I left the archway and drifted into the crowd again, taking a parallel street that would keep me within sight of his route without ever crossing it. I counted turns. Timed stops. Noted landmarks that mattered: a brass fountain that still ran; a steam vent that hissed louder than the others; a boarded-up storefront with fresh paint that didn’t quite match the decayaround it.
I kept walking, head down, looking like nothing and nobody at the exact same time.
Ashcroft descended a stairway that I’d bet wasn’t on any public map.
I didn’t follow him down the same way. I took the parallel route. I found an iron ladder bolted to a wall, slick with condensation, leading to a catwalk that ran above the lower level. From there, I followed him.
I moved slowly, then crouched behind a pressure housing and waited when he stopped beside a man in a clean white coat who was walking with his head down. The man straightened too fast when he noticed who had approached him, hands shaking just a little bit.
“I’ve come for an update,” Ashcroft stated, his voice commanding.
“We’re making progress,” the man replied. “Dispersion held across three districts.”
Ashcroft’s voice was calm. Unconcerned. “And what about the onset?”
“Much faster,” the man responded. “Now it takes less than a minute, and not hours like before. The aerosol binds more efficiently now.”
Ashcroft nodded. “Good.”
Another voice joined, a female one, clipped and impatient. “We’ve been making great progress, Lord Ashcroft.”
That caught my attention.
Ashcroft stopped at the threshold. “Schedule the next release then,” he ordered.
The woman frowned. “Where?”
“North,” he said. “I want to hit the smaller towns. Border regions. Places that can be written off as ‘incidents.’ I want a way to ferret out and expose the wolves living in hiding in my country once and for all.”
My jaw tightened.
“And the timetable?” she asked.
“Within the next two weeks,” Ashcroft replied. “Before anyone has time to organize a response.”
He turned back the way he’d come, his escorts re-forming around him like water closing over a stone.
I waited until the sound of his footsteps faded. Then I waited longer.
When I moved, I took it slow, slipping back along the catwalk, down the ladder, out through a maintenance corridor that spat me into daylight behind a row of boiler stacks. I didn’t look back, didn’t run.
I meandered back to the safehouse and told my pack everything.
CHAPTER 24
Afew days later…
Tamsin
We spent more than a week learning London and mapping it like the back of our hands.
We fell into a rhythm that felt almost domestic: wake early, blend into the morning churn, disappear by afternoon, and resurface at dusk. Most nights, I went out too. Before long, it became obvious that Ashcroft moved on a schedule. He liked late mornings, fancy lunches, and inspections that looked spontaneous but never were.
We tracked everything and kept mental checklists.
When it was dark and the streets were mostly abandoned, we would return to the safehouse. We would lay out what we’d learned on the table, shifting a cup to mark a corner, a cointo mark a guard, a folded scrap of paper to mark a door that wasn’t on any public map.
Eamon would press a cup into my hands before I realized I was thirsty. “Drink,” he’d say, and I would, because I trusted him. Bishop would sit beside me on the narrow stairs, our shoulders barely touching, and tell me what he noticed about the body language between political officials he’d tailed that day. Griff would walk me home through a crowded street and say nothing, his presence doing the work words didn’t need to. Nox would catch my eye from across a market and make my heart skip with nothing more than a wink. And Elias would kiss my temple in the evenings when we were back in the safehouse and say, “I’m proud of you.”
