CHAPTER 44

Nobody slept much that first night back. I heard Lisa moving around the kitchen well past midnight, and Nox’s door stayed a thin line of light under it for even longer than that.

I lay in the dark, running the scout’s face over in my mind, and the choice he’d been given, and the ease with which it had ended. None of it got easier to sit with the longer I turned it over.

I finally asked the question I’d been circling since the treeline.

“System window.”

The purple core steadied into view, the number sitting where it always did, closer to the edge than I’d let myself look at until now.

“Talk to me about the core,” I said. “In full this time, and not the short version.”

[ I was hoping you’d wait a little longer before asking. ]

“Why?”

[ Because I don’t have a good answer, and I don’t like giving you anything less than a good one. ]

I waited. The silence stretched longer than any I’d sat through with it before.

[ Something in me reacted to that core the moment it came out of the case, without understanding it and without remembering it. Just a reaction, the kind you can’t talk yourself out of afterward. ]

“What kind of reaction?”

[ Grief, maybe. That’s the closest word I have for it, and I’m not certain it’s the right one. ]

Azazel said nothing for a long moment, and the nothing itself felt heavier than anything he could have said instead.

When he finally spoke, it was careful, the way he got when something had unsettled him rather than merely surprised him.

I do not understand it either. I have no memory that explains it. I felt it, the way you feel a draft from a door you cannot see.

“Both of you felt the same thing?”

[ Similar, though not identical. I don’t have his history to draw on, whatever that history is. Whatever reacted in me might be reacting to something completely different than whatever reacted in him. I don’t know enough to say they’re the same feeling wearing two different voices. ]

“Is that why neither of you talks much about where you actually came from?”

[ Partly. Partly because neither of us has an answer, and admitting that out loud doesn’t feel like it helps either of us. Tonight it’s starting to feel like it might matter more than either of us let ourselves believe. ]

You have said very little about your own origins this whole time. Something in Azazel’s observation felt aimed at himself as much as at the System. I assumed it was your nature. Tonight I find myself less certain of that assumption than I have been in a long while.

[ Reconsider it carefully, then. I’m reconsidering a few things myself. ]

I sat with that longer than I wanted to, staring at a number that had stopped feeling like just a number several sentences ago.

“Is it dangerous? Absorbing it, when the time comes?”

[ I don’t know that either. I want to. I’ve never wanted to know something this badly and had this little to work with. ]

That is not the answer I hoped for.

[ No. It isn’t. I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to make the next few days easier on either of you. ]

I closed the window eventually, mostly because there wasn’t anywhere else useful the conversation could go that night. I lay awake a long while after, listening to the flat settle around three people who’d all decided sleep wasn’t worth attempting.

Nox was on the balcony at four, which I found out going to the kitchen for water and seeing the door open in a January that had no business having doors open in it.

He had the notebook out. He shut it when he heard me not quickly, but he shut it.

“You can leave that open,” I said. “I’m not going to read your sister’s handwriting over your shoulder.”

“I know. I’ve been doing it for three years and my hands do it without asking me now.” He put it in his jacket. “Can’t sleep either?”

“No.”

We stood there for a while. The estate had a security light that came on for foxes and went off again, and it did that four times while neither of us said anything.

“Tomorrow is the largest thing any of us has walked into,” Nox said eventually.

“Yes.”

“I keep working out where I stand in the room. I keep getting the same answer: behind both of you, which is where I’ve stood since the Chilterns.” He said it flatly, as a fact he had checked. “I came back from Japan to stop being the one who stands behind.”

“You’re not.”

“I’m, and it’s the right call, and I’d make it myself if it were mine to make.” He went back toward the door. “I’d just like it noted that I know.”

“Noted.”

“Thank you.” He paused with his hand on the frame. “Get some sleep. One of us should turn up rested, and it’s clearly not going to be me.”

Lisa found me in the kitchen the next morning before either of us had said a word about the night before.

“You look like you didn’t sleep.”

“Neither did you.”

“No.” She poured two mugs without asking if I wanted one, sliding the second across the table anyway. “I keep running the numbers. How much residue that generator’s leaked over however long it’s been running. It’s not a small figure.”

“How big?”

“Bigger than anything you’ve absorbed so far, probably by a significant margin. The core alone might already be more than everything you’ve taken in combined.”

She wrapped both hands around her own mug without drinking from it yet. “I don’t say that to frighten you. I say it because you should walk in there already knowing the scale of it.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t frightening anyway.”

She drank about a third of the mug before she said the next part, which with Lisa meant she’d decided on it in advance and was working up to the delivery.

“If it goes wrong in there, I want to know what you want me to do.”

“Lisa.”

“I’m a necromancer and you’re about to put something into your chest that nobody in this building understands. Those two sentences belong in the same conversation whether either of us enjoys it.” She still hadn’t looked up. “I’m asking you now, while you can answer, so that I never have to guess later.”

I thought about it for a while, because she had earned a real answer rather than a kind one.

“Get the other two out first.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“It’s the part I care about. The rest of it I don’t have an opinion on. I’d rather you did what you could live with than what I said in a kitchen the night before.”

She nodded slowly and finished the coffee.

“Right,” she said. “That’s a worse answer than the one I wanted and a better one than the one I expected.”

“Does it help?”

“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”

Nox joined us not long after, saying nothing about the light under his own door the night before. The three of us spent the rest of the morning on the plan, one last pass checking every piece against what the recon had shown us.

“Entry point holds,” Nox said, tracing a line across the layout with one finger. “Same fence gap. Guards are thin enough at night that we shouldn’t need to engage more than one or two if we’re careful.”

“And the core itself?” Lisa asked.

“Sits in a housing near the generator’s base, from what we saw. Exposed enough to reach, and not exactly unguarded, though not fortified the way I’d have expected either.”

“They’re not expecting anyone to try,” I said. “That jurisdiction wall’s done most of their security work for them so far.”

“Then let’s make sure it keeps doing that work right up until the moment it stops mattering,” Lisa said.

“What about after?” Nox said. “Once we’ve got it. Extraction route?”

“Same way we came in, unless something forces a change,” Lisa said. “I mapped two fallback routes in case the primary gets compromised. Neither’s pleasant, but both get us clear eventually.”

“Define eventually.”

“Longer than any of us will want it to take if we need them. Better than the alternative.”

“Fair enough.”

We finished the planning as the light outside went grey, the kind of overcast that made it hard to tell what hour it was without checking. Doyle arrived not long after, grim in a way that told me before he said anything that he’d found something.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Eight to ten in the morning. They’re pulling almost everyone on-site to take a delivery. Spare parts, according to what I overheard. That’s a two-hour window with minimal guard presence, and it’s the best one we’re likely to get.”

“That’s fast,” Lisa said.

“It’s what we’ve got. I can plant one more scout today, confirming Cú Chulainn’s off-site during the window rather than just assuming it from the delivery schedule. Beyond that, we move on what we already know.”

“Do it,” I said. “We need to know he’s gone, not just scheduled to be.”

“Already arranged. I’ll have confirmation by tonight.”

Nobody argued with the timeline, mostly because none of us had a better one to offer in its place.

Doyle lingered a moment after the others had started clearing the table, catching my eye in the way he did when something needed saying privately.

“You’re carrying more than the plan tonight,” he said quietly.

“Aren’t we all.”

“Some more than others. I’ve known you long enough to see it on you specifically.” He didn’t push further than that; the restraint cost more than pushing would have. “Just don’t carry it alone tomorrow. Whatever it’s.”

“I’ll try.”

“Try harder than that. I’d like all of you walking out of there, not just the ones who remembered to ask for help.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so the silence did the answering for me, and he seemed to accept it as answer enough for one evening.

[ Sixty-seven percent, ] 

the System said, quiet and unprompted, once the others had gone quiet over the last details of the plan. 

[ I wanted you to see the number again before tomorrow, and not to frighten you. Just so you walk in there already knowing how much room is left. ]

I looked at it for a long moment, thirty-three percent standing between where I was and a number none of us fully understood yet.

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it, even though the number gave me nothing except a clearer sense of how much I didn’t know.

Sleep, if you can manage it, Azazel said. Tomorrow will ask enough of both of us without tonight taking anything further in advance.

“I’ll try.”

Try harder than that. He handed Doyle’s own words back to me without a trace of irony. I would like us both walking out of there tomorrow, rather than only the parts of us that remembered to rest.