I put both hands flat on the desk and look at the wall map. The farmhouse icon at the edge of the eastern territories. Grid reference 7-14, which I circled in pencil four days ago and have not marked in the notebook yet because marking it means finishing the arithmetic and I have been not-finishing the arithmetic.
Here is what I know about the eastern resistance networks from six weeks of working through his files. They are human resistance cells operating in the territories bordering four Fae courts. Their work ranges from intelligence-gathering to supply-route disruption to what the redacted sections callasset relocation—the phrase the service uses when it doesn't want to name what it's actually talking about.
Asset relocationmeans omegas. Moving omegas out of Fae courts. The eastern cells run a network of safe houses and transit routes specifically for that purpose: claimed omegas who want to leave, omegas fleeing compulsory exchange programs, omegas who went in and found a way to send word back. The cells find them. The cells get them out.
Lena's cell was one of those cells.
I sit with this for a while. I have been sitting with it for three weeks, or rather I have been not-sitting with it—filing it lightly, rotating through alternative explanations, finding the ones that held just long enough to keep me moving. The warmth helped. The warmth always helped. But he dropped the magicthis morning and hasn't brought it back, and the Lena thought is sitting in my chest tonight at its actual size, and the actual size of it is: she wasn't only my handler. She was running extraction operations out of the eastern territories. She had the routes and the safe houses and the network.
She had what it took to get someone out.
She sent me a message sayingget out if you need to.I burned it two paragraphs in because I already knew what the third paragraph was going to say. I know what she was planning. She was building an extraction for me—preparing it, waiting for word from me, keeping the route open. She sent the message to let me know:whenever you're ready. I have you.
I haven't been ready.
I've been sleeping in his bed and handing pages across his desk and glowing at his approval and going to his rooms and sayingyoursand meaning it, and Lena has been eight weeks silent, and I have been filing the silence underpervasiveand not finishing the arithmetic.
I look at grid reference 7-14.
I write in the margin:illusion magic. Running since arrival. Evidence: twenty-nine entries, pattern confirmed.
I look at what I've written.
I pick up the pen again and I write under it, smaller and slower:Lena Riley. HV-7. Eight weeks no contact. Grid reference 7-14. Farmhouse. I handed him page eight.
The arithmetic takes ten seconds when I let myself finish it.
I built the picture that found her. I assembled it from his files, from his logs, from the access he granted in the right order at the right times. I assembled the picture and handed it across his desk and glowed atthis is exceptionaland went to his rooms that night. Three weeks later there is a summary in the morning stack that I have not read yet but I know what it contains.
I know what it contains.
I close the notebook.
I turn the lamp down.
The workroom is dark except for the mist-light through the window—pale and slow and his, his magic in every particle of it. I sit in it for a while. I look at the map on the wall with the farmhouse icon at the edge of the sightline.
She was coming for me.
She was building the route and keeping the door open and she sent me a letter sayingget out if you need toand I burned it and handed him page eight and she was coming for me.
I let this be the size it is.
Then I go to my own room.
I undress in the dark. I get into my own bed—the specific cold of a bed no one has slept in. The bond pulls from his direction through the wall. The marks warm at my throat, responding to the proximity even now, even through everything. I put my hand against the one at my collarbone and feel it move against my fingers, the mist-patterns shifting, and I lie there with my hand pressed against it and I breathe.
The Lena thought sits in my chest unsmoothed. No warmth arriving to ease it. No magic running. Just me and the actual size of it, which is large, which is the size of eight weeks of silence and a grid reference and a farmhouse and the wordfourteensitting in a morning summary I haven't read. The size of a woman who was building me a way out, and the size of having handed the map to the person who used it to find her.
I let it be the size it is.
I lie there for a long time, and eventually, in the dark, my eyes close.
In the morning I get up and I go to the workroom and I do not look at his door as I pass it and my hands are steady.
I open the notebook to a clean page.
I write at the top:What does he know that I don't know.