Chapter 221 The Effect of Oriental Tobacco
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, Sibyl's papers
Sibyl left papers.
This is something Tom told me on the first day and which I filed in the part of my mind that was filing things for later because the first day was not a day for papers, and the second day was not either, and the third day was the day Moira came and asked me where Lucia was and I asked the same question back, and on the fourth day I am asking it of the papers.
Sibyl died four months ago, before the facility raid, before the execution, before any of this section of the story that I am living through, and she left her papers to Tom, which is where papers go in my world, to Tom, who catalogs and cross-references and maintains and who brought them to me this morning without commentary because Tom understands when commentary is not useful.
Sibyl's papers have the quality of Sibyl, which is the quality of someone who saw things and wrote down what she saw with the specific precision of someone who understood that the seeing was not reliable but the writing was, that the record could be checked against events later even if the events were not yet legible at the time of writing. The earlier papers are full of things that have already happened, the Rookeries, the facility raids, the execution that she could not have known would happen and which she described in the specific veiled language that visions require, and reading them now is the specific disorientation of seeing events I have already lived described in the past tense of something that was seen in advance.
I am looking for Lucia.
I find her in the final pages, which are dated two weeks before Sibyl died and which have the quality of the last things she wrote, a different quality from the earlier pages, more compressed, more precise, the specific quality of someone saying the most important things in the time they have.
"The daughter lives two months more," the passage reads, and it is one of the longer passages in the final pages, which means Sibyl considered it important enough to extend. "Underground, beneath the healing place. The broken children know. The finder will come from inside."
I read it three times. I read the surrounding passages for context and find that the healing place appears twice in the earlier papers in connection with the Parliamentary medical infrastructure, which is centered around St. Thomas, the old supernatural hospital on the south side, which was abandoned in the conflict's second year and which has been sitting vacant since.
Beneath the healing place. Beneath St. Thomas.
Fell's facility. The one we breached the outer level of and found empty. The one where he moved the equipment to the sublevel that the records did not show because Silas's records were from before the sublevel was constructed.
Beneath the healing place. Underground. The broken children know.
Ash. The hybrid children who are still inside, who know the layout, who know Fell's patterns, who have been in the sublevel for three weeks.
The finder will come from inside.
The knock at the Den's door comes at five in the afternoon and the runner who brings the message to my room has the out-of-breath quality of someone who has run the whole way, and the message is short, delivered verbally rather than written because whoever sent it did not have time for writing.
A child. Young, hybrid, came in alone at the south entrance, injured, asking for me by name. Saying she knows where the others are. Saying she escaped from a building under the old St. Thomas site.
I am standing before the runner finishes the last sentence.
I find Cormac in the corridor and the look on my face tells him what the look on my face always tells him, which is that something has shifted and we are moving.
"Brother," he says, and he says it with the specific careful quality he has used since noon three days ago, the quality of someone managing me as well as the situation. "You're not thinking clearly."
"I have never been clearer," I say. "We end this tonight."