Chapter 179 The Tavern at Friuli
POV: Callum | The Feral Den
The Feral Den after a successful raid has a specific atmosphere that I have come to recognize and which is different from the Feral Den after a hard night or an ordinary night. It is not celebratory. It is the atmosphere of people who have done a difficult thing and who are processing the fact that it needed to be done, and who are trying to work out what doing it has cost them and what it means they need to do next.
We saved twelve children. One died in the water, between the facility and the boats, and that is a weight I am not going to put down and I know it and I have put it in the part of myself where I keep things I carry permanently.
Eleven children are in the Den's back rooms. Isla has been with them continuously since the raid, twenty hours straight, sleeping in four-hour increments on a cot by the door. Most of them are not talking yet. Two of them did not stop screaming for the first six hours. One of them, a boy who cannot be older than seven, is sitting in the corner farthest from the door and has not moved in two days except to eat.
Ash is the exception. Ash is ten years old and a hybrid and has been in the facility for three years and should by every reasonable expectation be the most damaged of them, and instead Ash is helping Isla. Ash carries food to the smaller ones. Ash sits with the boy in the corner and doesn't speak, just sits there, which is apparently the correct thing because the boy has stopped trying to press himself through the wall when someone is with him. The specific competence of a child who learned very early how to manage being in a terrible place.
I don't know what to do with Ash. I don't mean that as a problem. I mean I have not yet worked out how to honor it.
We debrief in the main room, forty people around tables pushed together, my people and the packless wolves who ran the boats and Tom's network and Cormac, who has been here since the raid with the particular quality of someone who has made a decision and is inhabiting it, which is different from his previous quality of someone managing competing obligations.
"Five facilities remain," I say. "We have addresses. Three of them are in cities we can reach. The other two are accessible but harder."
"Parliament's mobilized," says Tom. He has the rundown from three separate sources. "The dock incident put them on formal alert. Mordaunt's framing it as an attack on licensed research. Security at the facilities will be different now."
"How different?"
"We don't have current intel. We have Silas's records, which are good but old." Tom sets down the maps. "The facility we hit had six guards. The others may have more now."
"And the children inside them," says one of the packless wolves, a woman named Dara who has been part of every operation since the beginning. "Forty-one. Maybe more if there are subjects Silas's records didn't capture."
The room absorbs that. Forty-one. It is the number I wake up with.
"Can we hit all five?" Cormac asks.
"Not simultaneously," I say. "Not with our current numbers. Sequentially, maybe, if we move fast enough that they can't transfer the children between facilities when they realize we're working down the list."
"Or," says Tom, and he says it in the voice he uses when he has been sitting on something and has decided the moment has arrived to introduce it, "we wait."
He slides a piece of paper to the center of the table. Plain paper, handwritten in a precise unhurried script that belongs to someone who is comfortable with documentation. No signature. No identifying information.
It reads: Don't raid the facilities. I'm burning them from inside. Give me two weeks. The children will be evacuated first. - A Friend in the Order.
The room is quiet in the way rooms are quiet when something has just changed the terms of the conversation.
Cormac speaks first. "It's a trap."
"Maybe," says Tom.
"Obvious trap. They know we have the addresses. They know we're planning raids. This is them buying time to move the children somewhere we can't find them."
"Maybe," Tom says again. "Or it's real. And if it's real, it means someone inside the Hermetic Order has decided they've had enough, and they can reach all five facilities in ways we cannot."
"And if we wait and it's a trap," Cormac says, "we've given them two weeks."
I am looking at the handwriting. The precision of it. The specific detail of children will be evacuated first, not facilities will be emptied, not the program will be ended, but that particular phrase, which is the thing I would have asked about if I had been able to ask.
"Two weeks," I say. "We give them two weeks. And we spend those two weeks preparing the backup plan anyway."
Cormac looks at me across the table.
"Forty-one children," I say. "We can't afford to be wrong either way."