Alive and unshot.
That was becoming my baseline for a good day.
“Well?” I asked.
“Manakin’s furious, but he’s not pulling us out.” Will shed his coat, stomped snow off his boots, and sat down across from me. “His team arrived in Bern yesterday, four men under diplomatic cover. He can’t officially authorize them to help us, but there’s a dead drop at the Hauptbahnhof if we need to make contact.”
“That’s something.”
“It’s more than we had.” He glanced toward the hallway. “Where’s the Baroness?”
“Resting. Bisch is with her.” I studied his face, looking for whatever he wasn’t saying. “How bad was it? The conversation?”
“He reminded me that we’re burned if this goes sideways, tossed in jail, the usual.” Will almost smiled. “He also told me to tell you to stop getting shot.”
I snorted. “Noted. I’ll add it to my list of things to not do.”
The Baroness appeared in the doorway before Will could think of something snappy. She looked better than she had yesterday. She was still pale and moving carefully, but there was something sharper in her gaze.
Behind her, Bisch was a silent shadow.
“You spoke to your handler?” she asked.
“Yes.” Will stood, offered her his chair. She waved him off and lowered herself into the one beside me instead. “Manakin has resources in-country. They’re limited but real. He says if we can get concrete proof of the conspiracy, something they can take through official channels—”
The Baroness nodded slowly. “We need to discuss what we know and what we are going to do about it.”
Bisch took his usual position by the window. Will sat back down. The kitchen suddenly felt smaller, the four of us pressed together by the weight of what was coming.
“February 15th,” the Baroness said. “Eight days. I have been thinking about the Chamber Session, about what it means and how they plan to use it.”
I listened as she laid out how a manufactured crisis using infrastructure seizures, communications blackouts, and the appearance of a foreign attack could trigger the session. She walked through how compromised ministers could push through emergency decrees, and how the Order or the Soviets, whoever would step into the void, could seize control of the government while wrapping themselves in constitutional legitimacy.
“By the time anyone realizes what has happened,” she finished, “it will be too late. Resistance becomes treason. Opposition becomes sedition. They will have the law on their side.”
“How do we stop it?” I asked. “How can we expose them before they can trigger the crisis?”
“That requires proof, and it requires knowing who we can trust.” The Baroness’s good eye swept the table. “Which brings us to the question we have been avoiding.”
I felt Will tense beside me.
Bisch didn’t move from the window, but something shifted in his posture.
“You arranged the meetings,” I said to Bisch. Not an accusation. Just a fact. “Weber. Maurer. You knew the times and places.”
“Yes.” His voice was flat. “I did.”
“And yet you went back for Otto in the middle of a firefight. You collapsed the tunnel. You carried a dying man through hell when you could have saved yourself.” I held his gaze. “That’s not what a traitor does.”
“No,” the Baroness said quietly. “It is not.”
She locked eyes with her butler and held his gaze for what felt like days. Finally, Bisch nodded once, the barest acknowledgment of whatever they hadn’t said aloud, and turned back to the window.
“So if not Bisch,” Will said, “then who?”
I found myself thinking back through every meeting, every contact, every moment when information could have leaked.
And I kept coming back to the same place.
