Chapter 158 The Decision
The Decision
POV: Callum | Main Shelter, The Rookeries
He made the decision at two in the morning, which was when the last piece of it settled into place and the alternatives finished closing off.
Parliament had voted to investigate. He had received Alteroni's message an hour ago, relayed through Valentina's contacts. The vote was real, the authorization genuine, and Mordaunt had immediately called for a procedural recess that would last at minimum seventy-two hours before implementation could begin. Seventy-two hours was enough time to move twelve children to a secondary facility. It was certainly enough time to move one.
He was not waiting for Parliament.
He went through the shelter room by room, quiet enough not to wake the families sleeping in the upper floors, and gathered the people he needed into the main planning room one at a time.
Valentina was already awake, had been awake when he knocked, sitting in the dark with the particular stillness that full vampires had at rest. Tom came quickly, alert in the way of someone who had been expecting to be called. Isla he found in the medical supply room, reorganizing bandage stock at two in the morning, which was what Isla did when she was worried about something and needed her hands to be busy.
He laid out the plan on the table with the blueprint Ash had sent and the supplementary intelligence Silas's contact had provided.
Twenty fighters. Best he had across the crew. Entry through the hospital's south maintenance access, which the blueprint showed connected to the sub-basement through a service corridor that bypassed the main external ward. Tom handling the first two ward layers sequentially. The guard rotation gave them a seventeen minute window between shift changes on level two where the cell block was minimally staffed. In and out before the upper levels could respond.
He talked through it for fifteen minutes. Nobody interrupted.
When he finished, Isla said, "I'm coming."
"I need you here for when we bring them back. Twelve children, unknown medical conditions, potentially in withdrawal from experiments. I need you here and ready."
She held his eyes for a moment. Then she nodded, which he understood cost her something.
Valentina said, "I'm coming." It was not a question.
Tom said, "Obviously."
He accepted both without argument because he needed them and because arguing would waste time he didn't have.
The knock on the shelter's front door came at two thirty, which was unexpected enough that three fighters had weapons drawn before Callum reached it.
He opened it.
Cormac stood in the rain outside, alone, no pack behind him. He was wearing dark clothes and had the look of someone who had made a decision they intended to stick to regardless of reception.
"Let me prove I've changed," Cormac said. "You need every fighter you have for this. You know you do."
Callum looked at his brother in the rain for a long moment.
Six months of cautious ceasefire. Finn's face. Moira's half-written letter. The expression on Cormac's face during Harcastle's execution, when he had stood in the crowd and looked like a man who was seeing something about the system he'd allied with that he hadn't let himself see before.
"You follow my lead," Callum said. "Every decision in that facility is mine. You don't improvise, you don't act independently, and if I tell you to fall back you fall back. No arguments."
"Understood."
He stepped back from the door and let his brother inside.
The team was assembling in the main room, checking weapons and gear, and the mood in it was the mood that Callum had learned to read in the months since the first shelter battle, a specific combination of fear and purpose that people produced when they understood the stakes and had decided to move anyway.
He was doing a final check of the ward key documentation when the shelter's side door opened.
He turned.
Sarah stood in the doorway. Her face was the face of someone who had stopped performing and wasn't sure what was underneath it yet. She was wearing dark clothes, same as the rest of them. She had a pack over one shoulder and her hands were visible and empty and she was looking at him with an expression that he couldn't fully read and didn't try to.
"Take me with you," she said. "I can get you inside. The external ward on the south maintenance access, the one your blueprint shows bypassing, it doesn't bypass it fully. There's a secondary trigger that's not on any documentation I've seen." She held his gaze. "I know the deactivation sequence. Mordaunt had me memorize it when he thought he might need facility access."
The room was very quiet.
"I want to make this right," she said.