Chapter 168 The Thames Pirates
POV: Callum | Tunnels Beneath St. Thomas Hospital
The tunnel network ran toward the river, which was why Tom had arranged the boats.
Callum had the layout in his head from Ash's blueprint, the secondary exit that ran northeast from the facility's sub-basement through Victorian brick that predated the hospital above it by forty years, emerging at a maintenance dock on the Southwark bank that the Port Authority had decommissioned in 1987 and which sat unused and unwatched in the specific way that London's forgotten infrastructure sat unused and unwatched, which was completely.
He moved fast, Lily against his shoulder, and counted the children behind him by sound rather than sight because the tunnel was dark and he needed his eyes forward. Twelve sets of footsteps, some steady and some dragging, Cormac at the rear carrying two of the youngest, Sarah on his left with a nine year old holding her hand and moving with the careful deliberateness of a child who had learned to be quiet and was being quiet now because quiet felt safer than anything else.
Ash was beside him, which he had not directed and did not redirect. Ash moved with the focused attention of someone who knew this tunnel from the inside, who had been in this facility long enough to map it through sound and vibration and the particular quality of air movement that told you where the passages branched.
"Left at the second junction," Ash said. Not loud, just clear. "The right branch doubles back toward the hospital. They'll have it covered."
Callum took the left branch.
The Hermetic security team hit them forty meters later.
Four operatives, coming from a side passage that wasn't on the blueprint, which meant they had their own internal mapping that Ash's intelligence hadn't captured. They were human but enhanced, the Hermetic Order's standard security augmentation giving them reflexes and strength that pushed past baseline, and they came in fast with the coordinated movement of people who had run this drill before.
The first one reached Callum in the space of a second and a half.
He handed Lily to Ash without stopping moving, a single fluid transfer that Ash caught without being asked, and then he met the operative with everything the Rookeries and the prison and the fighting pits had built into him over three years, which was considerable and which had no rules attached to it.
He broke the first operative's arm at the elbow with a strike that used the tunnel wall as the third point of the geometry, the crack of it loud in the brick corridor. The operative dropped. The second one came in from the right and caught Callum across the face with something that had silver in it, a rod or a baton, and the burn of it registered as information rather than pain because pain was something he had learned to defer in combat.
He took the hit, used the momentum of it to turn into the third operative who was going past him toward the children, and put that one into the tunnel floor headfirst with enough force that the operative did not get up.
The fourth was Sarah.
She had moved before Callum reached the fourth operative, coming from the left with the combat efficiency of someone who had been trained by the same organization she was currently fighting, and the fourth operative went down hard with a knee strike to the back of the leg followed by an elbow to the base of the skull that was precise and deliberate and left the operative breathing but unconscious.
She looked at Callum across the bodies.
He nodded once. She nodded back.
They kept moving.
The remaining fighters in the tunnel were his crew, covering the children, and the fighting through the next hundred meters was the desperate ugly kind that tunnel combat always was, close and brutal and decided by who was willing to absorb more damage to keep moving. He took two more hits, both silver-adjacent, and filed them for later. One of his fighters went down and could not get up and he made the decision that the mission required, which was to keep moving, and he made it without letting himself fully feel it yet because there were twelve children behind him and feeling things fully was for later.
The tunnel ended in a metal door that Tom had unlocked three hours ago and relocked with a fae seal that looked locked to anyone who didn't know the touch pattern. Callum found the pattern by feel in the dark and the door opened onto cold river air and the sound of the Thames and two flat-bottomed boats sitting low in the water at the decommissioned dock, their engines idling, their operators looking at the door with the tension of people who had been waiting longer than was comfortable.
He got the children onto the first boat.
Ash went last, still carrying Lily, and handed her back to Callum before stepping aboard, and Lily transferred from one set of arms to the other without waking from whatever half-sleep she had found against Ash's shoulder, which was either a mercy or a sign of how far past capacity she was, and probably both.
He was counting heads, twelve children, all present, when the lights hit them from the north bank.
Parliament guards. Six of them on the embankment wall above, two on the dock itself, appearing from the darkness with the coordinated timing of people who had been positioned before the boats arrived, which meant someone had known the exit route.
"Boats stay docked," the lead guard said. "Everyone out. Parliamentary authority."
The exits were cut off. Two boats, twelve children, wounded fighters, and six Parliament guards between them and the river.