Sanctuary. Somewhere in Western Europe.

The next Sanctuary they hit was empty. Noah had knocked and knocked, but no one was home. They broke in through an open back window and Reeve felt like there really must be a better system. But it was good to be under a roof without strangers.

Once Noah had unlocked the front door from the inside and let them in, they took a moment to explore and take inventory of what they had. Weapons were stocked, the pantry had plenty of nonperishables, and the two bedrooms were packed in with rows of cots. A white light flipped on in the other room, startling Reeve out of the red haze he’d been squinting in. He went towards it.

It was Hannah. She was rummaging through a pile of blankets in one bedroom. Noah appeared at his side.

“Hey,” he called to her. “Turn that off.”

“What?” she asked, turning.

“The light.”

“There’s no one else here.”

Noah let out a deep sigh. “That’s exactly the… Everyone!” he shouted. The place was small enough that they were all probably already listening. “I don’t care if you’re personally alone in this house. You’re in the Church. Act like it, and not just when someone is watching. This life works for a reason.”

Hannah turned the lamp off. “Sorry,” she said into the dark.

Reeve blinked blindly and put a hand to his stitched up side in reflex. He heard Noah shift his weight and pitched his voice to carry.

“We need to go out hunting tonight. With the place empty, the area hasn’t been kept up and there might be some dens.” No one made a sound agreeing or disagreeing. It’s probably the best Noah could have hoped for with what he was asking. “Everyone suit up.”

Reeve put a clumsy hand on Noah’s arm. “I’m guessing I’ll be the one staying home?”

“Of course you’re staying home. I have no idea how you’re even bloody upright. But you’re not well enough to stay as the sentry, so I’ll be staying with you.”

“Wait, what?” Hannah walked into the hall, tangled in the process of buckling on a holster.

“I’m staying home,” Noah repeated, his voice a little too amused for Reeve’s liking.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa—we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

“Yes, you do,” he replied simply. “We’re going to be parting ways after this Sanctuary. If I hold your hand any longer, it’ll end up killing you.”

Reeve could feel the fear pulsing through the house like a bitter wash through his mind. The others started moving again after a moment of silence and hustled to prepare.

You’re not really sending them out alone, are you? he thought to Noah.

Of course not.

Gareth, Hannah, Alex, and Alyosha left with a minimal amount of complaints and a lot of glances in his direction. They were armed to the teeth. Even in the dim light, Hannah and Alex's faces were bruised from their previous encounter. Reeve knew this was the last thing they wanted to be doing, but they didn't argue.

"Be safe," he called from where he was resting on a torn up couch.

"We will," Alex said simply. They silently accepted Noah's blessing—something about being as cunning as snakes and as pure as doves. Reeve was having a hard time paying attention.

After they'd left, Noah turned back to him. “I’ll give them a couple minutes’ head start and then follow them.” He began pulling his gear from his bags. “Do me a favor and don’t follow with your brain. It’s distracting and you can’t help anyway.”

“They’re going to be pissed at both of us. You know that, right?”

Noah smiled. “You’ve survived it this long.”

Noah hadn’t intended for that to sting like it did. Reeve could feel it was meant as a friendly joke, but it still made him balk. Noah left shortly after, leaving Reeve alone and sore as all hell, laying on a couch with a shotgun on the floor beside him.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Guadalajara for some reason, about that first night when Hannah and Alex, bruised and battered, haltingly danced in Alyosha’s kitchen. How they’d laughed and drank and barely spoke to him. He’d survived their anger this long. He had to concede the point. From an outside perspective like Noah’s, it wouldn’t seem like that huge of a struggle to live with the silent resentment, the frustration and anger. But Noah wasn’t a telepath.

Reeve knew their silent complaints about him on a good day, let alone now. Nothing was silent. Reeve tried to focus on the quiet noises outside, staying ready for anything. It was no good. His side ached and his head raced. Hours passed in this restless haze.

Eventually the stillness of the empty house was broken as the group poured through the front door. Reeve shot up from the couch, ignoring the searing pull of the stitches. The stink of gasoline filled the room as they crowded in. Gareth had Hannah’s arm pulled up around his shoulder and he was helping her walk. Behind the black coats, there was blood running down the outside leg of her pants. Alex and Alyosha had eyes like saucers as they scrambled to pull gear inside, mindful of Hannah’s leg. Alex’s lip was busted and Alyosha had a limp of his own.

“Jesus,” Reeve breathed. “Are you okay?”

Hannah didn’t answer. She was upright and awake, but it was like she didn’t hear him.

“Get Noah,” Gareth said tersely, raising his voice to call Noah’s name again. “We need him to stitch this.”

Reeve glanced at the floor. “He’s not here.” He tried to explain, but it only came out in a short burst of stuttered mush, which he shut his mouth on once he heard himself.

He was saved by a knock at the door with Noah entering directly after.

The rest swung around, swearing, startled, and still in a heightened alert state.

Noah put a hand up to settle them. “Get her on the couch,” he said, gesturing to her leg. “I’ve got my kit.”

“Where were you?” Alex asked, pulling off his coat. It looked stiff and Reeve knew the black of the coat was hiding whatever gore he’d been splashed with.

Reeve half hoped Noah would lie, for his own sake.

“I followed you.” He rummaged through his med bag. “I wanted to make sure you were ready, and be there if things went wrong.”

“Things went wrong!” Alyosha shouted.

“And it didn’t go wrong,” Noah said gently, “it just didn’t go as planned.”

“It went wrong,” Alyosha repeated.

“Is it a bite?” Reeve asked.

“I think it just hit her, but it looks cut. I didn’t see nails,” Alex trailed off.

“Doesn’t need ‘em. Hit somebody with a pipe hard enough and it’ll slash you up something ugly.” He watched Noah slit her pant leg up to mid thigh. “It’s not that bad,” Noah muttered, relief in his voice.

Noah turned to Alyosha as he prepped a needle. “Sometimes it goes that way. If your lives were in danger, I’d have stepped in.” He nodded to Hannah. “Is she with us?”

Gareth looked up blankly. “I think it’s shock.”

Noah nodded. “That’s normal. This is going to hurt.” He covered the wound in antiseptic and Hannah arched her back, letting out a short wail, the life back in her eyes. She swore a blue streak while Noah stitched her leg, which was significantly more reassuring for Reeve to hear than nothing at all.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

When he’d finished, Gareth turned to Reeve. “You knew he was following us?” He didn’t even get a chance to answer. “Goddamn it. I’m just so tired of this shit.”

“You’ll be rid of me soon,” Noah said with a smile. “Tomorrow, I’ll get you to a Sanctuary where you won’t be alone and then see how you do without training wheels.”

“The dog got away,” Alex said, voice too small.

Noah nodded. “That happens.”

“No,” Alex argued, “I mean, we obviously can’t do this alone.”

“You did. This is what it is sometimes.”

Hannah turned to Reeve. She was pale. “I don’t want to do this,” she croaked, tongue thick. “You seriously couldn’t think of anything better than this when you were plotting?”

“I wasn’t plotting,” Reeve snapped, then lowered his voice. “This is the safest way, but if you don’t—It’s not just my decision.”

Gareth rubbed at his scalp. “Thanks for letting us in on the planning, but I don’t know. Just being on our own? I don’t like that either.”

“I can try to keep us safe if you want to try something else. I have my telepathy.”

Hannah’s face was lined with pain and her eyes were hard. “Thanks, but you couldn’t even keep your head out of the line of fire when you were in whatever little fortress you built in Beatty. The Church at least has a track record.”

“Hannah,” Alex started softly. Noah took that moment to silently extricate himself from the room, disappearing behind one of the bedroom doors.

“Am I wrong?”

Alex’s face twisted, “No, but—”

“You know I’m right,” she shot back. She looked back at Reeve. “You know I’m right.”

Reeve took a breath. “I have a system set up as a backup to the Church. I’m saying if that’s what you all wanted, I could work out a plan that would keep us as far off Neptune’s radar as possible.”

Hannah hauled herself upright and muttered under her breath, “Cause you’re so good at that.”

Reeve choked out half a laugh. “You want to know how I got caught? How Neptune found me out in Beatty?”

No one answered, but Reeve had been listening to the question from their minds for weeks now, so it didn’t matter. “You told them. You turned me in to Neptune. So I’d love it if we could stop talking about how this is all my fault.”

“What are you talking about?” Alex’s voice was a little unstrung.

Reeve slid down the wall to sit with his knees bent. “You don’t remember because they wiped you.”

“Why didn’t you say something before they grabbed you?” Gareth demanded, shaking.

“I didn’t notice. They were good. I couldn’t see it until I re-connected with your heads after being away. I can tell you or I can unlock it.”

“Unlock it.” Gareth’s voice was hard. The others nodded. Reeve did. It was easy. He’d be working the knots out for days, gently at the edges, so all it took was one final push for the barriers to melt away. He knew what they were seeing. He’d already watched.

“It was before our last mission.” Reeve said quietly. Hannah, Gareth, and Alex had their eyes closed, processing. “We’d been sent a mission, but I’d decided to hide him instead. I’d done it before, so that paperwork was all in order and you never even knew we’d had an assignment.” Reeve listened in.

There was a knock at the door. Gareth answered it and found four agents in dress shirts and slacks waiting to come in. Reeve wasn’t there. He’d gone off the day before, on one of his trips out of town. He’d told them he was tracking down some part or another for his car. They were Neptune agents, an Investigation team. They explained they’d been sent to double check with the team in person about their last target. The scene had been a little too clean and HQ had asked them to confirm the details of the mission report.

“I told them I didn’t know what mission they were talking about,” Hannah said, brow furrowed. “And that I wasn’t sure where you were.”

Reeve nodded. “And then they wiped you and sent the next false mission as a trap. And here we are.”

“You’re not going to actually say that I’m partly to blame for all this? Because I told the truth about something I had no idea there was even something to lie about?” Hannah’s face was wet, but Reeve was barely seeing it.

“How the fuck can we cover for you if we don’t know there’s anything to cover?” Alex broke in.

“I don’t know!” Reeve yelled back. “But you didn’t try.”

“Jesus Christ, Reeve,” Hannah said sourly. “I hope you think about this conversation later when you’re not sure why people don’t trust you.”

“We’ve never had Neptune show up to confirm anything before,” Gareth interrupted, eyes blank.

“It was a high profile target,” Reeve said, grateful for the question.

Alex looked up. “How high profile?”

Reeve mussed at his hair. “The file’s intel said this guy was an Entropy agent, but he wasn’t even close. He wasn’t even knacked. He used to work for Sol years and years ago, back before it was all gens and Sol employed a few non-knacked specialists to train them. This researcher, he’s a scientist, had made copies of projects in case he needed collateral when he left, but he hadn’t done anything new with them in decades. He just stuck them in a drawer.”

“And Sol just suddenly needed to make sure he didn’t go public?” Gareth asked.

Reeve shook his head. “Worse. Sol was cleaning house. He told me that Sol would have killed him to prevent us, knacked people, from reading those documents.”

“What was it?” Hannah asked.

“No.” Reeve swallowed. “They want me erased because they figure I know it.”

“It’s a little fucking late, Reeve,” Gareth sneered.

“If you don’t know, you and Hannah have a slim chance. And Alex, you were still technically a student. If this had happened a few weeks later, it would be a different story, but I think their procedures state they have to try to save you because you were a minor when you defected.”

“What did he have?” Alex asked, ignoring him.

“No.”

Alex huffed impatiently. “Maggie had the technology, Alyosha had a plane, Jon… Jonathan was a doctor. What did this guy have that you wanted? These files?”

“Paranoia.” Reeve let his hands flop in front of him, exhausted. His side burned with every breath. “He was sure Sol would come for him one day, so he’d been stashing away money in hidden accounts, buying fake identification papers and real estate in different names.”

No one spoke for a moment. When Reeve looked up, he saw that Alyosha had disappeared at some point, too. He hadn’t even heard him walk past him out of the room.

“For the record,” Hannah croaked. “When we went and got you back, not knowing what you did, these two thought it could be a mistake. I didn’t think that. I was sure you’d done something wrong, something bad enough for Neptune to take you. There’s a long, terrifying list of possibilities for things that can get you erased. And we came to get you anyway. I came knowing you’d done something awful. So I need you to just eat that you fucked up. Next time you dream up some secret conspiracy shit, you need to tell us so we don’t accidentally blow your cover. You asshole.”

Reeve clamped his eyes shut and didn’t move.

Hannah raised her voice, “Now, I need you two to help me get into a bedroom because, Reeve, I love you and I don’t want to hate you, but right now being in the same room with you is hard.”

Reeve realized belatedly that she was feeling his pain and her own. He could relate, so he kept his head down until he heard the bedroom door close. Noah would leave them alone soon and they’d be on their own again—something Reeve found absurdly foolish, given how the night had gone. He didn’t sleep.

---

Sol LAHQ. Company Housing.

Mackenzie’s head was pounding and any movement of her eyes seemed to set off new waves of pain. Still, she kept leafing through pages that might give her more information to add to the pieces she had already stowed away safely. There was a man in Paris who kept coming up in her notes, and she needed to either send someone she trusted to go check him out or find a way to get there herself. Given how concerned Rafe had been, she didn’t like her chances of being able to extricate herself from LAHQ, but she had her own concerns about who to choose to go in her stead. She needed Louis and Grace here, and this was sensitive.

Tossing aside page after page, she wished she could even articulate what she was looking for. More than anything, it was a feeling. The knowledge was there in her head; she couldn’t touch it, but it was in there. Every now and then, something she read would send this electric zing through her, like lightning forking and branching, reaching out to touch these inaccessible parts of her mind—signaling that it was connected to the chain.

She stared long and hard at a series of drawings, willing them to trigger something, but nothing clicked until she moved onto another stack of drawings and found one sketch of a young woman, hair in a thick, wavy bob. It wasn’t a face she recognized. There was a lot of graphite on the page, darkening the edges and she’d even gone in with black pen on top of it to try to make it darker. It was one way Mackenzie sometimes conveyed a sense of dread in her Knowing, when words didn’t feel true enough in the moment. The background amidst the darkness was hard to make out, but it looked much like a high-ranked corporate office, though she couldn’t say whose. She’d drawn a star anise pod in high detail that covered most of her chest.

The caption she’d written at the bottom read, “She will bring it all crashing down.”

The lightning struck through her mind, illuminating her far edges with a deep fear. A pull like an itch somewhere in her body told her she had seen this woman before. She’d drawn her before or written her down. Somewhere.

Head reeling, she stood and rushed across the room, eyes half closed and blinded by migraine. The other Knowing of her wasn’t from the same time she’d used her knack. It was later, maybe. Closer to now. She let the sick feeling in her stomach guide her to the filing cabinet that held her records from last year’s Knowing. There were two full drawers of papers, and that didn’t include voice recording data.

It took her two hours of going through shorthand, challenging her limit on her ability to push through a headache, until she found what she was looking for. Another drawing, this one lighter and picturing two people. The woman’s face was both soft and hard at once, and she was pressed, forehead to forehead, with a familiar man in glasses. To one side, she’d sketched a rough waterlily shape she didn’t understand.

The caption she’d scrawled read, “She could be the one to bring it all crashing down.” There was no dread in reading it, but something like hope. Below that, she’d added as an afterthought, “Send Fox to Paris.”

Fox del Sol. That’s who the man in the drawing was. One of her top ten agents. Someone she would count as trusted, but he hadn’t automatically made his way onto her shortlist for this Paris assignment. At the moment, Fox was undercover in Bulgaria, she knew.

Send Fox to Paris.

Okay. That settled that, but who was the woman?

She went to her computer, glancing back at the first drawing with the anise pod, and did a search in the Saturn database for “star anise.”

Anise del Sol popped up right away. She studied her face. Yes, that was her. Too young yet for the drawing, but still her. She was a fresh agent in Kyiv, and not likely to cross paths with someone like Fox.

She could bring it all crashing down.

The illumination sparked across her mind, inundating and absolute, raising the hair on her arms with urgent hope. Fate wasn’t fixed—or, it was and it wasn’t. She could help it along.

With a fresh sheet of paper, she made a note: reassign Fox’s current handler. Promote him if she had to. Request an agent from Kyiv be the one to make Fox’s last contact on that Bulgaria assignment. If fate willed it, it would be Anise del Sol.

Then, she’d send Fox to Paris.

***