Chapter 200 The Orphan's Filial Love
POV: Ash | The Shelter, then Isla's office
I have been listening to the adults plan for four days from the position I occupy in every room, which is the position of someone the adults have decided does not need to be told things directly and who has therefore been told everything indirectly through the conversations they have around me and near me and sometimes in my specific presence while apparently forgetting that I am there.
The raid on Fell's facility is in three days. I know the building. I know the floor plan in the specific way I know it because I was brought there twice for assessment, transported from the main facility to Fell's basement and back, two visits that I logged with the attention I applied to everything in the facility, which was the attention of someone who understood that information was the only resource available to me.
The eastern stairwell has a motion sensor that trips if you walk up the center but not if you walk close to the wall on the right side, which I know because I tested it on my second visit while the escort was distracted. The preservation room door has a magnetic lock that disengages during power fluctuations, which happen approximately every forty minutes in that building based on the pattern I tracked over six hours of waiting. The security rotation, when Fell had security, was every twenty-five minutes. Now that he is alone, there is no rotation, which means the intervals are longer and more predictable.
I know these things. The adults going through that door without knowing them are going to spend time they do not have finding out.
I go to Isla's office.
She is at her desk with the maps of the Clerkenwell building that the coalition has assembled from three separate sources, none of which are as accurate as what I have in my head, and she looks up when I come in with the expression she has developed for me specifically, which is warm and careful at the same time, the expression of someone who loves you and who is also always slightly afraid of what you have been through.
"The eastern stairwell," I say. "Walk the right wall, not the center. The motion sensor is calibrated for the center of the corridor."
She goes still.
"The preservation room door disengages during power fluctuations," I say. "Every forty minutes roughly. Fell is alone which means security rotation is gone. Intervals are longer." I sit down across from her. "I know that building. I need to tell Callum what I know."
"Ash," she says, and she says it with the quality she says my name when something is difficult, which is fully, using the whole word rather than treating it as a quick sound. "You don't have to do this."
"I know I don't have to," I say. "I want to." I look at her directly, which is something I have been practicing because the facility taught me not to look at adults directly and I am specifically unlearning it. "You saved me. You walked into that first facility and you made sure I got on the boat. You didn't know me. You didn't know any of us. You just did it because it was the right thing." I pause. "There's a child in that basement. Lucia. She's three months from being born and she has never been outside a preservation chamber. Fell is the only person who has ever known she exists." I look at Isla. "I'm not a victim anymore. I'm a survivor. Let me fight."
Isla sits with what I have said for a long time. The office is quiet in the way it is quiet at this hour, the children in the other rooms in the specific reduced noise of a late evening, Estella probably still awake with the blocks, two of the younger ones asleep already.
Her expression moves through several things and arrives at the one that means she has made a decision she is not entirely at peace with and which she is going to act on anyway.
"I'm telling Callum what you told me," she says. "You're coming with me when I tell him."