Ninety-three minutes to move Niara from the estate to the extraction point at the northern ridge, where a concealed shuttle would carry her to Teck's ship in low orbit. Ninety-three minutes of exposure, darkness, and the possibility that Voss's increasedpatrols would intersect their route and turn a rescue into a massacre.
Skarreth pulled a compact plasma pistol from the weapons case and checked the charge. Full. He holstered it at his thigh. A second weapon — smaller, concealable — went into the harness beneath his left arm. A blade went into his boot. The motions were automatic, muscle memory carved by years of identical preparations before identical runs that were never, in fact, identical. Each one found new ways to go wrong.
He rubbed the back of his neck where his beast pressed against the underside of his skin, restless, eager. The shift wanted to come. It always wanted to come during runs — the predator in him reading the danger, the adrenaline, the proximity to violence, and straining toward its most effective form. He held it down. The beast was a tool, not a master. He decided when it emerged.
Most of the time.
He crossed to his desk and pulled up the route on a holo-display he'd memorize and then erase. Northern service exit. Through the garden's outer perimeter. East along the ridge trail for two kilometers. The shuttle bay was carved into natural rock, invisible from above, shielded against standard sensor sweeps. Teck's ship would drop to low altitude at the agreed coordinates, open the cargo bay for ninety seconds, and leave. Ninety seconds. If Niara wasn't aboard, Teck would break atmo, and she'd be stranded on the surface with whatever Voss patrol had found them.
Teck didn't bluff. That was what made him reliable and what made him terrifying.
Skarreth studied the route until it lived behind his eyelids. Then he wiped the display.
"Nadir."
"My lord."
"Meet me at the service corridor. Full protocol."
A pause — brief, weighted. "Full protocol" meant Nadir carried a weapon. The butler had carried weapons before, with a competence that would have surprised anyone who saw only the dignified old servant pouring tea. But carrying a weapon meant the calculation had shifted from probably safe to possibly not, and they both understood what that shift cost.
"Understood."
The comm cut. Skarreth stood in the dark of his quarters, fully armed, fully dressed, and felt the familiar pre-operation stillness settle into his bones. The aristocrat was gone. The monster was gone. The soldier remained — focused, empty of everything except the next ninety-three minutes.
Eighty-nine now.
He moved.
The service corridor ran beneath the estate's western wing — narrow, unlit except by emergency strips along the floor, designed a century ago for the movement of supplies and servants. Skarreth had repurposed it for the movement of people. The walls were close enough that his shoulders nearly brushed both sides. The ceiling was low enough that he ducked at the junction points.
He rounded the final corner and found Nadir waiting with Niara.
The girl stood between the butler and the wall, a small pack clutched against her chest. She'd been dressed for travel — dark, practical clothing that Nadir had selected to blend with the terrain outside. Her lavender-grey skin looked ashen in the emergency lighting, her subtle iridescence washed out. Her eyes, those vivid teal irises, were dim. Not dark — dim. The bioluminescent gold that should have flecked through them like captured sunlight had faded to the faintest suggestion of warmth.
She was terrified.
She was also standing upright, holding her pack, and meeting his gaze. Not with defiance — she wasn't Octavia — but with the grim, shaking determination of someone who had decided that forward was the only direction left.
Nadir stood beside her in dark clothing, the lines of a sidearm visible beneath his jacket. The pin on his lapel — Skarreth's mother's crest — caught a thread of light from the floor strips. His muted gold eyes communicated everything a briefing would have wasted time on: She's ready. I'm ready. Clock is running.
Skarreth gave a single nod.
"Niara." He kept his voice low, stripped of warmth. Warmth suggested room for comfort, comfort bred hesitation, and hesitation killed people. "When we move, you stay between Nadir and me. You match my pace. If I stop, you stop. If I say down, you drop. If anything goes wrong, Nadir takes you forward and you do not look back. Understood?"
She nodded. Her hands tightened on the pack's straps and her knuckles paled against her lavender skin.
"Good. We move in?—"
A sound.
Footsteps. Light, bare-footed, coming from the corridor behind him. Not the tread of his staff or the heavy fall of a guard. Soft, curious footsteps. An artist's footsteps, placed with the spatial awareness of someone accustomed to navigating cluttered studios in the dark.
His blood iced.
He turned.
Octavia stood fifteen feet down the corridor in a sleep shirt that hung to her thighs, her locs loose around her shoulders, her feet bare on the cold stone. She'd followed the sounds — of course she had; she noticed everything, every anomaly in apattern. It was what made her extraordinary and it was what was about to destroy seven years of work.
