Page 56 of Deathless
I set the photograph down and leaned back. Behind me Jasper shifted, and his knee pressed harder against my spine. I let myself settle into it.
"Three weeks ago, he volunteered to go undercover. Achilles and Patroklos have been collecting people, trophies, leverage,call it what you want. Nevada saw an opening. Get close enough to their operation and he could access things nobody else could reach." Rhadamanthys paused. "Zeus's location."
Vihaan kept typing. Everyone else went quiet. My pulse kicked, and I pressed my thumb into the table edge until the nail went white. Zeus's location meant Eight's location, and I kept my face flat because if anyone in this room caught the hope tearing through me, they'd know exactly how far I'd go and exactly how to stop me.
"Yesterday," Rhadamanthys said, "Nevada sent a signal through a dead drop in Amritsar." He nodded at Vihaan. "The kid retrieved it."
Vihaan didn't look up. "The kid has a name."
"Vihaan retrieved it," Rhadamanthys said, not missing a beat. "Nevada has Zeus's location. And the extraction window is open right now."
I picked up the photograph again. Nevada stared off past the camera, completely unbothered. Three weeks inside a compound run by men who collected people, and this guy looked like he was waiting for room service.
"Where is he?" Jasper said from behind my shoulder.
Rhadamanthys tapped the map, northeast of Amritsar. "Patroklos has a compound here. Border territory, politically unstable."
"Politically unstable." Vihaan stopped typing and turned his head, like the statement was too wrong to let pass without eye contact. "India was a colony. The British ran it under their Eastern European directorship until '47. Then the Partition happened, and the Pantheon lost the whole subcontinent overnight. Eighty years and they still can't get it back, because the region doesn't want them. Patroklos is here because the Pantheon sent someone to take by force what they couldn't take by asking."
Most of them let it pass. Rhadamanthys gave a small nod that could have meant anything. But Vihaan wasn't looking at Rhadamanthys. He was looking at the map like it showed a problem older than this mission, and he was here for that problem, not ours.
"And Nevada got himself inside," Rhadamanthys said.
"Voluntarily," Lorenzo said, in the tone of a man who hadn't decided yet if that was brave or stupid.
"Voluntarily," Rhadamanthys confirmed.
Vihaan spun his laptop around. The screen showed compound schematics, satellite imagery, and guard rotations. "Nevada got the raw intel out through the dead drop. I did the rest." He spun it back. "There's a gap on the north side rotation between the second and third shifts. Same window every night. Their head of security is either lazy or incompetent, and I genuinely don't care which."
Lorenzo leaned over and said quietly in Spanish, "I like this kid."
"Don't tell him," I said. "He'll stop being useful."
Rhadamanthys pulled up a different screen. "The plan runs on one fact about Patroklos. He's a long way from home, and he misses it. Kazakhstan, originally. He hires musicians, traditional music, the kind that reminds him who he was before."
I glanced at Mr. Nobody. He sat exactly where he'd been, against the wall with his scars and his fiddle and that readiness with nowhere to point yet. The man was either the calmest person I'd ever met or the most dangerous. In my experience, those were usually the same thing.
"Vihaan books Mr. Nobody as entertainment, making it look legitimate in their system. He gets inside, performs, and creates a distraction when we need one. While Patroklos is occupied, Jasper and I go in through the north gap and pull Nevada out."
Jasper's knee went rigid against my spine. I kept facing forward because I already knew what his face looked like. He was running the same math I was: two men inside a Pantheon compound, one way in, one way out, and everything riding on a gap in a rotation that might not hold. The last time we'd split up, he'd walked into headlights and I'd spent four hours wearing a hole in hotel carpet, bargaining with a God I didn't believe in.
I reached behind me without looking and stole my pen back from Lorenzo. He slapped my hand. I kept the pen.
"Just the two of you," Jasper said. His voice was flat, but his knee pressed harder against my back.
"Two operators are harder to spot than four. Small footprint, surgical." Rhadamanthys looked at me. "Diego flies us in and holds the exit. Vihaan rides with him, cameras, alarms, communications, all of it runs from the vehicle." He looked at Vihaan. "You good with that?"
"I'm not here for this one rescue," Vihaan said. "I'm here because Patroklos runs a forced labor operation out of that compound, and I've been building a case against it for months. You get your man out, I get their files. Everybody wins."
The room went quiet in a different way than before. Rhadamanthys studied him for a long beat.
"The mission is Nevada," Rhadamanthys said. "That's the priority."
"Your priority." Vihaan met his stare. "Mine's bigger. But tonight they overlap, so let's not waste time arguing about whose matters more."
Lorenzo kicked my ankle under the table. I kicked him back.
"Lorenzo stays here."
