CHAPTER 40

Aldridge’s house sat dark at the end of a Highgate road lined with plane trees. Victorian brick.

A hedge that hadn’t been trimmed since the judge retired sat along the property line. A black car was parked two houses down with its engine off and lights dark.

“They’re already here,” Lisa said.

We crouched behind the hedge. Robin had slipped in through the side gate thirty seconds earlier, scouted the perimeter on foot, and returned the same way. Her mark inside the study stayed unspent.

“Three inside,” she said. “One by the front door and another in the study, plus one I couldn’t see. The car has a driver, so four total.”

“The black car at the launderette had two.”

“They brought friends.”

I looked at the house. The study was ground floor, rear-facing, its window a darker rectangle against the brick. The hall was twelve metres of hardwood, where every footstep would carry.

“Robin, you and Lisa blink into the study. Lisa cancels whoever’s in there while you grab the book. I take the back door and deal with whoever comes through the hall.”

“That’s a two-blink sequence. I can do one. Two in a row and I’m dry for five minutes.”

“Then we make the first blink count. Once you’re in, Lisa handles the study and you grab the book. I’ll take the hall. We don’t need the second blink if we clear the room.”

Robin looked at the house. Her face had gone blank in the way I was starting to recognise.

“What about the old man?” she said. “Aldridge. He’s in there.”

“They need him alive. He’s the homeowner. If this goes wrong, they need it to look like a burglary. A dead homeowner is a murder investigation, but a living one is a statement that got lost in filing.”

She nodded once. “On your count.”

For the record, I have watched you plan worse with less. That is a compliment to tonight, not to you.

“Three. Two. One.”

Robin grabbed Lisa’s hand. The air rippled, and they vanished.

I went over the hedge.

✦ ✦ ✦

The garden was dark. The lawn was overgrown, left to neglect when the owner stopped caring about appearances.

A stone path led to the back door, and I took it in four strides.

The kitchen was dark. Dishes were stacked on the counter, and a newspaper from three days ago sat folded on the table. The kettle was still warm; Aldridge had been making tea when they arrived.

The back door was unlocked. They’d left it that way for a quick exit.

I crossed the hall in four long steps. On the fourth, the study door opened and a man stepped out with military posture.

The passenger from the car. He saw me and reached for an Association-issue wand on his belt.

I closed the distance before his hand reached the grip. Nadir came up in a short arc, the pommel catching him under the jaw. He hit the floor hard enough to crack a board.

From inside the study, a green flash lit the window. Robin’s wind arrow was high-speed, hitting before the sound caught up.

I heard a man shout as a body struck a bookshelf, scattering volumes across the floor.

A second later the window flashed red. The detonation was contained, a sharp crack rather than a blast. Robin was rationing her yield.

I reached the study door as something heavy hit the floor.

The study was a wreck. Books lay in disordered heaps, and the desk had been swept clean.

The man from the front door was on his knees against the far wall, a bone construct wrapped around his chest. Lisa’s Entomb pinned him like a specimen.

Robin stood in the centre of the room with her bow drawn. The arrow on the string was blue.

The air around the tip frosted visibly, tiny crystals forming and breaking in the draft.

“The book’s gone,” she said. “They searched the study before we got here. The man I hit says the driver has it.”

“The driver’s still in the car.”

“Then the driver’s about to leave.”

I looked at the pinned man. Late thirties, better dressed than the one in the hall. “Where’s Aldridge?”

“Front room. Unharmed.”

“Who do you work for?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes flicked to the window as the driver started the engine outside.

“Go,” Robin said. “Both of you. I’ll hold this one.”

“You can’t…”

“I’ve been holding off worse than him for two months.” The defiance was back. “Get the notes.”

Lisa nodded, and we went out the front door on a run.

The black car was still at the curb with the driver’s door open. The driver sat inside with a hand on the ignition and the folder of notes on the passenger seat.

He saw us coming and reached for the ignition instead of the folder.

Lisa’s bones rose through the tarmac in front of the car. A cage of pale ribs erupted from the road surface and locked around the front axle.

The engine screamed and died. The driver’s head hit the steering wheel with a heavy thud.

I reached the passenger door. The folder sat on the seat, containing five sheets of paper covered in handwriting and dates. I recognized the codes from Doyle’s briefings: GM-14, GM-15, GM-16.

“Got them,” I said.

The driver was still conscious, looking at me with the flat expression of a professional who had lost.

“Tell Quill that the notes are in the hands of someone who reads.”

We regrouped at Zarya at half past two in the morning.

The conference room was clean, and Robin sat against the wall with her bow across her knees. She hadn’t spoken since the blink.

Lisa’s coat was draped over Robin’s shoulders.

Robin didn’t acknowledge it, but she didn’t take it off either.

The stubborn one gave her coat away without a single witness. I am mentioning it so at least one person knows it happened.

Lisa spread the five sheets across the table, three from the first book Robin had stolen and two from Aldridge’s. The paper was thin and translucent.

The dead man had written small. His handwriting was neat, the letters crowded together.

Lisa read them in sequence, her finger tracking the codes. She didn’t look up for six full minutes.

“It’s a shipment schedule. Three deliveries a month, rotating through southern terminals like Dover and Sheerness.”

She turned a page around so we could see the column of dates. “If the rotation holds, the next one docks at Sheerness tomorrow night.”

I reached for my phone and dialed Doyle. He answered on the fourth ring, listened to the summary, and promised a surveillance detail at Sheerness by morning.

“Sheerness is wrong.”

Robin hadn’t moved from the wall. She was looking at the page Lisa had turned around, her chin resting on her knees.

Lisa’s finger stopped on the column. “The rotation is right there. Strict sequence, eleven repetitions.”

“The rotation’s right, but the port’s wrong. Sheerness closed its deep-water berth two years ago. Nothing bigger than a fishing boat has docked there since.”

Robin shrugged. “I’ve slept in that terminal. There’s a hole in the east fence and nobody inside it.”

The room went quiet. Doyle’s voice came small out of the phone, asking if I was still there.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up.

Lisa re-read the pages faster now.

“He wrote it in sequence deliberately. The terminal names are real and the order is genuine, but the dates are offset. It isn’t a schedule. It’s a key.”

She pulled the first sheet back to the top of the stack. “Apply the offset and the pattern re-anchors north. These stop reading as terminal codes at all.”

She tapped the margin. “GM-14. GM-15. GM-16. GM designates gate material. The Association retired the entire system fifteen years ago once they realized you could track unauthorized gate activity through the codes.”

“And someone revived it.”

“Someone revived it to move gate materials through civilian ports for a minimum of two years. The Chilterns and the tundra gate we cleared were all supplied through this network.”

She squared the pages. “It would have taken me until Sheerness to see it.”

“Nah.” Robin picked at the feathers of an arrow. “You’d have seen the empty berth and worked it out on the drive back.”

“Who’s running it?”

Lisa turned the last page over. On the back, in different handwriting, sat a single name and a phone number.

“Vaughn,” she said. “Eleanor Vaughn.”

“The woman from Internal Oversight,” I said. “After the Chilterns.”

“The one who told us to write our account down somewhere that didn’t pass through too many hands. I took that for caution at the time.”

“A name and a number on the back page. The dead man was trying to reach her before he was killed.”

“Then we make the connection for him.”

Robin looked up from her bow. “What happens to me?”

“You walk,” I said. “You stole from rich people who won’t press charges because it would expose what you actually took. You helped recover evidence in an illegal supply chain. The Association won’t touch you, and if they try, Zarya will vouch.”

“I don’t want a guild to vouch for me.”

“Then don’t join one. But if you ever need somewhere to go that isn’t a flat with no heating, you know where to find us.”

The defiance in her face faded into something unguarded.

“You’re weird,” she said. “You climb like a machine and talk like a teacher, and you just walked into a house full of armed men for a girl you met two days ago.”

“Three days. The stakeout counts.”

“It doesn’t count. You didn’t even see me.”

“I saw you for four seconds. It counts.”

She almost smiled before shutting it down. “I’m not joining your guild. I’ve been on my own since I was fourteen, and I’m better at it than anyone who’s ever offered to help me.”

“I believe you.”

“But?”

“No, but. You climbed ninety-six floors in the Tower of Genesis while living in an unheated flat. You’re carrying a core that would read four or five if anyone got an assessment plate near you. You don’t need a guild. You just need people who’ll be there when you need something.”

She was quiet for a long moment. “Floor eighty-nine,” she said.

“What about it?”

“The mirror room. You took the third door on the left while everyone else took the second door. The reflection was wrong by about two degrees. I watched the replay fifty times trying to figure out how you knew.”

“The light didn’t pool, it bent. The third door was the only one angled wrong.”

“You noticed a two-degree angle in a room full of identical doors.”

“Perception score. It’s a long story.”

She stood and strapped the bow case across her back with practiced economy.

“The tournament Morgana mentioned,” she said. “The one that happens every ten years. That’s not just a tournament, is it?”

“No. The League runs every year, but the Games are what the League spends a decade auditioning for.”

“And the people who killed the dead man are building toward it.”

“That’s what Morgana thinks. We’ll know more once we talk to Vaughn.”

Robin nodded once. “Don’t die before the Games. I’m not good enough to compete yet, but when I am, I want you there.”

“Deal.”

She walked to the door and paused with her hand on the frame. “And thank you. For looking at the marks before what I stole.”

The door closed softly as she walked out the front exit.

Lisa studied the pages. “Vaughn. Tomorrow morning. There’s a café in Marylebone where the dead man was supposed to meet her.”

“We should call Doyle and brief him.”

“He already knows. You hung up on him, so I finished the conversation while you walked her out.”

She gathered the pages into a stack. “Whoever is using Morgana’s name has been working against this network since before Robin was born. The conspiracy isn’t new, and neither is the resistance.”

“And we found out about both three days ago.”

“Then we’re behind.”

“We’ve been behind before,” I said, standing up to stretch. “We usually catch up.”