Voss is in the operations base reviewing today’s examination data.
The impressions my shadows carry from that room taste like concentration — the sharp, narrow focus of a woman cross-referencing results against her existing models.
She hasn’t found anything yet. The fire interference Constantine created is still muddying the data from my session.
But she’s looking. She’s always looking.
The technician whose memory I rewrote is in the staff dining hall eating dinner.
His shadows taste normal. The Command is holding — the altered memory settled and stable, the belief that my examination was unremarkable as firmly lodged in his mind as the actual truth would have been if the truth weren’t a death sentence.
Bael’s agents report next.
His shadows are older and deeper than mine — they don’t thread through the building’s upper levels but through the bedrock beneath, the geological layer where his ancient darkness carries information the way underground rivers carry water.
The reports arrive as cold impressions that my mate bond translates: Hunter movements, patrol schedules, the location of every operative on campus mapped in the language of deep shadow.
Two Hunters in the west corridor making their nightly sweep. One stationed outside the operations base — permanent guard, new addition since Voss arrived. The four sensor technicians rotating in six-hour shifts to maintain the grid’s continuous monitoring.
And in the faculty wing, three visiting operatives who arrived yesterday and whose shadows carry the cold, sharp taste of people who are very good at violence and very comfortable with the idea of using it.
Not the binding team.
Not yet.
These are support staff — the advance structure that the ADU builds around an operation before the primary operatives deploy.
The scaffolding.
The fact that scaffolding is going up means the building is coming soon.
The binding team hasn’t arrived yet. That’s something.
Voss wants clean confirmation before she calls them in, and Constantine’s interference and Bael’s blood disguise have kept the confirmation from crystallizing.
But the window is narrowing.
Every hour that passes is an hour closer to the moment when Voss’s persistence overcomes our deceptions and the data tells her what she already suspects.
Constantine arrives through the blood path twenty minutes after me.
He looks like hell.
Not physically — Constantine always looks put together, the professional surface maintained even when the man beneath it is cracking.
But his eyes carry the specific exhaustion of someone who spent the day standing six feet from the person trying to kill the woman he loves and smiling and answering questions and pretending that the clipboard in his hands was more interesting than the quiet catastrophe unfolding in the examination chair.
Bael materializes from the deep shadows. Wings out. Green eyes steady.
The three of us in the sanctuary.
The only safe room left in a building full of traps.
“Strategy,” Constantine says, and his voice is hoarse in a way that tells me the professional surface is thinner than usual tonight. “We need to talk about what happens next.”
“What happens next is the binding team,” Bael says. “Voss is requesting confirmation. The data from Ashley’s examination is compromised enough to delay but not prevent. I give us three days. Maybe four.”
“Then we need an exit plan.”
