She nods once. “Curated. I want to see the scaffolding. The air before you pour the lavender into it. The empty rooms that will become something because you say they will.”
If I say no, I reinforce the accusation she isn’t even pretending not to level. If I say yes, I open a door I keep shut because I’ve learned the cost of letting people wander through my operation when I’m thinking about them instead of the structure. The knife and the paint sit between us anyway, the way her voice broke when she said she couldn’t stop thinking about me and my own response like I hadn’t planned not to go that far.
I could tell her to wait. I could tell her the coast site is a skeleton with paperwork for bones and donors for blood, not a place that will show her anything except how cold unfinished walls look when a person is projecting all their fears onto them. I could say what I say to anyone else:not now.
Instead I hear my own voice say, “All right.”
Her brows lift a fraction. She wasn’t expecting it that easily. I wasn’t either.
“But,” I add, and let the word slide into the space between us with the weight it deserves. “No improvisations or side doors. We go together. We leave together. You don’t step out of my line of sight unless I put you there.”
She doesn’t flinch. “You think I’m going to run.”
“I think Caldwell is still probing and that you have a talent for being exactly where trouble wants you.” It comes out sharperthan I mean. I soften the edge. “It’s not you I don’t trust, Aurora. It’s what wants you.”
She holds my gaze another beat and then nods. “Fine. But don’t dress it up as protection if what you really mean is control.”
“I mean both,” I say. Honesty should be harder than this; today it isn’t. “We leave tomorrow if I can get the team to stop doing their jobs long enough to let me bend procedure.”
She slides off the chair arm and onto her feet. “I can be ready.”
“Dress warm,” I tell her automatically. “The wind on that stretch of coast is worse than it looks.”
The corner of her mouth moves somewhere between defiance and acceptance. “Noted.”
I should shower. I should force food into my body so coffee isn’t chewing a hole through it alone. I should tell her I’m sorry for last night in a way that doesn’t flatten the truth of it into apology. Instead I say, “Come downstairs with me. We’ll route it clean.”
She hesitates, then moves. Her phone disappears into her pocket. The bandage on her palm peeks white under the cuff of her sleeve when she reaches for the door. I don’t let myself linger on it.
We cross glass, wood, and the breadth of the house on the interior corridor. The operations wing is already humming, night crew overlapping with morning staff, the screens in the main room cycling through feeds with their sound muted to a low line of static comfort. The smell here is familiar—ozone from electronics, paper, lemon oil that doesn’t quite kill the scent of worry people bring in with them.
Reid is at the long table, a tablet under his hand and two paper cups standing sentry like evidence of decency. He looks up when we enter, and everything about his face slots into place: thefriend, the lieutenant, the man who believes in my mission and will die on a hill for it. He’s good at this. I taught him to be.
“Morning,” he says, warmth threaded with the appropriate level of exhaustion. His gaze flicks to Aurora, softens by a calculated degree. “I was about to ping you. South Annex is clear if you want to look at the shell.”
“Tomorrow,” I confirm. “Two hours out, two hours back. No stops.”
“Got it.” He taps the tablet. “I’ll put the convoy at two vehicles. One lead, one tail. No insignia, no plates that read like Foundation. Path goes west on the back road, not the highway.” He glances at me. “You want me in the second car or with you?”
“In the second car. Aurora will be with me,” I say. I hear the echo of Aurora’s earlier insistence and lock it away before it shows on my face.
“Copy.” He swipes to another screen, tilts it so the ops wall can ingest it. “Only hiccup is still the maintenance ticket on Gate 3C. Sensor has been bouncing since the software push. We’ve been routing traffic to 3B while the vendor sorts it. If you want to take the west road, you’ll need a temporary bypass on the loop or you’ll get a false trip and we’ll lights-and-sirens the whole property at seven a.m.”
If I weren’t tired, I’d ask him why 3C is still pinging after the patch we applied last night. I’d ask for the error code, the duration of the bounce, whether the voltage drop corresponds to the new weatherproofing, whether the loop is actually the problem or if the buried line we inherited from the previous owner is corroding and needs to be pulled and reseated. If I weren’t thinking about Aurora’s request and the way her voice steadied when she made it, I’d walk to the console myself and run the bypass so I could see what we were opening.
“Put the bypass in and route the alert to your phone,” I say. “Not the desk. If it pings while we’re on the road I don’t want the whole wing spinning up because a raccoon hit a wire.”
“Done.” He slides the tablet toward me so I can lay my thumb on the biometric strip. The approval prompt glows green. He smiles like he enjoys nice systems working. “I’ll shadow you and peel off if we’re too heavy.”
“Don’t peel,” I say. “If we’re too heavy, we’re visible, and if we’re visible, we’re noisy, and if we’re noisy, Caldwell gets free signal he didn’t have to pay for.”
Reid nods, the right amount of chastened. “Point taken.”
I turn to Aurora. “You’ll need to sign visitor paperwork for the Annex,” I tell her. “It’s a shell, but we still treat it like an active site. We restrict photos. We don’t post locations. We don’t walk people through without a reason.”
“I’m not a tourist,” she says. “I know how to be somewhere without leaving footprints.”
That is both true and exactly untrue enough to make me want to put her in a pocket. I take two sets of forms from the binder on the credenza and set one in front of her. She reads quickly—not the skim of an amateur, but the triage of a person who’s been burned and knows where the heat hides. She signs, left-handed to keep the bandage out of the ink, mouth in a tight line that only relaxes when the last page flips.
