Page 57 of Deathless
Lorenzo opened his mouth.
"You just got Rafael back," Rhadamanthys said. "Your stitches are barely healed. And I need someone I trust holding this location."
Lorenzo closed his mouth. He looked at Rafael across the room, then back at Rhadamanthys, and whatever fight he'd been loading up died before it reached his teeth.
"The north gap," Mr. Nobody said.
Every head in the room turned. His voice was low and unhurried, the kind of voice that didn't need volume because it had never been ignored.
"The rotation gap is clean," he said. "But the approach isn't. Someone has been running that corridor ahead of you. Same compound, same routes, over the past year. The guard rotations adapted once already." He ran his thumb along the neck of the fiddle. "Whoever they are, they're good. And they'll be watching the same window you are."
Vihaan pulled up something on his screen and frowned. "He's right. There's ghost traffic in the logs. Someone's been probing their perimeter, but they never breach. They just look."
He set his hands back on the fiddle and returned to the middle distance like he'd never left it.
“Well, let’s hope he’s not planning to crash the party,” Rhadamanthys said.
"And Nevada has Zeus's location," I said. "And if we're right about where Eight ended up."
My voice held steady on Eight's name, but my hands didn't. I pressed them flat against the table and kept them there. She was out there somewhere in the dark of the Pantheon, the same machine that had trained her to kill before she could read, and every hour I spent in this room was an hour she spent alone.
"Then we'll know where to go next," Rhadamanthys said.
"I need fuel specs and a strip near Amritsar that doesn't ask questions," I said.
The Kalderash had been running routes through that corridor since before the Pantheon had a name. My tío's contacts ran back to my father's, a web of fuel depots and landing stripsand border men who owed us favors older than I was. I wasn't offering Rhadamanthys a pilot. I was offering him an organization that could move people across sovereign borders like they were suggestions.
Rhadamanthys nodded. I pushed my chair back, stood up, and put my hand out across the map.
"Then let's go save your man."
I needed a cigarette.I didn't have one because Diego had confiscated the pack an hour ago with some bullshit about enclosed spaces and everyone's lungs. The van already smelled like gun oil and sweat and three men sitting in the dark working through their nerves, so one cigarette wouldn't have tipped it into unbreathable.
"Mr. Nobody's in position," Vihaan said. The blue light from his screens turned his face corpse-pale. "Main hall. Patroklos just sat down."
I checked the katana again. The blade caught the glow from Vihaan's monitors and threw it back clean, the same as the last two times I'd checked. My hands needed work that didn't involve cigarettes I didn't have or running through all the ways this extraction could go sideways.
Beside me, Rhadamanthys chambered another round. The metallic click filled the van. He'd already loaded both revolvers twice. We burned time with useless weapon checks because sitting still before a job made my skin crawl.
Diego sat behind the wheel with the engine idling low, a purr that came up through the floorboards. He kept his hands loose on the wheel but locked his gaze on the side mirror, tracking headlights that had sat half a kilometer back for the past five minutes.
"We got a tail?" I asked.
"Maybe." His thumb tapped the steering wheel once, then stopped. "Could be someone heading in the same direction."
"For five minutes. Same exact distance."
"Yeah."
When Diego's thumb went still, he'd already made his decision. I filed the tell and turned back to the compound lights burning in the distance.
The audio feed crackled. Throat singing poured through the van's cheap speakers, two notes at once from one throat, harmonizing in ways that shouldn't be physically possible. The sound crawled up my spine and made my molars ache.
"What the fuck is that?" Diego said.
"Mongolian throat singing." Vihaan's fingers kept flying across his keyboard. "Traditional art form. Very difficult to master."
"Sounds like someone's getting strangled."
