Chapter 161 The Interview
POV: Sarah | Back Room, Main Shelter, The Rookeries
They put her in the back room with two fighters at the door and Callum across the table, which was where she had expected to end up eventually and which was, when it arrived, both exactly as she had imagined and nothing like it.
She had imagined it with more anger from him. She had worked with enough people who had been betrayed to know what it looked like, the heat of it, the way it moved through a person and came out as volume or violence or the particular cold that was worse than both. She had prepared for cold.
What she got was a man sitting across a table from her who looked like someone who had been awake for three days and had made peace with the fact that exhaustion was not a condition he was going to escape anytime soon. He looked at her with the assessment she had come to recognize as his default mode, reading everything and committing to nothing until he had enough information to be worth committing to.
Valentina was in the corner behind him, arms crossed, not hiding the fact that she would remove Sarah from the building herself if Callum gave the word. Isla was in the doorway, which was not quite inside and not quite outside, which told Sarah something about the dynamic between her judgment and Valentina's.
"Start from the beginning," Callum said. "Not the cover story. The real beginning."
She started from the real beginning.
Mordaunt had approached her fourteen months ago, before she had gone to Callum asking forgiveness, before the Battle of the Rookeries, when she had been living alone in the East End and running low on the resources that made living alone possible. The approach had been through a contact she trusted, which was how good approaches worked, the first conversation casual enough that she had not understood what she was agreeing to until she was already three conversations in and the picture had become clear.
He had her sister.
Not physically, not in a cell somewhere. But Clara had been a blood club regular for two years, had taken the venom three times in the first six months, which meant the dependency was set and the withdrawal was severe enough that without access to regular feeding she would be in genuine physical crisis within weeks. Clara was a thrall and she did not know she was a thrall because the venom also produced the particular quality of willingness that the consent laws had been designed to address but which the consent laws could not retroactively undo.
"Get us information," Mordaunt's contact had told her. "Keep your sister's access to the club secure. That's the arrangement."
She had told herself it was manageable. She had told herself she could control what she passed and what she withheld. She had told herself a version of this story that let her keep doing it, which was the same story every operative told themselves in the early stages of an arrangement they had not fully understood when they agreed to it.
She told Callum all of this without the version that made her look better. She was past the version that made her look better.
"The facility," she said. "I've been inside three times. Mordaunt had me deliver documents to Fell's contact in the sub-basement. I know the layout from the maintenance level down to level two." She set her hands flat on the table. "I know Fell's schedule. He arrives at seven in the morning and leaves by nine at night. He's not there overnight. The overnight staff is smaller, less specialized. If you go at three in the morning you hit the smallest guard rotation and the highest probability that Fell is not in the building."
"The secondary trigger on the south maintenance ward," Callum said.
"Five rune sequence. I have it memorized." She met his eyes. "I'm not giving it to you and sitting here while you go. I'm coming with you and walking you through it in real time."
"Why," Valentina said from behind him. Not a question. A test.
"Because Clara is somewhere in Mordaunt's club network and I have no leverage to get her out unless I have something to trade," Sarah said. "And the only thing worth trading is the facility. Full exposure, Parliamentary investigation, Hermetic Order dismantled." She looked at Callum. "That's what burns Mordaunt's operation to the ground. That's what gets my sister back."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Valentina said, "Don't trust her."
Isla said, from the doorway, "We need every advantage we have."
Callum looked at Sarah across the table for a long time. She held the look without flinching, because flinching was something she was done with.
"You come with us," he said. "But if this is a trap, you die first."
She nodded.
"I know," she said.