The train to Northbrook was not like the trains that ran between Carmody and the southern provinces. It was a single carriage pulled by a locomotive that wheezed and shuddered as it climbed into the foothills, its windows rattling in their frames, its seats worn thin by decades of passengers who had travelled this route and never returned. I was the only passenger in the carriage, and the conductor—an elderly man with a face like crumpled paper—had barely glanced at my ticket before retreating to his compartment at the front of the train.
I watched the landscape change through the grimy window. The grey suburbs of Carmody gave way to farmland, the farmland to forest, the forest to the jagged outlines of the Whitestone Mountains, their peaks already dusted with the first snow of autumn. The sky was a pale, washed-out blue, and the sun, when it appeared through the clouds, cast long shadows that stretched across the fields like fingers reaching for something just beyond their grasp.
Northbrook was the last stop on the line, a tiny station consisting of a single platform and a waiting room that had been boarded up years ago. The train shuddered to a halt, and I stepped onto the platform with my bag slung over my shoulder and the photograph of Aldric Voss clutched in my hand. The air was colder here, sharper, carrying the scent of pine and woodsmoke and something else—something metallic, like the taste of snow before it falls.
The village itself was a cluster of stone cottages huddled in a valley between two low hills. A single road ran through its centre, flanked by a pub, a post office, and a small church whose spire was missing its weathervane. Smoke rose from a few chimneys, but the streets were empty, and the only sound was the distant bleating of sheep and the whisper of wind through the pines.
I began to ask questions. The post office was open, but the woman behind the counter—a stout, ruddy-faced person with suspicious eyes—claimed never to have heard of anyone named Aldric Voss. The pub was empty save for a dog sleeping by the fire, and the publican, a man whose face seemed to have been carved from the same stone as the cottages, shook his head when I showed him the photograph. "No one by that name here," he said, his voice flat and final. "You must have the wrong village."
I did not have the wrong village. Gideon Marsh's directions had been specific, and the photograph in my hand was real, and the list of names I had found in the safe house had included this place. Aldric Voss was here, somewhere, hiding in the same way that his sister had hidden, behind the same walls of silence and suspicion that the people of Northbrook had erected against the outside world.
I spent the morning walking the single road from end to end, knocking on doors that opened only a crack, speaking to faces that regarded me with the same suspicious eyes as the woman in the post office. No one had heard of Aldric Voss. No one knew anything about a former intelligence officer. No one wanted to talk to a stranger from the city, a stranger with dark skin and worn clothes and the desperate, haunted look of a man who had been running for too long.
By midday, I had begun to despair. The hearing was in five days—no, four days now, if I counted the day I had spent on the train—and I had made no progress. Aldric Voss was a ghost, as invisible as I had once been, and the village of Northbrook was a fortress of silence that I could not breach.
I stopped at the church, more for rest than for hope, and sat in one of the hard wooden pews, staring at the altar and the stained-glass window above it—a depiction of Saint Elara, I realised with a start, her hands raised in blessing, her face serene and untroubled. The same saint whose feast day had marked the beginning of my long descent into the underworld. The same saint who was supposed to have healed the sick with nothing but her voice.
"I am not sick," I said aloud, to the empty church, to the saint, to no one. "I am dying. There is a difference."
"I suppose there is," said a voice behind me.
I turned. A man was standing in the doorway of the church, his silhouette framed against the pale afternoon light. He was tall and angular, with sharp features and slate-grey eyes that were identical to Cora Voss's—the same colour, the same intensity, the same unreadable expression. He wore a heavy coat and carried a walking stick, and his hair, which had once been dark, was now streaked with silver.
"Aldric Voss," I said.
"Luca Reyes." He walked down the aisle and sat in the pew beside me, his walking stick tapping against the stone floor. "I have been expecting you. Cora told me you might come. She said you were persistent."
"Cora has been taken," I said. "The Loom came for her at the safe house. She and Victor Havelock are gone. I found a list of names—your name was on it. She wanted you to help."
Aldric Voss did not react to the news of his sister's abduction. His face remained perfectly still, perfectly composed, the face of a man who had been trained to reveal nothing. But his hands, I noticed, were gripping the handle of his walking stick with a force that turned his knuckles white.
"I know she has been taken," he said quietly. "I felt it, the moment it happened. Cora and I—we have a connection. A bond that was forged long ago, in circumstances I will not describe to you. When she was taken, I knew. I have been waiting for you ever since."
"Then you know why I am here. The select committee hearing is in four days. Victor Havelock was supposed to testify, but he is gone. Cora was supposed to guide us through the proceedings, but she is gone. You are the only one left who knows the Loom from the inside, who can counter Sebastian Vane, who can ensure that my testimony is not twisted into a weapon against us."
Aldric Voss was silent for a long moment. The church was very still, the light filtering through the stained-glass window casting fragments of colour across the stone floor. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, almost contemplative.
"Do you know why I left the Aurelian Security Service, Mr. Reyes? Do you know why I have been hiding in this village for five years, cut off from everyone I ever knew, waiting for a moment that might never come?"
"No," I said. "Gideon Marsh told me you left under unexplained circumstances. He did not tell me why."
"Because I discovered the Loom." He turned to face me, his slate-grey eyes boring into mine. "Not the name—the name came later, from Cora. But the structure. The network. The marketplace of influence that operates beneath the surface of the Commonwealth's institutions. I discovered it fifteen years ago, in the course of a routine surveillance operation. A minor immigration consultant in the city of Carmody had been flagged for suspicious activity—money laundering, mostly, small sums moving through shell companies—and I was assigned to investigate."
"A minor immigration consultant," I repeated. "Miranda Sorensen."
"She was not the Angel of Ashbridge Row then. She was just a woman with an office and a string of desperate clients and a gift for making money disappear. I began investigating her, and the deeper I dug, the more I realised that her operation was connected to something much larger. Judges. Politicians. Officials in the Ministry of Justice. All of them linked by a web of favours and debts and quiet understandings. All of them profiting from the misery of people like you."
"What happened?"
"What happened is that my superiors shut down the investigation. They told me I had been pursuing a phantom, that the connections I had found were coincidental, that Miranda Sorensen was a legitimate businesswoman who had been unfairly targeted by an overzealous intelligence officer. They offered me a promotion—a desk job, far from the field, where I could not cause any more trouble. And when I refused, when I threatened to take my findings to the press, they destroyed me."
His voice did not change, but something in his eyes shifted—a shadow, a memory, a wound that had never fully healed. "They fabricated evidence of misconduct. They leaked it to the Chronicle. Within a week, my career was over, my reputation was destroyed, and my name was synonymous with corruption. I fled to Northbrook, to this village where no one asks questions, and I have been here ever since, watching the Loom grow and spread and consume everything in its path. Watching my sister continue the fight I could not win."
"Cora continued your work," I said. "She joined the Commission. She began investigating Miranda Sorensen. She found the documents, the witnesses, the evidence."
"She found you." Aldric Voss's gaze softened, and for the first time, I saw something other than cold composure in his eyes. It might have been respect. It might have been sorrow. "Cora believed that you were the key, Mr. Reyes. Not because you were the most important witness, or the most sympathetic victim, but because you refused to be silenced. Every other person the Loom has touched has eventually given up. They have taken the money, or signed the confidentiality agreement, or simply vanished into the shadows from which they came. But you—you kept fighting. You kept testifying. You kept refusing to accept the narrative that Miranda Sorensen and her allies had constructed. That is why Cora chose you. That is why I am sitting here now."
"Then you will help me," I said. "You will testify before the committee. You will tell them what you know."
Aldric Voss was silent again. The light through the stained-glass window shifted, the colours sliding across the floor as the sun moved behind the mountains. When he spoke, his voice was heavy with something that sounded almost like grief.
"I cannot testify, Mr. Reyes. Not because I do not wish to. Because I am dead."
I stared at him. "Dead. You are sitting in front of me. You are speaking to me. You are not dead."
"Legally, I am dead. Aldric Voss died five years ago, in a fire that consumed his home in the northern provinces. The body was identified by dental records. The death certificate was issued. The pension was paid to his surviving relatives—Cora, as it happens, though she never touched the money. The man who died in that fire was a vagrant, a man with no name and no family, a man whose body I had been preserving for exactly that purpose. I staged my own death, Mr. Reyes, because it was the only way to escape the Loom. As long as Aldric Voss is dead, the Loom has no reason to pursue me. The moment I reveal myself—the moment I testify—I become a target again. And so does everyone I have ever cared about."
"Then why did you stay? Why remain in Northbrook, waiting, if you never intended to act?"
"Because I was waiting for you." He reached into his coat and withdrew a folder—thicker than the ones I had grown accustomed to, its pages yellowed with age, its edges worn from years of handling. "This is the file I compiled during my investigation of Miranda Sorensen. It contains evidence that goes far beyond what Cora found, far beyond what Victor Havelock provided. Names. Dates. Bank accounts. Transcripts of conversations that were never meant to be recorded. It is the complete record of the Loom's operations, from its earliest days to the present. I have been keeping it safe for fifteen years, waiting for someone who could use it. Someone who was not dead. Someone who was still fighting."
He placed the folder on the pew between us. It was heavy, far heavier than it should have been, as if the weight of all the evidence it contained had somehow manifested physically.
"I cannot testify," he said again. "But you can. Take this file. Take it to Carmody. Take it to the select committee. It will give you everything you need to expose the Loom—not just Miranda Sorensen and Julian Frost, but the entire network. The names of the officials who have been bought. The records of the bribes that have been paid. The proof that the Frost ruling was not merely a judicial error but a criminal conspiracy, planned and executed by people who are still in power. This file, Mr. Reyes, is the weapon you have been looking for. The weapon Cora died to protect."
I took the folder. My hands were trembling, and my eyes were burning with something that might have been tears, though I had thought myself long past the capacity for weeping. "What will you do?"
"I will remain here," Aldric Voss said. "In the village where no one knows my name. I will continue to be dead, because it is the only way I can continue to be free. But I will be watching. I will be listening. And if the day comes when the Loom is finally destroyed—if the day comes when Miranda Sorensen and Julian Frost and all the others are held to account—I will emerge from the shadows and reclaim my name. Until then, I am a ghost. Like you."
He stood, his walking stick tapping against the stone floor, and walked toward the door of the church. The light from the stained-glass window fell across his face, illuminating the sharp angles of his features, the silver streaks in his hair, the slate-grey eyes that were so like his sister's.
"One more thing," he said, pausing at the door. "The safe house in Bellhaven. The message on the wall. 'You are next.' It was not a threat, Mr. Reyes. It was a warning. Cora knew she was going to be taken. She left the message for you, to let you know that the Loom was closing in. And she left something else—something I think you have not yet found."
He turned and walked through the door, his silhouette swallowed by the pale afternoon light, and I was left alone in the church with the folder in my hands and the echo of his words in my ears.
Something I had not yet found. Something Cora had left for me.
I searched the folder first, flipping through its yellowed pages, scanning the names and dates and bank accounts that Aldric Voss had compiled over fifteen years of silent watching. The evidence was overwhelming—more than enough to expose the Loom, more than enough to bring down Miranda Sorensen and Julian Frost and all the others. But there was nothing in the folder that seemed like a final message, nothing personal, nothing that spoke directly to me.
Then I remembered the list of names I had found in the safe house. I withdrew it from my pocket, unfolded it, and read it again. Sebastian Vane. The two compromised members of the committee. Aldric Voss. And at the bottom, almost invisible where the ink had smudged, a line I had not noticed before.
Check the floorboard. Number 7. Rowan Close.
The floorboard. The same hiding place Elena Marchetti had used in her cottage on Whitethorn Lane. The same hiding place I had used in my room at the boarding house. Cora Voss had learned from the best—or perhaps she had taught them. Either way, the message was clear. She had left something for me beneath the floorboards of the safe house, and I had been too distraught, too panicked, to find it.
I closed the folder and stood. The hearing was in four days. The journey back to Carmody would take a day, perhaps more if the trains were not running on schedule. That left me three days to retrieve Cora's final message, prepare my testimony, and walk into the committee room to face Sebastian Vane and the representatives of the Loom.
Three days. It was not enough. It would never be enough. But it was all I had.
I left the church and walked back through the silent village, the folder heavy under my arm, the photograph of Aldric Voss still in my pocket. The train to Carmody was scheduled to depart in two hours. I would be on it. And then I would return to the safe house, to the shattered door and the dark stains on the wall and the message Cora Voss had left for me in the only place she knew I would find it.
The night was falling over the Whitestone Mountains, the first stars pricking the sky above the peaks, and somewhere in the darkness, the Loom was spinning its threads, weaving its tapestry, pulling me ever closer to the centre of a design I was only beginning to understand.
But I had Aldric Voss's file. I had Cora Voss's final message, waiting for me beneath the floorboards of the safe house. And I had the three days that remained, the three days that would determine whether everything I had suffered—everything we had all suffered—had been for something, or for nothing at all.
The train whistle sounded in the distance, a long, mournful note that echoed through the valley like a bell tolling the hours of my remaining life. I walked toward it, my bag over my shoulder, the folder under my arm, and the cold mountain wind at my back.
Three days.
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