“Must’ve taken some work,” I say.
He gives a small nod and gestures me forward. We take the stairs down two short flights to a slab of floor poured rougher than the rest. He angles us to the right, toward a section of wall that doesn’t quite match. Same dull paint, but newer.
“Here,” he says.
Hereturns out to be a rectangle the size of a door.
Cassian keys the top lock, spins a recessed wheel, then shoulders the plate open with a grunt. It swings inward on hinges thick enough to belong to a vault.
Beyond lies a squat concrete room. The ceiling’s so low Cassian ducks on instinct.
In the center of the room stands a welded table—an altar-that’s-not-an-altar, built from a salvaged X-ray gantry plate.
Twelve containers rest on its surface. They aren’t identical, but they echo one another in shape and weight. There are ammo cans with gasket lids, two metal flight cases lined with foam, and a squat lead box with a grooved handle that makes my fingers ache just to look at it.
Each container has been strapped closed with ratchet bands.
Each one is marked with chalk — thin white lines, drawn cleanly, forming a language of circles and crossings I recognize from Nathaniel’s meticulous hands and Talon’s rougher imitations.
“Well,” Talon mutters, breaking the silence. “Here we are.”
Indeed. Here we are.
And whatever I thought would happen once we came here seems completely absurd now.
I take one step closer. The back of my neck prickles, like the fine hairs there are trying to stand and there’s no room.
I wasn’t supposed to be this person. I was supposed to be… God, what? A regular human? An abused wife who didn’t know it? A woman who never had to look at a pile of boxes and think:Each of these could open its eyes and kill me.
“Twelve,” I say again.
“Twelve,” Cassian confirms.
The terrible thing about a sleeping bomb is how unsuspecting it looks. For all I know, it could just sit here like this for the next five hundred years.
A memory cracks through me: the wraith screamed when she realized I could hurt her. The air turned white, and I felt as if I were being pulled through a keyhole and filled with knives.
One wraith nearly unmade me.
Twelve is… math I can’t forgive.
I stand there another minute. Maybe two. Then, it’s over.
“Okay,” I say at last, quietly. “I’ve seen enough.”
Talon’s voice softens in that rare way he reserves for just the two of us. “Distraction achieved, Little Grim?”
I inhale all the way, finally. “Yeah. I think… yes.”
Cassian watches me for a long beat, his eyes scanning my face as if checking for cracks. “And the other problem?” he asks, carefully. “Measured against this one, does it feel any smaller?”
I let the question hang. Mark’s voice is not in this room; I can feel the rightness of that absence down to my bones. But I also feel the tether I’ve made out of indecision. The longer I keep him on the hook, the more I belong to the act of holding.
“It does,” I say. “Not small. But finite. Manageable.” The words feel strange and exactly true. “I’m ready to make a call.”
Cassian gives a single nod. “Then let’s go back.”
He closes the room the way he opened it—click, clack, thunk—and shoulders it once to be sure.
