Chapter 22

The clock on Mildred's wall read 3:47 AM, which meant Penelope had been staring at Gertrude's floor plans for approximately four hours and had approximately negative twelve percent of her nerve left. The number forty-six from her earlier estimate had been, if she was being honest, aggressively optimistic. She had maybe twenty minutes before she started laughing in that unhinged way that made Marcus reach for the nearest blunt object—not as a weapon, but as something to physically restrain her with.

The back room of Mildred's—technically a converted storage closet that had aspirations of being an office, or perhaps a panic room—smelled like old coffee, printer toner, and the particular brand of despair that came from trying to save a city with a laminated fake ID and a key card borrowed from a woman who collected filing anomalies the way other people collected cats.

"Service entrance," Marcus said, tapping the east side of the building with a pen that looked comically small in his broad hand. He'd been circling the three entry points like a predator sizing up three different gazelles, except gazelles didn't have "Authorized Personnel Only" signs and Marcus wasn't the type to anthropomorphize his prey. "Loading dock. Ventilation shaft. We need to commit to one."

"The ventilation shaft is climate-controlled and quite spacious," Theo read aloud from his notebook, where he'd transcribed Gertrude's exact words with the reverent precision of a court stenographer. "She underlined 'quite spacious' twice. That's either very reassuring or deeply suspicious. I can't decide which."

Penelope dragged her hands through her hair, which was already so disheveled it looked like she'd lost a fight with a static electricity generator. "Let me get this straight. Our options are: the front door for janitors, the back door for filing cabinets, and a ceiling hole that a sixty-year-old archivist has opinions about."

"When you put it that way—" Theo began.

"Don't. I'm already having enough trouble not picturing us all falling into a luminous pit."

The words came out sharper than she intended. The vision was still there—fragmented, fraying at the edges like a photograph left in the sun, but there. Hexenburg dissolving. The ground opening up like a mouth. That horrible, beautiful white-hot nothing swallowing everything, and the sound—God, the sound—like every frequency of every scream compressed into a single sustained note that wasn't a note at all but an absence of one.

She pushed the memory down. It didn't go far. It never did.

Marcus's gaze flicked to her face, then away. He had a way of doing that—checking on her without making it a thing, which she appreciated more than she'd ever admit. His crooked nose cast a strange shadow across the floor plans in the lamplight, and his cheap suit jacket was slung over the back of his chair, revealing a shirtsleeve that was slightly too short for his arms. He'd been sitting in that chair for three hours without shifting his weight. Penelope was fairly sure he'd been trained to remain stationary for extended periods, or possibly he was just part statue.

"The service entrance requires a clearance scan at the door," Marcus continued, because Marcus always continued. It was one of his more comforting qualities. "Mauve level should pass, but the license was fabricated with a deliberate typo matching known Authority documentation errors. If the scan cross-references—" He paused. That particular pause—the long one, the one that meant he was about to say something he found personally distasteful. "If the scan cross-references with the central registry, we're done."

"Define 'done,'" Theo said, his pen poised over his notebook.

"Arrested. Processed. Charged with fraud, trespassing, and operating without a prophetic license in a restricted federal divination facility."

"Right. So, done done."

"Loading dock is better," Marcus said, returning to the floor plans with the focus of a man who had already grieved and moved past the potential arrests of everyone in the room. "Less foot traffic during the Clearing window. Gertrude's key card should get us through the archival wing entrance. But we'll be in the building's interior for approximately—" He consulted his watch, a digital thing that looked like it had survived three wars. "—forty minutes before the Clearing begins. That's our operational window."

"Forty minutes to stop a city from falling into a glowing hole," Penelope said. "That's—what—roughly the length of a sitcom episode without commercials? We're trying to prevent the apocalypse in the runtime of a Friends rerun."

"I don't know what that is," Marcus said, which was possibly the most Marcus thing he'd ever said.

Penelope looked at the floor plans again. The Divination Authority headquarters was a sprawling, ugly building—seven floors of brutalist concrete that someone had tried to soften with potted ferns, based on the annotations Gertrude had scrawled in the margins. ("Ficus on 4th floor—dying." "Water cooler, 2nd floor east—frequently empty, do not rely.") The building looked like a bunker designed by someone who thought bunkers were too cheerful.

The Clearing would take place in the central chamber on the fifth floor—a room Gertrude had marked with a small, neat star and the words: "DO NOT ENTER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES (unless you're the sinkhole girl, in which case, God help you)."

Penelope really needed to have a conversation with Gertrude about her annotation choices.

"Okay," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. The word sat in the room like a small, fragile object. "Loading dock. Archival wing. We go in through Gertrude's access point and make our way to the fifth floor central chamber. We have forty minutes. What happens when we get there?"

Silence.

This was the part of the plan that didn't exist yet—the part where they actually stopped the Clearing from collapsing Hexenburg into a sinkhole of light. The infiltration strategy was solid (relatively speaking; it was built on a fake ID and the goodwill of a rogue archivist, but still). The destination was identified. The timeline was clear.

What they would do when they arrived was, in technical terms, a complete and utter blank.

"We need Sebastian," Theo said, and Penelope's stomach performed a complicated maneuver that she chose to attribute to Mildred's coffee rather than the mention of Sebastian Crowe's name.

Sebastian had been conspicuously absent from the planning session. He'd sent a message—elegant, infuriating, characteristically Sebastian—saying only that he was "pursuing a lead" and would "join the effort when it became strategically viable." The message had smelled faintly of jasmine, which was impossible for a text message and yet somehow undeniable. Penelope had held her phone at arm's length for a full minute before responding with a single period, which she felt communicated the appropriate level of irritation and longing and absolutely nothing else.

"Sebastian has his own agenda," she said, carefully. "He always has his own agenda. The agenda probably has a tailored waistcoat and a five-year exit strategy."

"Sebastian has sources inside the Authority that we don't," Marcus said. The fact that he acknowledged this without judgment was a testament to how far he'd come from the man who, three weeks ago, had insisted on running background checks on the barista at Mildred's regular coffee spot. "He may have information about the Clearing's mechanics. We can't intervene if we don't understand what we're intervening in."

"I hate that you're right." Penelope pulled at a loose thread on her outermost cardigan—the brown one with the wooden buttons that she'd found in a Goodwill bin in 2019 and which had been slowly unraveling ever since, like a metaphor for her life. "I hate that he's the only person we know who might understand what's actually happening. I hate—" She stopped. "Fine. Theo, can you reach him?"

"I've been texting him every forty-five minutes," Theo admitted, with the sheepish expression of a man who'd just confessed to something between diligence and obsession. "He hasn't responded since midnight. His last message was—" He flipped a page in his notebook. "'Stop.' Very economical. Very Sebastian."

Penelope closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, the vision flickered—Hexenburg, dissolving. The white-hot nothing. The sound that wasn't a sound.

She opened her eyes.

"We proceed without him," she said. "We use the loading dock. We get to the fifth floor. And when we're standing in front of whatever mechanism drives the Clearing, we improvise."

"Improvise," Marcus repeated, in the tone of a man who had just been told that the word "improvise" was now part of his tactical vocabulary and was deeply uncomfortable about it.

"Improvisation is a legitimate strategy."

"Improvisation is what happens when strategy fails."

"Then consider this plan strategically designed to fail in a specific direction," Penelope said, with a crispness that surprised even her. She pressed her ink-stained finger to the fifth floor on the floor plan. "We go in. We find out what the Clearing actually does. And then we stop it. Forty minutes."

Marcus studied her for a long moment. His expression was unreadable—that permanent alertness, that watchfulness that made him look like a man perpetually standing in a doorway deciding whether to enter or retreat. Then something shifted. Not much. A softening around the jaw. A fractional lowering of his shoulders.

"Forty minutes," he agreed.

"Forty minutes!" Theo echoed, scribbling furiously. "This is—I mean, this is terrifying, obviously, deeply terrifying, but also—" His pen stopped. His expressive face went through a rapid sequence of emotions that looked like a slot machine cycling through feelings before landing on something raw and earnest. "Also, I think this might be the most important thing I've ever been part of. Which is saying something, because I once covered a story about a psychic chiropractor who could realign your aura with your spine. That was—okay, that was not important at all. Forget I said that."

"Forgotten," Marcus said, with the precise diction of a man who would absolutely not forget it.

Penelope stood up. Her knees cracked in a way that seemed premature for someone her age but entirely appropriate for someone who'd been hunched over floor plans for four hours on a diet of coffee and anxiety. She pulled her cardigans tighter—the brown one, the green one underneath, the truly heinous orange one beneath that which she wore for warmth and not, she insisted to herself, for its bizarre comforting properties.

"Seventeen hours," she said. "No—sixteen now. Sixteen hours to save Hexenburg from falling into a luminous pit." She paused. "That sounded significantly less ridiculous in my head."

"It sounds exactly as ridiculous as it is," Marcus said, standing and reaching for his suit jacket. He shrugged into it. The shoulders didn't fit. They never fit. He looked like a refrigerator wearing a costume. "But ridiculous has never stopped me before."

"That's—you've worked for me for three weeks."

"Longest three weeks of my life."

Penelope couldn't tell if he was joking. She suspected he wasn't. She suspected he also didn't care whether she could tell, which was either a sign of deep trust or profound indifference, and with Marcus, those things might be the same.

Theo snapped his notebook shut. "I'll run a final check on the loading dock schedule—Gertrude's notes say the last archival delivery comes in at 6 AM, which gives us a window before the morning shift. I'll also—" He hesitated. "I'll try Sebastian one more time."

"Don't," Penelope started.

"One more time," Theo said firmly, in one of the rare moments where his enthusiasm calcified into something that resembled resolve. "If he doesn't respond, we go without him. But Pen—he knows things about the Authority that we don't. About the Clearing. About what the ritual actually does." He paused. "And about you."

The room went very quiet.

"What does that mean?" Marcus asked, his voice dropping into that register—not suspicious, not accusatory, but careful. The voice of a man who had just noticed a tripwire.

"It means Gertrude called her 'the sinkhole girl,'" Theo said. "It means Sebastian showed up in her life right when the visions started getting worse. It means—" He spread his hands, his wild curls catching the lamplight. "I don't know what it means. That's why I want to ask him."

Penelope felt the uncashed royalty checks in her desk drawer at home like a phantom weight in her chest—proof that someone in her family still thought about her, still sent pieces of themselves across the distance, even if she couldn't bring herself to accept them. Her mother. The checks. The silence that accompanied them, month after month, year after year. No note. No return address she recognized. Just the checks, made out to her name, drawn from an account she'd never been able to trace.

She thought about her grandmother's milky eyes. The breathing walls of the Vale estate. The tea service shattering on the floor like a prophecy breaking apart.

"Fine," she said. "One more time. But Theo—"

"Yeah?"

"If he responds with another single-word text, I'm going to need you to not tell me about it. I have a limited emotional bandwidth and I need to reserve at least forty percent of it for not dying tomorrow."

"Sixty percent on not dying," Marcus corrected. "Minimum. I'll handle the allocation."

Penelope almost smiled. Almost. The expression made it as far as the corners of her mouth before the vision flickered again—Hexenburg dissolving, the ground opening up, the light that consumed everything—and the smile retreated, replaced by something harder. Something that felt less like hope and more like the thing that lived underneath hope: the stubborn, irrational refusal to stop trying.

She picked up the floor plans, folded them with the care of someone handling a map to the only future that mattered, and tucked them into the inner pocket of her brown cardigan, right next to the uncashed check she carried like a talisman, though she'd never told anyone why.

Sixteen hours.

The ventilation shaft, she decided. Gertrude had underlined "quite spacious" twice, and Penelope was choosing to trust the enthusiasm of a woman who annotated dying ficus plants with the same precision she annotated reality-ending rituals. It was, perhaps, not the most rational basis for a tactical decision. But rationality had left the building approximately four hours ago, and in its absence, Penelope was left with instinct, spite, and the particular brand of desperate creativity that came from being the worst psychic in a family of prophets and knowing—knowing in her bones—that she was the only one who'd seen the city burn.

She reached for her coat.

And her phone buzzed.

Not Theo's phone. Hers. The screen lit up with a number she didn't recognize, and a message—three words, no punctuation, no signature:

Don't trust Gertrude.