# Chapter 17: The Approach

I slept like someone had turned me off and forgotten to set a timer.

No dreams, no half-waking noise, no background processing demanding attention. Just the deep, black nothing of a body that had been running on debt for days and finally got handed the receipt. When I opened my eyes, the light through the window was grey and even — Godsday morning, the city operating at half-speed, even the tanner downstairs taking his one day of reluctant rest. The floorboards were silent. The building breathed around us like something that had also been given permission to stop.

Bracelet warm. Amber-red. The overnight charge had held — ninety percent, maybe a hair above. The stone had that dense, saturated look, like stained glass catching light from behind. Full enough. Full would have been better, but full would have taken another day I didn't have.

(*Ninety percent bracelet. Twenty percent jacket. Seven to eight seconds against the crystal before the well runs dry. Seven seconds. Yesterday that sounded like a plan. Today it sounds like a prayer with a deadline.*)

Devod was already awake.

Not the slow, uncertain surfacing of the past days — the drift in and out, consciousness arriving in fragments and departing without warning. Devod was sitting up against the wall, blanket across his lap, hands resting on his knees with weight to them. Day four. The silver in his hair wasn't going anywhere, and the gauntness would take weeks to fill back in, but his eyes tracked clean and his breathing was steady and the man behind the face was present in a way he hadn't been since before. He was watching the room the way someone watches a harbour from shore — not going anywhere, content to observe the movement of things he'd helped set in motion.

Mere was at the small table under the window, herbal preparations arranged in the ordering system that existed entirely in her head. Three compound mixtures in stoppered glass bottles. Dosing notes in her compact handwriting. The pencil was behind her ear and her focus was absolute — adjusting preparations for variables she could anticipate before having access to Kae. She'd been up for a while. Mere didn't wait for mornings to decide to start.

"There's bread," she said, without looking up. "Carson sent it yesterday evening."

I ate. The bread was dense and dark and slightly stale, which meant Carson hadn't baked it himself — one of his people, probably the baker three streets over who owed him for a chimney repair that would outlast the building. I stood by the window and chewed and watched the empty street below and felt the plan sitting in my head like a loaded mechanism, all the parts present, waiting for someone to pull the lever.

"I need the jacket," I said. "It's at Chandler's Row."

Devod looked up. "Carson was heading that direction this morning. Something about Brida."

Mere's pencil stopped. "He'll be warning her."

"That's his job today." I'd told Carson the plan yesterday — the parts he needed, which was Brida's safety and the timing. Carson had absorbed it — calmly, completely, with a nod that said *she's my flock, I'd have done it anyway, but it's nice to be asked.* "I'll meet him there. He can bring the jacket."

"Or you could go to Chandler's Row yourself," Mere said. She still hadn't looked up. "Check on Sniff. The house. Our things."

The *our* landed. It always did, every time, a small weight added to the pile of evidence that the life I was building wasn't theoretical anymore. Relevant, not currently actionable.

"Leon first," I said. "Then Carson and Brida. Then Ledger. I'll get the jacket on the way."

Devod nodded. Not agreement — acknowledgement. He was watching his plan get assembled, the tactical framework he'd contributed from a cot on Day 3, and the expression on his face was earned confidence — twelve years of learning when to speak and when to let the thing he'd said do the work. He didn't add anything. Didn't offer encouragement or last-minute ideas.

(*Different. The ten-ideas Devod would have had three suggestions by now, two of them structurally unsound. This Devod trusts the fourth idea. The one that worked. And the silence isn't absence — it's the other thing. The thing that means the words have already been said.*)

"Be careful," Mere said. To the notebook. To the herbal compounds. To the air approximately three feet to my left.

"Always," I said, which was a lie we both understood the function of, and I left Millford Street into the Godsday stillness of a city that didn't know what was about to happen to it.

* * *

Leon was in the courtyard behind the chandler's shop.

Force of habit, or restlessness driving him to the one place his body associated with productive violence even on a day when no training was scheduled. He was running fire drills alone — the Telessi sleeve on his left forearm, throwing shaped bursts at the far wall where the scorch marks had accumulated into a blackened abstract that the chandler had stopped complaining about two weeks ago. The bursts were clean, controlled, and angrier than they needed to be. Leon's fire always told the truth about his emotional state before his mouth caught up.

He stopped when he heard me cross the yard. Turned. The sleeve cooled with a faint hiss.

"Godsday," he said. "Thought even guild dogs got a rest day."

"We need to talk."

Leon read my face the way he read everything — fast, instinctive, jumping to conclusions that were usually right. He wiped his hands on his trousers and leaned against the courtyard wall, arms crossed, chin slightly raised. Bracing for something he could pretend was casual.

"The plan," I said. "Three parts. Simultaneous."

I laid it out. Brida as Kae's next target — Cass working through the people who'd sheltered Kae, burning the network, and Brida was next on the list. Leon at Brida's location, positioned and waiting. When Kae came for her, Leon would contain him. Not kill — contain. Meanwhile, I'd be inside the Compact safehouse on the south docks with Ledger, working the crystal. Third part: Mere's herbal treatment, ready to bridge the gap between the crystal stopping and Kae's pain returning.

Leon listened. He was good at listening when the information mattered — the noise that usually bounced between three thoughts at once going still, absorbing operationally, same as mine when the noise caught a pattern.

"Contain," he said, when I finished.

"Contain."

"Not kill."

"No."

Leon uncrossed his arms. Crossed them again. Uncrossed them and put his hands in his pockets, which was worse — Leon's hands were his tell, and when he couldn't figure out what to do with them, it meant his emotional cycling had hit something it couldn't process fast enough to clear.

"You want to save him," Leon said. Not a question.

"The plan saves him. The crystal gets turned. Mere's treatment handles the pain. He comes out the other side damaged but functional. Guild custody under Ledger — intelligence asset, testimony against Cass, the whole chain of evidence."

"That's the operational argument." Leon's voice was level, careful. "I'm asking about the other one."

I didn't answer immediately. The courtyard held Godsday silence — the absence of usual noise making the remaining sounds sharper. A bird somewhere. The creak of the chandler's sign in a breeze that barely existed.

"He's a weapon someone else built," I said. "Killing the weapon doesn't disarm the builder. And the weapon didn't volunteer."

Leon looked at the scorch marks on the wall. His marks, weeks of them, layered and overlapping — the visible history of someone working out something he couldn't name by setting things on fire in controlled, precise increments.

"He put Devod in a bed." Leon's voice had gone quiet — the dangerous kind, not the uncertain kind. "He drained people in their homes, Phelan. In their *sleep*. And the plan is to *save* him."

"Yes."

"Not kill him."

"No."

Leon's jaw worked. The fast processing that usually cleared anger or guilt in seconds and moved on — his signature trick, feel it and flush it — had stalled on something. I watched it happen. He wanted Kae to be a monster. Monsters you could put down and feel clean about it. But I'd just handed him a version where Kae was a weapon and Cass was the hand that aimed it, and Leon was angry because he knew I was right and it didn't help.

(*Two kinds of debt. The kind you owe and the kind you carry. Leon's been carrying this since the crystal left his hands. Saving Kae doesn't clear the ledger. Nothing clears the ledger. But it changes what's written on it, and for a man who's been telling himself "don't ask who's buying" for years, that might be worse than killing Kae. Killing pays a debt. Saving means you sit with it.*)

"The intercept role," I said. "You, at Brida's. Kae walks in expecting a target and finds a wall of fire between him and her. Head-on containment. Your fire's better than mine for that — more force, wider coverage, you don't need precision to hold a doorway."

"You're putting me between a crystal-enhanced addict and a woman I've never met."

"I'm putting you where your skills work best. If I'm at Brida's and you're in the safehouse, we both fail. Your fire holds a line. Mine picks a lock."

Leon almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved a fraction and stopped, like his face had started the expression and his brain had pulled the emergency brake.

"Serving someone else's plan," he said, quietly. "That's what this is."

"That's what this is."

"Plan, I hate that word."

"I know."

He stood there for a long moment, hands in his pockets, staring at the blackened wall. The bird had gone. The courtyard held its breath, or I was projecting, which I did when the noise was running hot and the person in front of me was processing something I could read but not help with.

"The crystal," Leon said. "You're going to break it?"

"Turn it inside out. Rewrite who the crystal thinks its master is, so anyone using it becomes a target instead. The bracelet already has a way in — when the crystal latched onto me during the tenement fight, it opened a door. I kept the key."

"So Kae tries to use it and it does to him what he's been doing to everyone else."

"For about three seconds. Then Mere's treatment catches him before the withdrawal does."

Leon absorbed this. I could see the math running behind his eyes — not magical math, moral math, the kind that doesn't have clean solutions. Save the weapon. Disarm the builder. Live with the chain of custody.

"The stay-or-bolt thing," he said. "From before."

"I remember."

"That was abstract. This isn't."

"No."

"Positioning at Brida's, waiting for an addicted weapon to walk through the door. Putting myself between him and a target. Not freelancing — not picking my own angle, not improvising, not bolting when the numbers look bad." He pulled his hands out of his pockets. Looked at them. Put them at his sides, which was better — decided, not searching. "Someone else's plan. Someone else's timing. And I hold the line because that's the role, and the role is right, and the fact that I hate the word doesn't change the fact that it's the right word."

"Yes," I said. Because sometimes one word was the only honest answer.

Leon nodded. Once. Sharp, military — which was funny, because Leon had never been military and would have laughed at the comparison. But the nod wasn't borrowed. It was earned here, over weeks of drills and guilt and a choice that kept getting harder and kept getting made.

"What time?" he said.

"This afternoon. I'll send word via soundstone when everyone's in position."

"I'll need Brida's address."

I gave it to him. "Carson's already there — he's warning her this morning. She trusts him. When you arrive, he'll introduce you."

"The big reverend with the gorilla hands." Leon's voice had found its usual register — dry, sardonic, the armour going back on. "Wonderful." Leon pushed off the wall. Rolled his shoulders. The Telessi sleeve caught the flat winter light and threw a dull amber reflection. "Phelan."

"What."

"Don't die in the safehouse."

"Wasn't planning on it."

"You never plan on it. That's why I mention it."

He turned back to the wall and threw a fire burst that was cleaner, tighter, and steadier than anything he'd been doing when I arrived. The anger was still there. But it had a shape now — a direction, a role, a line to hold. I watched for one more burst and left.

* * *

Carson had beaten me to Brida's.

I found them at her tenement — same building from the night I'd fought Kae, same fire-scarred ground floor, same too-new shutters that Carson had installed with enough hardware to withstand a siege. The whitewash had been touched up since my last visit, still uneven, still thin in places where the char showed through like a bruise under makeup. Someone had put a window box on the sill with something green growing in it. Winter-hardy. Stubborn. It looked like something Brida would choose.

Carson was in the doorway, and *in* was the wrong word — Carson occupied doorways the way weather occupied a valley, completely and without apology. He had a canvas bag over one shoulder and a cup of something hot in his enormous hand, and he was talking to Brida in the low, steady voice that was his version of a pastoral visit. The voice said: *I'm here, I'm not leaving, and whatever comes next, you're not facing it alone.*

He saw me coming and didn't change his posture or his tone. Just shifted slightly to make room in the doorway, which given his dimensions was a generous act of spatial engineering.

"Morning, Varrant. She knows."

"How much?"

"All of it. I don't do half-truths — they're worse than lies and harder to maintain." Carson took a sip from his cup. "She's angry. She's scared. She's going to help anyway."

Brida appeared behind Carson's shoulder. Wiry frame, tired brown eyes, hands gripping her own elbows. Her face was doing two things at once — the tight jaw and hard stare of someone who'd been put on a target list by a boy she'd sheltered, and underneath it, the exhausted understanding of someone who knew exactly how he'd gotten there. Angry at what Kae had become. Not confused about why.

(*Boy. He's not a boy — twenty-something, old enough to answer for what he's done. But everyone who knows him calls him that. Brida does. Carson does. Even Ledger's reports say "the boy." Because Kae never got past the age where someone should have caught him, and we all know it, and so he stays a boy in every mouth that says his name.*)

"He says you're going to save Kae," Brida said. Not to me — past me, at the street, at the concept itself, testing whether it sounded different said aloud.

"That's the plan."

"Not kill him."

"No." The echo of Leon's question, the same words, different weight. Leon had asked from the place where guilt meets duty. Brida asked from the place where love meets betrayal.

"Elara would have wanted that," Brida said. Her grip on her elbows tightened, then released. "She always said the pain made him do things he wouldn't choose. Said if someone could fix the pain, the rest would follow." A pause. "I reported her disappearance. To the Compact. They took my name and did nothing. Now I know why."

I didn't fill the silence. Brida wasn't looking for comfort — she was laying facts out in order, arranging them like tools before a job. Getting the shape of it straight.

"He used to come in the evenings," she said. "After dark, mostly. Ninth or tenth bell. Stayed an hour, sometimes two. Didn't talk much anymore — just sat. Ate if I put food in front of him." She glanced at Carson, who gave her a nod that was barely perceptible on a man that large. "He stopped coming four days ago."

Four days. The same day Devod was drained. The timeline fit Ledger's intel like a key in a lock — and it meant that whatever the crystal did to Kae that night, whatever it cost him to put a man in a bed and walk away, that was the night he stopped being able to sit in Brida's kitchen and pretend he was still the person she'd sheltered.

"He's been watching the building," I said. Not a question.

Brida's jaw tightened. She'd already worked that out — you didn't survive the warrens by being slow. "Twice that I spotted. Across the street, early morning. Just standing there. Not coming in." Her voice went flat. "He used to knock."

(*He's saying goodbye. The version of him that carved a snake pendant and asked permission before hurting anyone — that version is standing across the street trying to look at her one more time before the other version does what Cass needs done. Four days of steeling himself. Four days of the crystal screaming for a fix and the boy underneath trying not to listen.*)

"Ledger's people have been tracking his movements," I said. "He's been casing the approaches. Checking sight lines, watching who comes and goes, when you're alone. The pattern says tonight."

"Tonight." She repeated it the way you repeat a diagnosis — already known, worse confirmed.

"When he comes, there'll be someone here. A friend of mine. Fire mage — good one. He won't hurt Kae. He'll keep Kae from hurting you, and he'll keep Kae from leaving until my part is done."

"The man with the sleeve," Brida said. She'd seen Leon — during the fight that night, or after, or through the network that made the warrens work. "He was there that night. When my wall burned."

"He was there to help."

"I know." She said it simply, without accusation. "The wall was worth it if the boy inside is still worth saving."

(*The calculus of mercy. She's doing it right there — weighing the burned walls against the boy Elara found at fifteen, the one who carved a snake pendant and sought permission before hurting anyone, the one the crystal is eating alive. And the math works out. Not cleanly, not without cost, but it works out. Brida Voss decided he was worth saving before I walked through the door. Carson just gave her the shape to hang the decision on.*)

Carson shifted the canvas bag on his shoulder. "Your jacket's in here. Stopped by Chandler's Row on the way over — Sniff's fine, by the way. Annoyed, but fine. Jenet fed him yesterday."

I took the bag. The jacket had weight to it — not heavy, just *present*. The kind of weight that tells your body something has changed. I shrugged it on over my coat and felt the studs settle against my chest, cold and inert, waiting for something to hit them. It looked like a jacket. It moved like a jacket. But underneath the leather and stitching, Carter had built something that blurred the line between clothing and armor without crossing it — nothing that would flag at a ward checkpoint, nothing that screamed protection, just a working man's coat that happened to buy you extra seconds when extra seconds were the difference between walking out and being carried.

"Carson." I caught him before he moved. "Stay with Brida until Leon arrives. He'll need the introduction."

"Already planned on it." Carson's enormous hand rested briefly on Brida's doorframe — *my flock, my walls, and I built the shutters so they'd hold.* "We'll be here."

* * *

Ledger was waiting at the guild quarter edge, where the cobblestones shifted from maintained to merely functional and the buildings stopped pretending to be respectable. Leaning against a wall in a way that looked casual if you didn't notice that the position gave him sightlines down three streets and his weight was on his forward foot.

"Walk with me," he said.

We walked south. Toward the docks, toward the safehouse, toward the part of Drenwick where I'd spent a year renting a shack two streets from a building I'd never thought to examine. The route Ledger chose was indirect — side streets, alleys, a path that avoided main thoroughfares without looking like it was avoiding them. Professional habit. Or professional necessity. With Ledger, the distinction was academic.

"The safehouse is standard Compact layout," he said, as we walked. Voice low, pitched for me and the cobblestones and nothing else. "Outer ward ring — detection and response, keyed to unauthorised magical signatures. Anything above ambient that the wards don't recognise triggers an alert. The ring refreshes on a twelve-bell cycle."

"Twelve bells. That's a long refresh."

"Compact efficiency. They build the wards once and maintain on schedule — quarterly recalibration, monthly seal rotation, daily supply drops through an intermediary who carries a warded chit — small thing, fits in a pocket. The wards read it like a hall pass. Chit changes every three days."

"You know the rotation schedule."

Ledger didn't answer for a full three strides. The pause was loaded — not with reluctance but with careful calculation. How much truth to spend.

"I know the principles behind the rotation," he said. "The specific schedule for this safehouse will follow the standard pattern. First-era ward work, adapted for current Compact practice. The seals are layered — outer ring reads for hostile intent and magical signature, inner ring checks for a specific mark, like a wax seal on a letter. If the seal doesn't match, the door doesn't open. The outer ring is the problem. The inner ring is negotiable."

(*He knows this the way a locksmith knows locks. Not from studying the theory — from standing inside the room. Protocols, configurations, seal rotations, supply drop intermediaries. Not desk-analyst knowledge. Not even intelligence-officer knowledge. Field-operator knowledge, earned by someone who spent years walking through doors like these as routine. The pile of things I've noticed about Ledger that don't fit his cover story isn't a pile anymore. It's a shadow the size of a building, and I'm standing inside it.*)

"The outer ward," I said, steering back to operational. "Detection and response. If I walk in with the bracelet active—"

"The bracelet's pre-Compact. The ward's post-Compact. Different magical language. The ward will read the bracelet as ambient noise — old energy, unstructured, no hostile intent because the bracelet's passive state doesn't register as a working. That's your entry."

"And if I activate anything while inside?"

"Don't. Not until you're at the crystal. The inner wards are asset-protection — they respond to active magical workings within the safehouse perimeter. But they're keyed to Compact standard frequencies. That thing you do — the way you read workings — won't trigger them. It's passive observation, not an active working. The moment you start manipulating the crystal, you'll have a window before the inner wards register the activity as a threat."

"How long a window?"

"Depends on the working. Small, quiet, precise — two to three minutes before the wards notice something's wrong. Loud and invasive — thirty seconds, maybe less."

"The crystal work won't be loud. But it won't be small either."

Ledger glanced at me. A sideways look, quick, assessing — the same look he'd been giving me a dozen times across this case, each time adding data to whatever file he was building inside his head. "Then you'll need to work fast and precise, and I'll need to be monitoring the ward response in real time so I can tell you when the window's closing."

"You can read ward states?"

Another three-stride pause. "I can read these ward states. This kind of layout. It's what I know."

I let it sit. Pushed was the wrong verb for Ledger — you didn't push him toward information, you let the gap exist and watched whether he chose to fill it. Today he chose not to. The gap remained, the shadow lengthened, and I added it to the collection I'd been building since the worn folder on his desk.

We turned south onto the dock road. The smell changed — salt and tar and the faint undertone of decay that was the waterfront's permanent perfume. My old shack was east, two streets over. The safehouse was south of that — I could see the street from here. A plain facade, timber and brick, shuttered windows, no signage. A building that existed in peripheral vision without ever graduating to attention.

"I walked past that for over a year," I said.

"Most people do," Ledger said. "That's the point."

* * *

The afternoon crept in low and flat, the winter light doing the bare minimum required to qualify as daytime. I sent word to Leon via soundstone — timing confirmed, ninth bell. Leon's reply was three words: *I'll be there.* No elaboration. No bravado. He'd already said everything he needed to say in the courtyard.

Mere had her preparations ready. Soundstone confirmation: three compounds, dosing schedule written out, adjustments for Kae's size and condition mapped out so she could adapt on the spot once she had him in front of her. She'd stay at Millford Street with Devod — close enough to move when called, the herbal kit packed, Devod awake and settled beside her.

Carson confirmed Leon's arrival at Brida's via the tanner's boy, who'd run the message through three intermediaries in the time it took me to finish my second cup of cold tea. Carson's network — favours and fish-fry fellowship and the gravitational pull of someone who collected people as naturally as I avoided them. Leon was inside. Brida was calm. Carson was leaving them to it — his job was done, the flock was tended, and he'd be at the chapel-workshop if needed.

Ledger and I were south of the dock road, in the lee of a warehouse wall with a sightline to the safehouse's front and side entrances. The building sat in the late afternoon gloom like something that would prefer not to be discussed. Two streets east, I could see my old shack's roofline — and between us, the place where a boy was being eaten alive by a crystal that had passed through Leon's hands, through Harren's shop, through a broker's ledger, through the institutional machinery of someone in Thorngate who'd looked at a broken kid and seen raw material.

(*A year. Two streets away and I never looked. The safehouse was background noise — brick and timber and shuttered windows, walked past a thousand times and never seen. That's the trick. Not invisibility. Irrelevance. The most dangerous things in Drenwick aren't hidden. They're just not interesting enough to notice.*)

The bracelet was warm on my wrist. The jacket's ore studs sat cold against my chest, my arms, the back of my neck. Carter's work — built the way everything Carter built was built, with the competence of someone who expressed care through material science. The difference between enough and not enough.

Ledger stood beside me, weight forward, eyes on the safehouse. He hadn't spoken in several minutes — unusual for someone who used silence strategically. This was different. Every variable calculated, nothing left to say. He was ready. Had been ready since he'd said *I can get you in* in Devod's room above the tanner's shop. Everything since then had been logistics.

"Ninth bell," I said. "That's when Brida says he usually arrives."

"Then we go in at ninth bell. Supply drop window opens at half past eight — the chit will hold for forty-five minutes before the wards reset. Plenty of time if you don't wander."

"I don't wander."

"You absolutely wander. But today, don't."

I looked at Ledger. He looked at the safehouse. Something crossed his face — not quite a smile, not quite concern. A flicker of the person underneath the professional mask, visible for a moment before the surface reasserted itself.

The light faded. Ninth bell was two hours away. The city would go about its Godsday evening — suppers and taverns and domestic rhythms, people who didn't know that five separate individuals had spent their day arranging themselves into a mechanism designed to save a boy who'd been turned into a weapon.

Leon at Brida's. Ready to hold a line he'd never held before, for reasons he'd spent weeks trying to name and failing.

Mere at Millford Street. Herbal compounds packed, dosing schedule memorised, the bridge between a crystal's false mercy and something real and sustainable and honest.

Devod in the room above the tanner's. Recovering. Watching. Trusting the fourth idea to carry.

Carson's network, threaded through the warrens like roots through soil. Messages passed, doors opened, flock tended.

Brida in her tenement with the scorched walls and the stubborn window-box plant. Choosing to help save the person who'd been sent to hurt her, because Elara would have wanted it, because mercy was a decision you made before you had all the reasons.

Ledger beside me, saying nothing, eyes on the building with the patient attention of someone who'd weighed the cost and already decided it was acceptable.

And me. Bracelet warm, jacket heavy, the key already in the lock since the tenement.

The plan had gaps. Every plan has gaps. But the people filling them had chosen to be here, and the choices had cost them something, and the mechanism was loaded and the lever was waiting and the winter evening settled over the south docks like a held breath.

Two hours.

I leaned against the warehouse wall and watched the safehouse and didn't think about what would happen if I was wrong, because the noise had already run those calculations and put them in the drawer marked *things that don't change the decision,* and I trusted it.

The quiet of the before.
