Page 20 of Laundering Down the Legions
Grayson slid back to the secondary station. "I'll pull the barrier diagnostics. See if there's anything Zandia missed in the ward structure. Weak points we can shore up."
"There won't be anything she missed," Kearan said with resigned honesty. "But pull them anyway. Every hour counts."
Grayson disappeared into the data, present in the room but mostly elsewhere, and it left a particular quiet for the two of us to stand in.
"You're not putting it on," Kearan said. Not a question. He'd been reading my face the whole time. "Not yet."
"Not yet. I need to think. About whether there's actually a way out of it that doesn't cost everyone."
He moved closer, even though he kept his eyes on the monitors. "Zandia said there wasn't an alternative," he said quietly.
"Zandia doesn't know everything. She's ancient, powerful, and terrifying, and she's also been running on the same worldview for centuries. There might be answers she stopped looking for a long time ago because she decided they were impossible."
"There might be." He didn't argue with the hope, because he understood what it was worth. But he wouldn't pretend the math was better than it was either. "We need to be realistic about the time, though."
"Seventy-two hours. More or less."
"Yes." He leaned against the console, and it brought him close enough to be a choice. "We brief the team. The threat, the diagnostics, and the ring. Get their read on everything."
"They'll say I have to put it on."
"Probably. The math doesn't leave much room for moral arguments."
"I know. But I made a decision. I'm not wearing someone's trapped consciousness as armor unless I can promise to return them."
He was quiet for a moment, and then he said the thing I hadn't expected. "In the planning room. Before the alarm. That wasn't finished."
The kiss had stayed printed on me through everything. "No," I said. "It wasn't."
He was close now, the distance between us gone with his hand on the edge of the console almost over mine. I wanted to close the gap and find out what came after that interrupted kiss, what happened when nothing screamed through our nervous systems and made us stop.
But the ring was still warm against my sternum, the monitors were still pulsing, and seventy-two hours still meant we didn't have room for anything but surviving.
"After," I said, steadier than I felt. "After we find a way through that doesn't make me wear someone's soul, and there's no deadline written by ancient creatures."
"If there is an after," Kearan said. Not cruel. Honest.
"There has to be. The alternative is unacceptable, and I don't accept unacceptable."
From the secondary station, Grayson made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. Recognition. He didn't look up from the diagnostics, but his shoulders eased, and I caught the smallest curl at the corner of his mouth.
Kearan stepped back, just enough to put the distance back without making it a rejection, and his face reset to clinical. "I'll help you prep the briefing. We present the timeline, the diagnostics, and the ring."
"No." I double-checked I had everything I'd run in with. "You and Grayson can present the brief. I'll be in the planning room finding option 3."
"You'll find something," he added, and I couldn't tell if he believed it or if he was just good at delivering the necessary lie.
Beyond the walls more creatures were gathering. The threat wasn't abstract anymore. It was measured in hours. But something had shifted in my chest, not hope, that was too generous for what we were facing, but the stubbornness of refusing to believe some choices were never choices. I looked at the red signature one more time, then back at Kearan.
"Go brief the team," I said. "We've got seventy-two hours to break a binding everyone swears is permanent. We should get started."
Kearan nodded and moved for the door. Grayson saved his work and followed without being asked, and the three of us left together, the red signature still pulsing behind us.
CHAPTER 11
Icame back to the world with the edge of the grimoire printed into my left cheek and no memory of when I'd stopped reading and started using my mother's life's work as a pillow. The planning room was dark except for a few desk lamps, the clock read 3:47 with no AM or PM to tell me which kind of terrible this was, and my back felt like it had been put together by someone who'd never met a spine. I peeled my face off the page, smearing my cheekbone across a section of Eloise's handwriting that had been legible until I drooled on it, and tried to care.
Except.
