Page 2 of Alien Devil’s Crown

“They know there’s a sealed Sovereign chamber under the throne room. They’ve tried for years to breach the shell. Knowing the door exists doesn’t give us a route to it, and it hasn’t given them a way through it.”

She enlarged the foundation ring instead.

“There is one thing I can’t explain. The original plans show protected galleries radiating away from the core columns, plus mass-lift shafts the Conclave renovations routed around instead of removing. Too expensive for maintenance, too redundant for ordinary evacuation. Whoever built the Spire expected the whole tower to need emptying fast.”

“Can we use them to enter?”

“No. Every gallery opens from inside the secured band. But they were important enough that three generations of contractors were ordered not to cut them.”

I marked the discrepancy. Whatever those galleries were, the builders had been protecting them for generations.

Kallum hadn’t spoken in an hour. He stood at the viewport with Anhara, her shoulder against his arm, and when I looked at him he shook his head once. That settled it. If Kallum couldn’t find a route we’d missed, there wasn’t one.

I looked at the schematic and thought about the man who died inside it.

The Sovereign taught me to start with the defender’s assumptions. Three weeks on the Spire had found plenty. The problem was that every useful one was correct. They expected bribery, false credentials, hacking, infiltrators, orbital attack, ground assault. They had built for all of it.

I was supposed to be in that building six years ago. I’d been trying to make up for that absence ever since.

“Say we get in.” Tamsin leaned forward.

“Say Brevan’s credentials hold and somehow we reach the secured interior. We still don’t know the interior. Guard rotations, lockdown steps, which corridors have kill switches. We’d be running blind through the most defended building in the sector.”

“Yes.”

“That’s it? Yes?”

“You’re not wrong. I won’t pretend you are.” I stood and walked the length of the display, floors scrolling past at eye level. Sixty floors of administration. Twenty of garrison. The throne room where the Conclave held court now, in the same chamber where they shot the man the throne belonged to.

What we had wasn’t enough. Stolen blueprints from before the coup. Exterior surveillance. Guesswork.

“What we need,” I said, “is someone inside.”

Talon’s mouth thinned. “The Conclave doesn’t leak. It runs loyalty sweeps twice a year, whether anyone’s disloyal or not. You know what happened to the last three informants anyone tried to grow in that building.”

“I know what happened to them.” Their names were in a file I didn’t open anymore.

“I’m not proposing we grow one. I’m telling you what the problem requires. The Spire can’t be taken from outside. So either we take it from inside, or we put five keys in a case and admit the Conclave keeps what they stole because they built the walls thick enough.”

Nobody answered. Turnip snored. Six years of war. Less than half a year of keys. All of it sat in a case in the corner, and the silence said everyone had reached the same conclusion.

Zarek broke it. “So, we find thicker walls to break.”

“There are no thicker walls. That’s the point. This is the last building.” I put my hand on the table’s edge.

“The vault’s under that throne room because he wanted it under their feet. He hid his legacy in the one place they’d never open. Now we have to reach it. In the middle of six thousand of them. With no map of the inside.”

“Then we wait,” Talon said. “Build assets. Two years, three. We’ve waited six.”

“For years we’ve given them reasons to find us. Then five keys vanished inside half a year. Slade’s dead, Qeth’s dead, Tarsus is disgraced, Kelloch’s syndicate is ash. They know someone’s collecting now, even if they don’t know why. Time isn’t neutral anymore. Every month we wait, they harden that building and hunt us harder.” I looked around the table, at the ten people this decision put at risk.

“I don’t have a plan. I’m telling you that plainly. What I have is a problem with no soft approach and a clock I can’t see.”

They took the admission steadily, still waiting for me to find a way. Their trust frightened me. Every face at this table belonged to someone I wanted alive at the end of the war, and I had run out of ways to promise them that.

Varrick’s console chimed.

Not the soft tone of a finished process. The hard triple pulse he kept for traffic on our covert relays. He frowned at it. Then he stopped frowning, and his hands went still over the interface. Varrick’s hands never go still.