Page 36 of Alien Devil’s Crown

Varrick and Sabine joined us at the first service landing, the hub below them already slagged.

“Carys is with Brevan at the gallery arch,” Sabine said, then called movements from a handheld she’d wired into the door logs on her way out.

“Squad of eight, two corridors over, moving to cut the gallery route.” Her voice stayed completely calm.

“The vault relay is still on our net,” Varrick said. “That second command is still resolving. The old registry hasn’t finished answering.”

Varrick sealed a blast door behind us with a splice that took four seconds and would take the Spire’s engineers a very educational afternoon. “Marriage of two incompatible door standards,” he explained to no one, running. “Beautiful. Criminal. They deserve each other.”

“Squad repositioning, gallery, ninety seconds,” Sabine said, not looking up. They spoke over each other and missed nothing.

Overhead, faint through the structure, the Penumbra announced itself. A rolling boom of displaced air as Talon brought her low across the Spire’s crown, and the building’s own defense grid opened up after him. Tamsin’s voice arrived on the net calm as a tide table.

“That’s us knocking. First diversion pass. Bay doors in six minutes; our next pass is your landing window, and the neighborhood is getting loud, so mind the schedule.” The Spire shuddered somewhere far above. Whatever Talon was doing, it had the defense grid fully occupied.

Brevan and Carys held the gallery arch when we reached it, and the delegation cover stopped mattering there. Brevan had talked two separate garrison elements into securing the wrong atrium, over an open Conclave frequency, in flawless watch-officer cadence. When it finally stopped working, he shot with the same unhurried courtesy he did everything.

“Turret,” Carys said mildly, and the turret above the arch spun away from us and shut down.

Flinx rode her shoulders through the fire with his chrome hackles up, blinding every optic that turned our way, looking deeply offended by a day spent inside luggage. Brevan covered his mate’s blind side without appearing to know he was doing it.

Sweat had lifted the edge of my facial mesh into my lower field of vision. I stripped it off before we moved through the arch. Brevan had already abandoned the delegation voice; we needed to see and shoot now.

We were forty meters from the grand stair when Kallum stepped out of a side corridor and I nearly shot him.

He was blood-spattered and calm. Anhara came half a step off his flank, rifle up, braid loose. They joined our column without a word.

A nod passed between him and Rylos, the entire after-action report of whatever the last ten minutes of his war had held. Anhara gave me one too, smaller, farm-plain, a nod that said still standing, good. Then her hand brushed Kallum’s as they turned, knuckles to knuckles, deliberate, one half-second of contact.

He adjusted his position so their rifle arcs overlapped. No glance, no discussion. Anhara had reached for him; he had answered without losing awareness of the corridor.

And what I felt watching it was want. Someone who knew where I was without checking, whose attention included me without controlling me, and mine doing the same for him.

“Grand stair’s a kill box,” I said. “They’ll have it packed. Service ramps, east side, two flights, and we come out on the throne level past their choke.”

“Past their choke,” Rylos confirmed, and the whole column turned with us.

Doctrine put a blocking element on the ramps too, but it had been written for slower intruders. We hit the landing four minutes ahead of the schedule I’d have set against us. Three men were still hauling a supply cart into position.

Zarek didn’t even slow. He put the cart through the doorway they’d meant it to block. Bronwen blew a kiss to the wreckage as we climbed.

We climbed two flights through the noise of boots and Sabine’s calls. Rylos stayed beside me, close enough that our sleeves brushed. In the shuttle escaping the Virelle, I had put a hand against his chest to steady myself. Now I kept pace beside him because I wanted to get out with him.

At the top, Zarek forced the last doors. We came out of the service dark into ceremonial light.

Marble. Gold. Banners with the Conclave’s sunburst hanging forty feet down walls I’d crossed a hundred times with my mask on, delivering briefings to the men who ordered this level washed of blood before the morning session.

Beyond the columns, thick as shuttles, stood the rebuilt ceremonial doors of the throne room. Shut and gleaming. And set into the chamber’s eastern face, smaller, in the old style they’d never bothered to replace, the east access. The door. His door.

I’d walked past it for six years and never once let my eyes stop on it, because Strategist Darven had no brother. Lika Vashri did, and I could not afford to carry one thought of her above the fortieth floor.

Lika Vashri was here now, carrying a rifle, with Soren’s records at Rylos’s hip.

“Bay’s past the throne level, north gallery,” I said. “Two hundred meters. Once we cross this floor we’re one lift from done.”

“Then we cross it,” Rylos said.

Every gun in the column came up at the same instant mine did, because the ceremonial light was on, and the level was not empty.