Chapter 59 Finding Nadia

Chapter 59 Finding Nadia
POV: Calla Voss

Ardeen had the facility address in a document she had been carrying on her person since she walked into the planning meeting three days ago, and she produced it for Maren Solde in the upper hall corridor without being asked twice, which told me she had been waiting for exactly this moment and had not been certain it would arrive.
The summit council moved faster than I expected people who had been reviewing documentation at eleven at night to move.
Three representatives stayed at Blackthorn to manage the restriction on Vex's team and coordinate with the campus administration, which was going to require significant conversation given that the campus administration had two council-connected faculty members currently sitting in their residential apartments unaware that the summit council had just assumed jurisdiction over their institution.
The other nine left with the facility address and a formal dispatch authorization and four summit security officers and two vehicles at two in the morning.
Remy went with them.
Not as a passenger. He went as the primary evidence source, the person who had built the incident map and knew every discrepancy and every access log and every cross-referenced date, the person who could answer questions in real time that the documentation alone could not answer, which was what the council needed in a vehicle moving toward a sealed facility two hours north in the middle of the night.
He found me in the corridor outside the upper hall before they left.
"The restriction on the facility means they cannot move her before we arrive," he said. "The dispatch authorization went through the summit channel. It is legally binding in all twelve jurisdictions."
"I know," I said.
He looked at me the way he had looked at me in the chamber after he said I did not say anything about leaving, without managing the length of it.
"Four hours," he said. "Approximately."
"I will be here," I said.
He went.
I stood in the corridor and listened to the vehicles leave campus through the outer gate, which I could not see from where I was standing but could hear, and then the campus was quiet in the specific way of a place where something significant has happened and the people who were here for it are still here, processing in their separate rooms, waiting for what came next.
I went to find Petra.
She was awake. She opened her door before I knocked, which meant she had been sitting just inside it, and she looked at my face and said nothing, which was the right thing.
I sat on the floor because the chair felt like too much of a decision and the floor was available.
She sat across from me.
I told her about the chamber. Not all of it. The parts that were in the recording she would hear eventually through the council's process, so I told her the parts that were not in the recording, the feeling of the edges dissolving, the floor going missing under my feet, the green light on the panel staying on through all of it.
The way the bond had worked as a boundary.
She listened.
When I was done she said, "Are you all right."
"I do not know yet," I said. "I think so. Ask me in a week."
She nodded like that was a reasonable timeline.
At three in the morning Silas knocked on the open door and came in and sat against the wall and did not say anything for a while, which was so unlike him that it was its own kind of statement.
I looked at him.
"Your father," I said.
He looked at the floor. "Yes."
"You were always going to tell me," I said.
"I was always going to tell you after," he said. "Before was too complicated."
"It is still after," I said.
He looked up. The easy attention was there but the layer under it was visible tonight, the real version, the one that had been running the whole time under the careful portioning and the calibrated timing.
"My father is on the external oversight body that has jurisdiction over council conduct," he said. "The one that exists precisely because the council's internal review structure cannot investigate itself without compromising the investigation." He paused. "He has been trying to build a case against Vex's program for six years. He could not get inside access. He could not get a recording. He could not get a chain of custody that would hold under council challenge." He looked at me. "I came to Blackthorn because I could get those things. Because I was young enough and unknown enough and connected enough through my mother's family to get a scholarship placement without triggering any flags."
I sat with that.
"The unknown number," I said.
"My father," he said. "Running communications through a clean channel because any direct contact with me while I was inside would have been visible."
I thought about one word messages and false timestamps and she's awake and tonight and hurry, all of it coming from a man two hours away building the external case while his son built the inside one.
"Wren," I said.
"Corrine Aldare is my mother's cousin," he said. "Wren is my second cousin. I did not know she was placed in the scholarship program until she told me about the man with the identification who came to her room in week one." His jaw tightened slightly. "I should have gotten her out then."
"She made her own choices," I said.
"Yes," he said. "She did."
We sat quietly.
At four in the morning my phone buzzed on Petra's desk where I had retrieved it from my room an hour earlier.
Remy.
I picked it up.
The message was longer than any he had sent before, which was itself information before I read a word of it, because Remy did not use length unless length was what the information required.
I read it once.
I read it again.
Nadia Corr was alive and in the facility and conscious and able to communicate and not unharmed, the last part delivered in the careful language of someone who knew the details and had decided that the details required a different conversation than a four in the morning message could hold.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I kept reading.
She was not alone in the facility.
Two other students. Both female. Both between seventeen and twenty years old. Both with records in their respective home institutions showing voluntary departures under personal circumstances. Both from academies in different regions, one northeast and one west, neither connected to Blackthorn in any publicly documented way.
I read the final line of Remy's message a third time.
The facility's internal records show six intake files over the past four years. Three students are currently resident. Three prior intakes are listed as concluded and transferred to an unspecified secondary location.
Transferred.
Not released. Not returned to their institutions. Transferred to a location the facility records did not name.
I looked up from the phone.
Silas was watching me.
I turned the phone and held it so he could read the screen.
He read it.
The easy attention left his face entirely.
What was underneath it was not the real version I had been seeing tonight. It was something underneath that, something that had not been visible before, and seeing it told me that six students was not the number his father had been working from and that the external case had just expanded into a shape that was significantly larger than anything the two years of documentation on Remy's wall had mapped.
Petra's hand was on my arm.
I had not noticed her move.
"Calla," she said.
My phone buzzed again.
Remy, a second message, four words.
"There are more facilities."