The seven days passed like water through my fingers—swift, cold, impossible to hold. I spent them in the narrow room in Lowcross, the folder of questions open on the bed, the documents from Victor Havelock spread across the floor like a map of the underworld. Margot Keane continued her quiet ministry of tea and biscuits, her sorrowful face appearing at my door at intervals that seemed almost ritualistic, as if she were performing some ancient rite of hospitality for the dying. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she understood, better than I did, what awaited me at the end of those seven days.
Anouk Delacroix visited twice, bringing updates from Cora Voss and revisions to the questions. Victor Havelock, she told me, had agreed to testify first, but his health was deteriorating. The strain of hiding, the fear of exposure, the grief of watching his daughter fade—all of it had worn him down to a shadow of the man I had met in the black saloon. His doctors had advised against the stress of a parliamentary hearing, but he had insisted. He had promised his daughter, he said, that he would leave her something real. The testimony was that something. It was all he had left.
Vera Lindström telephoned on the fourth day, her voice crisp and professional as always, but with an undercurrent of tension that I had not heard before. She had secured a commitment from the select committee to hear Victor Havelock and me in closed session—a concession, she explained, that would protect us from the worst of the media attention while allowing the committee to investigate the allegations without interference. But the closed session was a double-edged sword. It meant that our testimony would not be public immediately, that the Loom would have time to respond, to spin, to silence. It meant that the risk of what we were doing was greater than ever.
On the sixth day, I went to Bellhaven.
I had not intended to return to Rowan Close. Cora Voss had told me to wait, and I had waited, and the waiting had become a kind of discipline, a way of measuring the dwindling hours. But on the sixth day, with the hearing looming like a cliff edge in the darkness, I found myself boarding the tram to the northern edge of the city, my feet carrying me along the tree-lined avenue and into the narrow cul-de-sac, my hand pushing open the wrought-iron gate without any conscious decision on my part.
The safe house was dark. The single bulb above the door had burned out, and the windows were blank and unreflective, like the eyes of a corpse. I knocked, but there was no answer. I knocked again, harder, and the door swung open under my hand, its lock broken, its frame splintered where someone had forced it inward.
I stepped inside.
The sitting room had been destroyed. The folding table was overturned, its documents scattered across the floor in drifts of white paper. The laptop computer lay in the corner, its screen shattered, its casing cracked. The kettle had been knocked from its hob, and a dark stain spread across the floorboards where the water had pooled and dried. And on the wall above the table, written in something dark and wet that had long since dried to a rusty brown, were three words:
YOU ARE NEXT.
I stood in the wreckage for a long time, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps, my heart hammering against my ribs. Cora Voss was gone. Victor Havelock was gone. The safe house had been compromised, the documents scattered, the warning scrawled on the wall like a signature. The Loom had found them. The Loom had taken them. And the message it had left behind was meant for me.
I searched the house, moving from room to room with the desperate thoroughness of a man who knows what he will find but cannot stop himself from looking. The kitchen was empty. The bedroom was empty. The back door hung open, its lock similarly broken, revealing a small garden overgrown with weeds and a path that led to an alley beyond. There was no sign of Cora Voss. No sign of Victor Havelock. No blood, at least—no evidence of violence beyond the destruction of the sitting room. But the absence of bodies did not mean they were alive. It meant only that whatever had happened here had happened elsewhere, in a place I could not see and could not reach.
I returned to the sitting room and began to gather the scattered documents. Most were ruined—trampled, torn, soaked with water from the overturned kettle. But some were still legible, and among them I found a single sheet of paper, handwritten in Cora Voss's small, precise script. It was not a letter. It was a list of names, written in haste, the ink smudged in places where her hand had dragged across the page.
Sebastian Vane. The chief counsel of the select committee. Former ASS. Still active.
Two members of the committee, their names circled. One of them was the member from Edgemere, the one Anouk Delacroix had warned me about.
And at the bottom of the page, underlined twice, a single name that I did not recognise: Aldric Voss.
I stared at the name for a long time. Voss. Cora Voss's name. But the first name was different—Aldric, not Cora. A husband? A brother? A father? Whoever he was, he was connected to Cora Voss, and his name was on a list of people who had been compromised by the Loom.
I folded the paper and placed it in my pocket, beside the note from Cora Voss that I had carried since the night Victor Havelock gave me the documents. Then I left the safe house, stepping over the shattered doorframe and into the grey afternoon light. The street was empty. The curtains of the neighbouring houses were drawn. No one had seen anything. No one had heard anything. No one would come to investigate, because no one in Bellhaven wanted to attract the attention of the forces that had done this.
I walked back to the tram stop in a daze, the list of names burning in my pocket. Victor Havelock was gone. Cora Voss was gone. The testimony that was supposed to shatter the Loom, the testimony that was supposed to give meaning to my suffering, had been silenced before it could be spoken. And I was alone, with only the documents in my room and the questions in my folder and the forty-one days that still remained before the deportation order took effect.
But I was wrong. I was not alone.
When I returned to the boarding house in Lowcross, I found Margot Keane waiting for me in the hallway. Her sorrowful face was even more sorrowful than usual, and her hands were twisting a dishcloth into a knot. "There is someone here to see you, Mr. Reyes," she said. "A man. He is waiting in your room. He said it was urgent."
I climbed the stairs with the same heavy legs, the same hammering heart, the same sense of inevitability that had accompanied me through every threshold of this long, slow destruction. The door to my room was ajar, and through the gap I could see a figure standing by the window, his silhouette framed against the grey light.
Gideon Marsh turned when I entered. His tea-coloured eyes were bloodshot, his gaunt face even gaunter than before, his hands trembling at his sides. "They have taken her," he said. "Cora. The Loom. They came for her last night, at the safe house. Victor Havelock tried to fight them, but he was too weak. They took them both."
"I know," I said. "I went to the safe house. I saw the wreckage."
Gideon Marsh closed his eyes, and for a moment, I thought he might collapse. But he steadied himself, his hands gripping the edge of the windowsill, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "There is more. The select committee. It is a trap, just as Anouk Delacroix warned. Sebastian Vane is not merely a former ASS officer. He is the Loom's principal liaison to the intelligence services. He has been feeding information to Miranda Sorensen for years. If you testify before that committee, your words will be recorded, analysed, and used to destroy you. Cora knew this. She was planning to expose Vane during the hearing, to use the testimony as a trap for the trappers. But now—"
"But now she is gone," I said. "And the plan is gone with her."
"No." Gideon Marsh opened his eyes, and I saw, in their tea-coloured depths, a spark of something that had not been there before. "The plan is not gone. The plan is still in motion. Victor Havelock is gone, but the documents he gave you are still here. Cora Voss is gone, but the evidence she gathered is still here. The testimony can still be given. The Loom can still be exposed. But you cannot do it alone. You need someone inside the committee room. Someone who can counter Vane's influence. Someone who can ensure that your words are heard by the right ears."
"Who?" I asked.
Gideon Marsh reached into his coat and withdrew a photograph—a small, faded image of a man in military uniform, his face sharp and angular, his eyes the same slate-grey as Cora Voss's. "Aldric Voss. Cora's brother. He is a former intelligence officer, like Cora. He left the ASS five years ago, under circumstances that were never fully explained. He has been living in seclusion ever since, in a village in the northern provinces. Cora was in contact with him. She believed that he could help us, that he knew things about the Loom that even she did not know."
"Aldric Voss," I said, taking the photograph. "He is on the list I found at the safe house. Cora wrote his name down before she was taken."
"Then you understand. Aldric Voss is the key. He is the one person who can help you now. You must find him before the hearing. You must convince him to testify in Cora's place. Without him, the plan will fail. The Loom will win. Miranda Sorensen will remain untouchable, and everyone who has sacrificed themselves—Cora, Victor, Elena Marchetti, Sabine Kroger, all of them—will have done so for nothing."
I looked at the photograph. Aldric Voss stared back at me with his sister's eyes, his face unreadable, his history a mystery. A former intelligence officer. A man who had left the ASS under unexplained circumstances. A man who had been hiding for five years, waiting for something—or someone.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"Northbrook," Gideon Marsh said. "A village in the foothills of the Whitestone Mountains. It is a day's journey from Carmody by train, and then another day on foot or by cart. The hearing is in six days. If you leave now, you can reach him in time."
"Six days," I said. "The hearing is in six days. If I go to Northbrook, I may not return in time."
"If you do not go to Northbrook, the hearing will destroy you. Vane will twist your testimony into a weapon. The Loom will use your own words to discredit everything you have fought for. Aldric Voss is the only person who can prevent that. He knows the Loom's methods. He knows its weaknesses. He knows how to fight an enemy that cannot be seen."
I folded the photograph and placed it in my pocket, beside the list of names, beside the note from Cora Voss. The pocket was growing heavy with the weight of all the paper I had accumulated, all the evidence and the warnings and the fragments of a conspiracy that seemed to expand every time I thought I had grasped its shape.
"I will go," I said. "But if I do not return in time—if the hearing proceeds without me—"
"Then the Loom wins," Gideon Marsh said. "But the Loom has been winning for years. It won the day the Frost ruling was issued. It won the day the Chronicle killed Paul Ashworth's story. It won the day the Commission was shut down and Cora was terminated. Every victory we have had—the Guardian article, the High Court injunction, the stay of deportation—has been a victory within a larger defeat. The hearing is our last chance to turn that defeat into something else. Do you understand?"
I understood. I understood that the forty-one days had become six days, and the six days would become a journey into the unknown, and the journey would either save me or doom me, and I would not know which until it was too late.
I packed a small bag—a change of clothes, the folder of questions, the documents from Victor Havelock, the photograph of Miranda Sorensen at the fundraising dinner, the letters she had sent me over the months. Margot Keane, when I told her I was leaving, pressed a parcel of food into my hands and looked at me with an expression that seemed, for the first time, to contain something other than sorrow. It might have been hope. It might have been resignation. It might have been the simple, human recognition that one person can offer another when words are insufficient.
"Come back, Mr. Reyes," she said. "Whatever happens, come back."
The train to Northbrook left from Carmody Central at midnight. I sat in the same carriage where I had sat on my return from Highmoor, the carriage where Gideon Marsh had been watching me with his tea-coloured eyes, and I watched the lights of the city recede into darkness. The documents were in my bag. The photograph of Aldric Voss was in my pocket. And somewhere in the night, beyond the hills and the forests and the small, sleeping villages of the northern Commonwealth, a former intelligence officer was waiting for me, carrying the last piece of a puzzle I had been trying to solve for months.
The hearing was in six days. I had six days to find Aldric Voss, to convince him to testify, and to return to Carmody before the Loom closed its fist around everything I had fought for.
Six days. The number echoed in my mind like a bell tolling the hours of my remaining life. And as the train carried me northward, into the darkness, into the mountains, into the unknown, I allowed myself, for the first time since the Feast of Saint Elara, to feel something that was not fear or dread or the cold, creeping certainty of my own destruction.
I allowed myself to feel purpose.
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