Chapter 199 Clean Drawing
ELIJAH
Hazel ran in, which she never did, and I knew before she opened her mouth that something had broken.
“The children are back,” she said. “All of them. They started arriving in the pack about an hour ago. Parents are at the gates.”
I stood up from the desk so fast the chair scraped back. “Leo?”
“Not yet. But the others. All of them have returned. Some of them look rough but they’re alive and they’re home.”
I was already moving toward the door. “Get the car. And find out if anyone has seen Adriana.”
“She hasn’t contacted me through the link yet,” Hazel said, keeping pace beside me down the corridor. “But the children coming back means she did something. She moved something from inside.”
“I know.” I pushed through the front entrance into the morning air. The driveway was already busier than it should have been at this hour — guards moving, a cluster of household staff talking near the east entrance. Word traveled fast in a pack. “I’m going into the village. If even one of those children spoke to Leo before they were released, I need to know what he told them.”
Hazel had a car waiting by the time I reached the bottom of the steps. I got in. She got in beside me.
We drove into the pack in silence that was not comfortable but was necessary, both of us turning the same things over and not yet having enough to say something useful about any of them.
The first family we stopped at was in the lower residential quarter. Hazel had the address from the files Adriana had compiled. Small house on a corner, a window box with herbs that someone had been tending carefully. A light on inside despite the early hour.
I knocked myself. Hazel stood slightly behind me.
The door opened and a woman stood there with flour on her hands and an expression that collapsed the moment she saw who was standing on her step.
“My King,” she said, and her voice broke on the second word.
“I heard your daughter came home,” I said. “Can I come in?”
She stepped back without answering, which was its own kind of answer.
The house was small and warm and smelled like something baking. A man was at the kitchen table with his arms around a girl of maybe fifteen who had her face pressed into his shoulder. He looked up when we came in and started to rise and I waved him down.
“Don’t,” I said. “Stay where you are.”
I sat across the table from them. Hazel stayed near the door.
The girl lifted her face from her father’s shoulder and looked at me with the eyes of someone who had seen enough in the past several months to have aged past fifteen in the ways that mattered.
“I’m sorry this happened to you,” I said. “I’m sorry we didn’t know sooner and I’m sorry you were in there as long as you were. That’s a failure of this kingdom and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
She looked at me steadily.
“I want to ask you some questions,” I said. “Only if you’re ready. If you’re not, I can come back.”
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Tell me about the boy in the facility.”
Something shifted in her expression, not quite a smile but near it. “Leo.” She said the name like it mattered to her. “He arrived after most of us had already been there a while. He was different from the first day. The rest of us were scared and trying not to show it. He came in and started counting things.”
“Counting things,” I said.
“Guards. Exits. How many of us there were. How many times the food came.” She shook her head slightly. “He didn’t stop talking to the man who ran the place. All of us were trying to be invisible and he was just — talking to him. At dinner every night. We thought he was going to get himself killed and then we realized he was getting us better food and more water and the guards stopped hitting people as much.”
Her father’s jaw tightened. Her mother was very still near the wall.
“Did he tell you anything?” I asked. “Did he give you anything before you left?”
She reached into her sleeve.
The paper she pulled out was folded into a small square, worn at the creases from being handled. She set it on the table between us.
I unfolded it.
A face was drawn carefully, with specific attention to the features. A girl, perhaps eight or nine, with a mark near her left eye and a particular set to her mouth. Notes in small handwriting around the edges. The street where she had first appeared crying, looking lost. It was even more clear than the first one he’d sent.
I turned the paper over.
On the back, a second drawing. A man’s face this time — older, heavyset, the face of someone who had decided long ago that authority was something you wore rather than earned. Landon. And beneath the portrait, almost invisible unless you were looking for it, two words written in the smallest possible letters.
‘Spy. Incomplete.’
I looked at Hazel over the top of the paper. She had already seen it. Her expression said she understood what it meant. Whoever it was, Leo had seen them. Leo knew who had been feeding information from inside our pack.
“He drew that picture of the king while the king was standing right there watching him,” the girl said. “He said if you saw it you’d understand.”
“I understand,” I said.
I folded the paper and put it in my jacket pocket.
“Thank you,” I said to the girl. Then to her parents. “Both of you. For raising someone brave enough to remember the things that needed remembering.”
The mother made a sound that was not quite crying.
I stood up and Hazel opened the door and we walked back out into the morning air. I got in and sat for a moment and breathed.
“The face of the spy will help us with the search.”
“Circulate the drawing through the pack. Someone in this pack knows whose child that is. Find the child, find the parents. Find the parents and we find another thread in Landon’s network.” I pulled out of the street. “And get the partial face to someone who can work with it. Give them everything we know about Shawn’s people and tell them to cross-reference.”
Hazel was already on her phone.