I am holding her and she is saying nothing and the bond is running open between us and I am looking at the dispatch case and I cannot find the name for what I am doing right now.
I hold her. I wait for the knot to ease. I do not say any of it aloud.
15
CLAIRE
Ifind it at half past midnight.
I wasn't looking for it specifically. I was cross-referencing safe house locations against supply routes—routine triangulation, the kind of thing my hands can do while my mind works the next layer—when the pattern snagged on something.
A notation in the October traffic. An asset designation half-buried in a routing table I'd been through twice already.
Third pass. There it is.
HV-7. Eastern territories. October through December. Cross-referenced against relay point 7-9—the one he stalled on for three days before giving me the October logs this morning. Three days is not a coincidence. Three days is someone deciding how much to give me.
I write it in ciphered shorthand in the margin. I sit very still.
HV-7. I know that designation. It is not from his files.
I pullevery document I have that touches the eastern territories in October and I work through them the way Lena taught me at seventeen: start at the edges, let the picture assemble itself rather than reaching for the centre. The centre will be wrong until you've built the frame.
Lena taught me that.
I am not going to think about that right now.
Three documents in, a second reference. Different table, same designation, same date range. This one has a location tag. Not a grid reference—a region marker. Broad, but the relay point narrows it. The two together give me an overlap.
I go to the map on the workroom wall.
I trace the region with my finger. The relay point. The overlap where they meet.
There is a farmhouse icon in the centre of the overlap.
I put the heel of my hand over it.
The eastern territories.Lena's territory.
She told me once—in a field letter, the kind that burns—that she was running correspondence through a farmhouse in the east. She didn't give me a grid reference. She didn't name the location. She gave me enough to reconstruct it from, because that is how she communicates things she wants me to know without putting them in writing: she gives me the edges and she trusts me to build the centre.
The centre of the overlap between region marker delta-six and relay point 7-9 is a farmhouse Lena Riley has been using since at least last spring.
He knows where she is.
He has known since October and he has been giving me the logs that build toward this location piece by piece and he knew what I would find when I got there.
I take my hand off the map. I look at my own handwriting in the margin of the notebook. HV-7. The designation he didn't give me and didn't suppress—just left in the October traffic for me to find on the third pass.
I do not know what that means. I add it to the list of things I don't know yet and I have been keeping.
I am still looking at the map when the door opens.
He doesn't knock.It's his manor. He comes in and stops just inside the door and I don't cover the notebook. I should—reflex says cover it, protect the thread—but my hands don't move. He already knows. He always knows. Truth-sight and six weeks of watching me work; he reads my face before I've opened my mouth.
"You found something," he says.
"Yes."