Page 5 of Ashes & Aether

“Stay here tonight.”

I shake my head. “Rook expects me.”

Hargreaves sighs as though Rook’s inconvenience is greater than mine. “You run yourself ragged for men who don’t appreciate you.”

“I know.”

He smiles, hearing loyalty, and I leave him to inject enough rapid-acting insulin to put himself into a coma before anyone checks on him. He will not survive until dawn, and the physician will blame a dosing error because Hargreaves has punished three nurses for making them.

One of the surviving nurses may even believe in God again.

00:15

Michael Rook’s panic room can sustain one person for nine days, with independent water, power, and filtration. Its ventilation system has three settings—external, filtered and sealed—and Rook believes the sealed setting includes oxygen recycling.

It does not.

I explained that during installation, but he accused me of undermining his confidence in the engineers and ordered me out. Months later, when the control panel began failing, he asked me to arrange the repairs.

I kept the override code.

At midnight, a flare rises over the western wall of his compound after a guard receives a radio warning in a modified version of my voice. The recording took three attempts because I sounded too irritated in the first two.

The alarm sends Rook below ground alone, following his own protocol, which keeps his guards outside the room until he confirms whether the attack is internal. He closes the steel door while I watch the indicator turn red from the maintenance corridor on the other side of the wall.

My hands shake once as I enter the code. Annoying.

I set the room to sealed, disable the interior controls, and leave the status display showing filtered air. Rook will assume the communication system has failed, as it often does.

He has water for nine days. But the air will become unbreathable by dawn.

I leave through the service tunnel before his guards determine that the flare came from inside the perimeter. No one stops me. Everyone’s always certain that I’m harmless.

01:03

Duncan Morgan has two hundred and twelve soldiers under his command and none outside his bedroom door, because I wrote the shift schedule. Tonight, one team believes the other has taken over, so both sets of men are in the barracks complaining about each other and drinking cheap swill while the corridor outside his room remains empty.

Morgan snores behind the door. He has been drinking with the officers who returned from the river operation and went to bed without checking the generator beneath his bedroom window, so I check it for him.

The exhaust pipe runs away from the building through a narrow metal flue, with two screws holding the elbow joint in place. I loosened them three weeks ago and reported the vibration as harmless. Now it takes less than a minute to pull the joint free and turn it toward the room’s ventilation intake.

The generator coughs, fumes disappear into the intake, and Morgan’s snoring does not change.

I hang the card he uses when entertaining women from his bedroom door, ensuring his guards will leave him undisturbed until morning. There will be an inspection and the loose joint will be blamed, particularly since Morgan has ignored six maintenance reports this month, including the one I wrote about this generator.

I wash the soot from my fingers in the servants’ lavatory, and the paper in my breast pocket crackles when I bend over the basin.

I straighten and leave.

02:26

Gareth Pike is still awake when I reach the palace. Of course he is.

Pike sleeps in the mornings and conducts business at night because he believes it makes him unpredictable, when it mainly makes him tired. The guards at the west entrance wave me through after checking my coat for weapons.

They do not find any.

“He’s in the cellar,” one says. “Been down there an hour.”