Chapter 229 A Desperate Achievement
POV: Callum | Fell's facility, St. Thomas sublevel
The service entrance is the one Ash's escaped hybrid mapped for us, which means the layout we have in our heads is accurate to three weeks ago, and three weeks in a facility being managed by a single obsessive person who killed his last assistant two days ago is enough time for things to have changed, so we go in the way you go into a place where the map might not match the territory, which is carefully and with attention to the gap between expected and actual.
Tom goes first at the wards, which is the correct order because Tom's fae ability is the thing that makes the entry possible at all, the wards on the service entrance being the Hermetic Order's standard layered barrier system, three wards stacked and keyed to each other so that breaking the outer one without the second and third causes the whole system to trigger.
I watch Tom work the wards in the specific way I have watched Tom work for three years, which is with the attention of someone who does not fully understand the mechanism and who has learned to read the results rather than the process, and the results tonight are that the first ward comes down in forty seconds and the second in ninety and the third, which is the one that would have triggered the alarm, in four minutes and twelve seconds, which is four minutes and twelve seconds of the team behind me in the specific held-still quality of twenty-six people who understand that moving is the wrong choice right now.
The entrance opens.
Inside, the smell is the same smell I have come to associate with Fell's operations specifically, which is preservation compound and old air and something underneath both of those things, something biological and wrong, the smell of a space that has been used for purposes it was not designed for and which has absorbed those purposes into its walls and floors over years of use.
Cormac moves up beside me and Dante is on the other side and the twenty fighters distribute into the configuration we established at the Den, four groups of five with Tom and Isla as the flexible elements, Tom to address any additional magical barriers and Isla to manage the medical situation when we find the children, which we will find, which is the only version of tonight I am allowing myself to plan for.
The first magical trap is twelve feet inside the entrance, embedded in the floor of the first corridor, the specific kind of Hermetic trap that does not prevent passage but identifies it and sends a signal, a passive alerting system rather than an active barrier. Tom neutralizes it in eight seconds, which means Fell's board in whatever room he is currently in has not received the signal, which means we still have the element of surprise, which is the single most important variable we have going into this.
The second and third traps are in the stairwell down to the sublevel, more active than the first, and the second one activates partially before Tom shuts it down, which means there is a sound, a brief sound, not an alarm but the specific truncated quality of a system that started a process and did not finish it, and after that sound we all stop and hold for thirty seconds listening to the facility's sounds.
What we hear is footsteps from the lower sublevel, the sound of someone moving with the specific urgency of a person who has heard something and who is responding to it, and the movement is in the direction away from us rather than toward us, which means Fell heard the partial activation and has made the decision to move the thing he is protecting rather than to confront what triggered the system.
We move faster.
The third level down is where the main holding area is, based on Ash's information, and the door to it is open, which means it was occupied and recently vacated, and inside there are four children. Three of them are together in the corner farthest from the door, the specific posture of children who have been in enclosed spaces long enough that corners feel safer than open areas, and one of them is already on his feet and moving toward me before I am fully through the door.
Ash.
Ten years old and three weeks of sublevel and still moving toward the rescue rather than waiting for the rescue to reach him, which is the most Ash thing I have ever seen Ash do and which I have no time to process properly because we are inside a facility where the target has already started moving.
"He went deeper," Ash says, and Ash says it with the directed precision of someone who has been tracking Fell's movements and who has the information I need in the exact format I need it. "There's another level. Below this one. He built it after the coalition found the first sublevel. Nobody's records have it." Ash looks at me. "I'll show you."
I look at Cormac. Cormac looks at the four children and then at me with the expression that means he is already calculating the split, who goes down and who stays up and what each group does.
"Isla takes the children," he says. "We go deeper."
Isla is already crossing the room to the children in the specific way she crosses rooms when children need her, which is completely and without looking at anything else.
Ash is already at the far wall, pressing the section of paneling that is not paneling, that is the concealed access to the level below.
"Now," Ash says. "He's running."