I was right behind her.
Kingston drove us.Amaryllis was in the front passenger seat while I sat in the rear with Beacon. She had her braced knee angled toward the door, and her canelay between us. She hadn’t spoken since we left the estate. She faced the window, but her focus was somewhere past the glass.
The cantonal police had taped off the perimeter and stationed two officers at the access road. Kingston showed his credentials and spoke to them in French. One officer addressed Beacon, who responded but didn’t turn to look at him. He waved us through anyway.
The building appeared worse than yesterday. The east side had finished collapsing overnight. The west wall had buckled inward, and what was left of the roof had caved into the hall. The dust that rose from the rubble looked like smoke.
“I received the sweep results,” said Kingston. “The K-9 unit has cleared the building. No devices were found in addition to the three that detonated.”
Beacon got out of the vehicle on her own. She planted the cane on the gravel but didn’t go farther. I came around to her side and waited.
“The entrance we used last night is gone,” she said. “The west side might hold.”
“I’ll check the structure first. You don’t go inside until I clear it.”
When she nodded rather than argue, I wondered if we should’ve stopped at the hospital first.
The four of us spent twenty minutes surveying the perimeter. The section on the west was damaged but standing. The walls were of medieval construction, two feet thick, and the bombs had cracked them without bringing them down. I tested the footing and checked overhead for loose debris before marking a path for us to go inside.
The blast patterns were easily readable, and I located all three detonation points. The primary charge had been placed low against the base of the interior support column. The second was near the east wall foundation. The third was deeper, near the rear of the hall where the ceiling vaulting was highest. Each one had exploited a different structural weakness.
This wasn’t guesswork. Whoever placed them had studied load distribution in this building and worked from an architectural assessment.
I marked each point and photographed what I could reach.
Beacon had made it inside on her own. She was moving deeper into the building, toward the administrativeoffices on the far side of the corridor, and I followed without asking where she was going.
The office she stopped at was buried under a section of collapsed ceiling. The door was gone, but the frame held, and the interior walls remained standing. In the corner, under a slab of fallen plaster, was a safe. The blast had blown it open.
She went through what was inside carefully with one hand, setting aside what was ruined. At the bottom was a journal. The cover was charred at one corner, but it was intact enough to hold together. She lifted it out and held it for a moment without opening it.
“Is that what you came for?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Kingston approached from the entrance. “Fedpol is thirty minutes out. We need to go.”
Beacon tucked the journal inside her jacket and got to her feet. I got my shoulder under her good arm, and we walked out through the west corridor to the SUV.
She got into the rear seat. Her face was gray with stone dust, but her eyes were dry.
When we arrivedat the nearby hospital, Kingston dropped us at the entrance and went to park. Beacon got herself through the doors before I could offer my arm. She’d been doing that since we left the estate—outpacing any offer of help by making sure she was already three steps ahead of it.
Mercury had called ahead, so the radiologist expected us. Beacon went in for the knee scans first. I sat in a plastic chair in the corridor and opened the site photographs on my phone. That someone had known exactly where to hit nagged at me. The knowledge required to place those charges wasn’t available to anyone who hadn’t studied engineering.
The radiology door opened, and Beacon came out on one crutch. A doctor, who looked like a man who’d lost an argument he knew he was right about, was behind her.
“Grade two MCL sprain,” Beacon said before I could ask. “Six to eight weeks in a brace. No surgery unless it doesn’t stabilize. The arm is a clean fracture of the ulna. Six weeks in a cast. Ribs are bruised but not fractured. He wants me off the knee entirely.”
“What aboutthe cut on your head?”
“Too small to require stitches.”
“You said no surgery unless your leg doesn’t stabilize.”
“It will. I told him I’d wear the brace and stay off it when I could.”
The doctor spoke to her in French, and she responded the same way. His tone was insistent. Hers was final. He retreated down the corridor.
