Through the bond, south, Celeste. Alive. Moving. The presence I have learned, through a war’s worth of distance, to trust.
In front of me, the man who built her and broke her and put her in a room for me to find.
And between us, the woman who walked into this building to prove that the shaping failed, and the look in her eyes says she intends to prove it now, and I don’t know what she’s going to do, and for the first time in this war, neither does Konstantin, and his anticipation has an edge of uncertainty in it that means I am not the only variable he underestimated.
Nobody in the trophy room moves.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
The sublevel smells like bleach and fear and the stale trapped air of a place where people have been kept long enough that their breathing has changed the composition of the room.
Alexei leads. The server mirror is running two levels up without him, machines copying machines, because the data doesn’t need watching and the people behind these doors do. He knows this building as Simone knows the sanctuary, from the inside, from years of walking its corridors under someone else’s authority, and the expression on his face as he descends the stairs is the expression of a man returning to a place he swore he’d only see again through a scope.
“Third sublevel,” he says. Clinical. The voice that ran the sanctuary. “Holding cells. Twelve rooms. The last I saw, six were occupied.”
“Human or vampire?”
“Both. Konstantin kept them separated by utility. The humans were leverage. The vampires were experiments.” He pauses at areinforced door. His hand finds the lock mechanism without looking. Muscle memory from years of running this route. “The humans may not know who we are. They may not believe we’re here to help. The last person who opened this door was me, and I was bringing them food on Konstantin’s schedule.”
“Then you open it,” I say. “And I’ll be the new face.”
He nods. The people behind that door will get a face they recognize doing a thing they didn’t expect, opening the door instead of closing it, walking in with a woman beside him instead of a tray on a schedule.
How he moves through these corridors says everything the words don’t. The careful measured steps of a man retracing a route he walked in another life, under other orders, for a man who didn’t deserve his service. He has been on both sides of that door, and the being-on-both-sides shows in ways he doesn’t discuss and doesn’t need to.
He opens the door.
The corridor beyond is narrow and lit by overhead fluorescents that buzz at a frequency the twins don’t like. I feel them stir, a low restless push against my navel, and I press it down.Not now. We stay still, the three of us.
The first four cells are empty. Cleared. The beds stripped, the walls bare, an absence that says the occupants were moved before we arrived. Konstantin relocated his assets. He knew we were coming. He told us in the letter.
The fifth cell has a woman.
Human. Mid-thirties. Thin as people get when feeding is regular but insufficient, the body burning its reserves against a deficit that never quite catches up. The cell is barely wider than the cot. Concrete floor, concrete walls, a single overhead strip light humming at the same pitch as the corridor. A cot with a blanket that’s been folded and refolded so many times the creases havetheir own creases. A plastic cup of water on the floor beside the cot, half-full, placed where she can reach it without standing.
She’s arranged what she has with the precision of someone who has been in this space long enough to make it a room instead of a cell, and the arrangement is the only agency she has, and she keeps it, a weapon she can’t swing. She’s sitting on the bed with her back against the wall and her arms around her knees and when Alexei opens the door she doesn’t look up.
“Ma’am.” I drop to her level. “My name is Celeste. We’re here to get you out.”
She looks up. Her eyes move from me to Alexei, and when they land on Alexei something happens in her face, recognition and fear and a complicated relief that says she knows this man from the other side of the bars and is recalculating what his presence means.
“You left,” she says to him.
“I came back.” His voice doesn’t change. His hands are at his sides. “With people who are going to take you somewhere safe.”
“The boy,” she says. “Is the boy still here?”
Alexei goes very still.
“What boy?” I ask.
“Two cells down. He was here when I arrived. Eight or nine years old. I could hear him through the wall.” Her voice is flat and her eyes are not and the gap between the two is the gap between surviving and processing. “He stopped making noise three days ago. I’ve been listening. He stopped.”
I’m moving before she finishes.
Two cells down. The door is locked. The force finds the mechanism and tears it apart, the lock scattering across the floor in pieces of metal that ring on the concrete, and the door swings open and the room is small and cold and lit by a single overhead light and on the cot in the corner there is a boy.
