't have a clean name for. Not guilt. She had trained the guilt out of herself years ago and what remained was more complicated. A kind of gravity. The weight of knowing that what she had just sent would set something in motion, and that the child in that room with the reinforced lock was not a target she had ever been comfortable with.
She set that aside too.
The roof was almost done.
"You're good at this," Drez said, surveying their work.
"Staying useful," she said. "It's what I know how to do."
That evening, Mordaunt's contact sent back a single line of confirmation.
The child is still there. We proceed.