Chapter 181 The Boozing-Ken Once More
POV: Callum | The Feral Den
The second large meeting at the Feral Den happens twelve days after the first, and it is bigger than the first, which means word has traveled in the way that word travels through the packless community, person to person, across networks that do not exist in any official register and which are more robust than most official registers because they were built by people for whom official channels had already failed.
There are thirty people beyond my core group. Packless wolves who have been waiting to see whether this was real. A few supernatural community workers from Tom's network. Two hybrid wolves who came down from Leeds when they heard what was happening and who have not said much but have not left either. Jax Ironhide's contact, a woman named Sera who is here in a listening capacity and who has the specific quality of someone whose reports to Ironhide will be accurate and thorough.
Forty-five people, plus my core: Callum, Cormac, Isla, Valentina, Tom.
I read the anonymous note aloud. I read it slowly and clearly and then I put it on the table and let the room look at it.
"It's a trap," Cormac says, because this is what Cormac says, and he says it not from paranoia but from the specific experience of someone who has survived by assuming the worst-case interpretation and being occasionally wrong in a survivable direction.
"Tell me why," I say, because I want the argument, because the argument is useful.
"They know we have the addresses. They know our next move is to raid the other five facilities. The anonymous offer gives them two weeks to move the children to locations Silas's records don't cover, consolidate security, and wait for us to come when we've got no element of surprise." He points at the note. "This is Mordaunt. This is someone sophisticated enough to know exactly what we want to hear."
"It might be Mordaunt," Tom says. "It might also be someone in the Order who has watched the program for years and hit their limit." He looks around the room. "The children who came out of the first facility. Ash. The others. Someone made sure the emergency exits in that facility were unlocked. Someone switched off two of the security cameras on the east corridor for six minutes. We assumed it was luck. What if it wasn't?"
The room absorbs this.
I had not been certain Tom had worked that out. He had, of course.
"The inside contact in the first raid," I say. "If that was the same person, they were already there. They already helped us once without identifying themselves. This could be the follow-up."
"Or it's the cover story designed for exactly this conversation," Cormac says.
He is not wrong. He is also not right in a way that I can demonstrate. This is the problem.
"Forty-one children," says Dara, from across the table. She says it the same way she has said it at every meeting, as the number that holds the weight of the decision. "If we raid and walk into a trap, we're finished as an operation and the children lose the only people currently trying to reach them. If we wait and the insider is genuine, they get out without a raid. If we wait and it's a trap, we've given them two weeks." She looks at me. "What do forty-one children inside those walls do with two weeks?"
I have thought about this. I have not stopped thinking about it.
"We give the insider two weeks," I say. "We give them the two weeks because the upside is forty-one children evacuated and five facilities destroyed and the Order's program set back years, and we spend those two weeks building the backup operation so that the moment the two weeks are up, whether the insider came through or not, we go." I look at Cormac. "We prepare as if it is a trap. We act as if it might not be."
The vote is not formal. It does not need to be. The room has already decided by the time I finish.
Two weeks later, on a night when the rain comes in hard off the river and the city has that specific quality of contained noise that means most people are inside, three facilities burn simultaneously.
I am not at any of them. I am at the Feral Den with a radio and Tom and a map and the taut specific quality of waiting for information that is either the best thing or the worst thing.
The first report comes in at eleven forty-two: Bristol facility engaged, children evacuating north entrance, Order security withdrawing, fire spreading from internal source.
The second report at eleven forty-six: Manchester facility, same conditions, thirty-one children counted out, all mobile, two injured, fire confirmed.
The third at eleven fifty-one: Cardiff.
Forty-one children. The insider kept their promise.
I put the radio down and look at the map and feel something that is not triumph and is not relief and is closest to the specific quality of a weight being redistributed, not removed, redistributed, the understanding that the thing you have been carrying has been acknowledged by the world and that acknowledgment is different from setting it down.
Tom is already on the secondary radio. His voice changes.
"Fell wasn't at any of the three facilities," he says. "He's not at the London facility either. The Edinburgh facility is clean, no children, no staff, abandoned three days ago." He sets the radio down. "He knew. He knew we'd agreed to the two weeks and he used them." He looks at me. "Fell and the embryo are gone."