Kane is right. We need to get her out of Europe.
The bedroom door opens. Victoria stands in the frame with her phone in one hand and a look on her face that I've learned to read across a decade of absence. The composure is still there,the controlled exterior that she wears like body armor, but underneath it something has shifted. Her jaw is set at the angle she uses when she's reached a decision that no one is going to talk her out of.
"I need to go to Prague."
I set the phone down. "Why?"
"Because I have one contact left who might survive this if I warn him in person." She leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, and the bandage on her knuckles catches the light from the kitchen. "And because Webb's people won't expect me to run toward danger instead of away from it."
Marek. She's talking about the information broker she ran in Vinohrady, a man I know of through Echo Ridge's intelligence files but have never met. Victoria's relationship with Marek predates my death by several years, which means it predates my involvement with Echo Ridge, which means it's one of the few pieces of her network that I can't map from the inside.
"Prague is Committee territory, Vix. Eastern European operations hub. You'd be walking into their front garden."
"I'm aware of the geography." The look she gives me could freeze hydraulic fluid. "Marek has been dark since the purge started. If he's still alive, he's running, and if he's running, he won't answer a phone call or an encrypted message. He'll answer a knock on his door from someone he trusts."
"And if Webb's people are already waiting at his location?"
"Then we deal with it." She sayswethe way someone bites into something bitter, tasting the word and resenting the necessity. "You have Echo Ridge resources. Satellite coverage, signals intelligence, tactical support. Use them."
She's right, and we both know it. Running to Prague is tactically reckless and strategically sound. Webb's search patterns are designed around the assumption that Victoria will flee toward safety, not toward the epicenter of Committeeoperations. Every model, every protocol, every predictive framework the Committee uses will point them west and north, toward the English-speaking world, toward established intelligence partnerships. Prague is south and east. Prague is counterintuitive.
Prague is exactly what Victoria Cross would do, which is why I should have anticipated it.
"I'll coordinate with Tommy. Satellite coverage of Marek's neighborhood, real-time intercept feeds on Committee communications in the Prague theatre." I stand, and the movement puts me close enough to her that I can see the tension gathered along her collarbone, the pulse visible at her throat. "We move tonight. Train, not air. Less surveillance, more control over the route."
"Fine." She pushes off the doorframe and turns back toward the bedroom.
"Vix."
She stops but doesn't turn around. I can see the line of her shoulders, the rigid set of her spine, the way she holds herself together through discipline and fury and whatever reserves she hasn't yet depleted. The bandage on her hand is spotting red. She's reopened the cuts from hitting me, which means she's been gripping the phone hard enough to split the scabs.
"Marek is worth the risk?"
She turns her head just enough that I can see the edge of her profile, the silver threading through dark hair, the line of her jaw. "Everyone I've lost was worth the risk. That's why I'm the one who's supposed to protect them."
The words land between us with a weight that has nothing to do with Prague and everything to do with what I failed to do for a decade. I let it settle. I don't apologize, because apologies from me have the structural integrity of wet cardboard, and she deserves better than words I've already proven are cheap.
"I'll have Tommy run the coverage," I say instead. "We leave at twenty-one hundred."
She disappears into the bedroom. The door doesn't close this time, which is either progress or an oversight.
I spend the next two hours coordinating with Echo Base. Tommy pulls satellite imagery of Vinohrady and overlays it with Committee facility locations. The nearest confirmed Committee safe house is in Prague 2, the municipal district that shares a border with Marek's Vinohrady neighborhood, close enough that any approach will require careful routing. Kane signs off on the operation with the caveat that it remains extraction-focused. Warn Marek. Get out. Move to the Ghent airfield and get Victoria on a plane to Montana.
Vix emerges twice during the planning. Once to refill the electric kettle she found in the kitchen cabinet, brewing tea with the automatic precision of a woman who has made tea in safe houses from Beirut to Berlin. The second time to stand behind my shoulder and study the satellite imagery on my phone screen without asking permission, her breath warm against the back of my neck, close enough that I can smell the cheap soap from the bathroom mixed with something underneath that hasn't changed in ten years.
She points to a street two blocks from Marek's building. "Committee surveillance van parked there last month. Might be a permanent post."
"I'll have Tommy check current imagery."
She nods once, takes her tea, and goes back to the bedroom. The space she occupied behind me holds her warmth for a few seconds after she leaves, and I sit in it the way a man sits in the last patch of sun before winter comes.
The train to Prague departs Brussels at twenty-one thirty, a night service that will put us into the city by morning. I book the tickets through a clean account Kane established for Europeanoperations, separate names, no connection to either Victoria's compromised aliases or my own Echo Ridge credentials.
We board in silence. The compartment is small, two seats facing each other across a fold-down table, the kind of enforced proximity that would be uncomfortable with a stranger and is something else entirely with the woman sitting across from me.
The train pulls out of Brussels, and the city falls away into darkness. Belgium scrolls past in fragments of light, villages and motorways and the occasional flare of an industrial complex against the night sky.
Vix reads intercepts on her phone for the first hour, her face lit blue by the screen, her expression unreadable. I review Tommy's satellite coverage of the Prague approach and mark three alternate routes to Marek's building, each one designed to avoid the Committee surveillance post Victoria identified. We work in parallel, not together, two people performing complementary tasks in the same space without acknowledging the connection between them.
