“And then what?” I asked.
Mirae’s eyes flicked to her, then back to me. “Ashcroft is very certain of two things,” she said. “That wolves are dangerous. And that he is safe from them.”
Zara stiffened. “You’re not suggesting?—”
“I’m suggesting you let him experience exactly what he’s so afraid of,” Mirae said calmly.
Zara spoke first. “You mean a wolf bite.”
Mirae nodded.
Sera shook her head slowly. “That’s… risky.”
“So is letting him continue operating,” Mirae said. “He’s been insulated from consequences. That’s why he’s comfortable. That’s why his guard is down.”
I rubbed my thumb along the edge of the table. “If we do that, it changes things.”
Mirae met my gaze, her eyes burning with ambition.
“It changes everything.”
Both Zara’s and Sera’s packs left together the next day.
Watching them go was harder than I expected.
Not because I doubted them, but because once they were gone, there was no more staging, and no more waiting for all the pieces to align. What was left was the culmination ofeverything I’d worked for since London destroyed my home all those years ago.
Mirae didn’t give us long. The night to rest. A morning to prepare. Then she sent her runner—a thin man with copper goggles pushed up into his hair and ink-stained fingers—to tell us it was time to go.
We dressed to disappear.
No insignia. No weapons visible unless they could pass as tools. Coats patched and mended until they looked like they’d survived years of work instead of weeks of war. Elias traded his usual jacket for a long oilskin coat that smelled faintly of machine grease. Griff wrapped his hands in worn leather and slung a sack over his shoulder like a dockworker. Bishop wore a scarf he could pull up over his nose and carried a satchel that could have held ledgers or knives. Eamon tucked his medical kit into a battered crate. Nox dirtied his face until he looked like someone no one would remember five seconds after passing.
“We meet where?” Griff asked.
“Under the old pumping hall,” Mirae said. “Midnight. If you’re late, wait. If you don’t come—” She shrugged. “Well, you just had bad luck.”
That was reassuring.
Mirae watched all of it without comment and after we were fully ready, she led us to a junction where four tunnels became one. Elias and Griff took the left route with the larger flow of people. Bishop and Eamon followed a maintenance channel that would put them near the eastern quarter by nightfall. Nox and I went last, slipping into the stream that fed directly toward the river.
The tunnels thinned as we moved, the air warming with the city’s natural rhythm. Steam hissed through pipes overhead. Gears turned behind walls. Somewhere above us, pistons rose and fell with the patience of a machine that would keep working long after people stopped caring why.
When we surfaced, it wasn’t through a dramatic gate or guarded checkpoint.
It was a side hatch behind a row of boilers.
London rose around us, its skyline jagged with towers that vented steam into the sky like breath. Walkways crisscrossed overhead, linking buildings at odd angles.
People walked everywhere—workers, traders, clerks—boots on stone, carts rolling on iron rims. The noise was constant but not particularly loud.
No one looked at us.
We moved with the flow, crossing bridges over black water channels that carried runoff away from the city’s core. Massive turbines turned slowly beneath grates, powering districts that no longer remembered what fuel was. Everything ran on pressure now, steam, water, and stored heat.
By the time the sun dipped behind the towers, we reached the edge of the river works, a vast complex of pumping halls and pressure chambers that fed half the city. Steam rolled off it in thick clouds, hissing from vents like a living thing.
We slipped inside the last one on the right with a group of maintenance workers changing shifts.
