Chapter 2: The Extraction

The Derrick-Senne bar moved at forty seconds, not the sixty he'd planned for. He was fifteen seconds ahead of the duplicate's average, which was useful and not something to rely on.

He had the gate open before he knew there was a guard inside.

The canvas lifted toward him in a rectangle of wagon-dark interior, and he registered the guard in the moment before the guard registered him: a man in his thirties, seated on a supply crate near the forward wall, with a short blade at his belt and an expression that had not yet reached alarm. The guard had been expecting the ride to Torren Street. He had not been expecting the rear gate to open.

Two seconds. Aldric used both.

He went in low and fast, got one hand on the guard's sword wrist before the blade cleared the scabbard, and brought his elbow into the side of the man's head at the angle that produced unconsciousness rather than worse. The guard folded. Aldric caught him by the collar and lowered him to the wagon bed without sound.

He stood, breathing, and took stock of what he had not known.

An interior guard. A detail not in the transit manifest, which meant either the manifest was incomplete or it had been updated after he'd obtained it. Either way, the window had just shortened. The unconscious man would be found at the facility — not sooner, if the forward box guards hadn't heard anything, but the sound of the elbow strike had been loud enough in the closed space that he could not assume they hadn't.

Thessaly was chained to an iron ring on the forward wall by a collar and a length of heavy chain. The chain was tied at the ring with cord, not locked — the interior guard held the key. He checked the man's belt pouch, took the key, freed the collar in six seconds. He picked up the cloth hood and held it out to her.

She looked at it. Looked at him.

He said nothing.

She took the hood.

---

He helped her out the rear gate and found the left flanker had moved.

Not dramatically — he'd shifted inward by ten feet, drawn toward something at a stall on the left side of the street. A dispute between a vendor and a customer, loud enough to be interesting. The flanker's attention was on it. But his new position gave him a sightline to the rear of the wagon that his previous position hadn't, and the sightline was open.

Aldric's planned route crossed directly through it.

He put the hood over Thessaly's head before she came fully out. She went still, understood, and didn't resist. He kept his hand on her arm and steered her left instead of right — away from the route he'd walked twice, away from the stable on Torren, toward the narrower alley on the wagon's other side that he hadn't planned to use.

The flanker's attention stayed on the vendor dispute.

They moved at a walk. Not fast — fast was conspicuous. He counted his steps: twenty to the alley mouth, twelve through the turn, then south along the district wall toward the secondary exit he'd identified on his walk-through as a fallback and had not intended to need.

A boy was sitting on the doorstep at the alley's mouth.

Twelve, maybe thirteen. Eating bread from a cloth, elbows on his knees, watching nothing in particular. He looked up when they entered his sight line. His eyes went to Aldric, then to Thessaly — the hood, the way she moved with careful steps beside him, the chain still looped from the collar at her neck where he hadn't had time to remove it fully.

He looked at Aldric again.

Aldric made the calculation in two seconds. The boy was not positioned as a watcher — his posture was loose, unready, and his attention had been on the bread first. The doorstep he occupied was for a shuttered cooperage that had no traffic at this hour. He was here because doorsteps were for sitting on.

He could not be certain.

He kept walking. He kept the pace steady. He looked at the boy for exactly as long as looking away would have been conspicuous, and then he didn't look at him anymore.

The boy didn't move. Didn't call out.

---

The stable at the district wall's southern end was empty, as it had been empty for six days. He brought Thessaly inside and shut the door and removed the hood.

She took a breath that wasn't rationed. She stood in the space between the empty stalls and looked at the roof and the dust and the thin light coming through the boards, and she said nothing for a moment.

Then she looked at him.

He watched her organize it — not surprise, not relief, something more methodical. She was taking in his face, his weapons, his posture, the fact that he'd gone through six seconds of chain removal and not hurt her in the process. She was assembling something from components she already had.

Ink stained the first two fingers of her right hand. Even nine months in a cell hadn't faded it entirely. She held herself with the precise economy of someone who had learned, in a very specific educational environment, that unnecessary motion was a failure of discipline.

"You're Vane," she said.

He waited.

"The Conclave said you were dead." She was still assessing him. Not frightened. The fear, if it was there, was organized somewhere he couldn't see it. "They put it in the public record in the third month. Execution confirmed. They were quite specific."

"The record is wrong."

"I know that now." She rubbed her wrists where the collar had been. A habit, by this point. "They said you killed him. The King."

He kept his attention on the door. The stable had one entrance. The district wall behind it had no windows on this face.

"They said the killing was why you were in the cell when the Winter Court happened. That you'd been arrested for it."

"Yes."

"Was it true."

"The King ordered an execution and I carried it out," he said. "The man executed had betrayed a supply route that got twelve soldiers killed. Two months later the Conclave destroyed the King's order and used my role in the execution to frame me." He watched the door. "So: yes and no. Neither is useful to you."

She was quiet for a moment. He heard her thinking through it — not deciding whether to believe him, but deciding what it meant if she did.

"What are you going to do with the evidence?" she said.

"Not now."

"I need to know before—"

"We have ten minutes before the wagon arrives at the facility and they start looking," he said. "We move, we talk later."

She looked at him with an expression that had something tightly controlled at its edges. Then she moved toward the stable door.

He went first. She followed.

Behind them, the doorstep at the alley mouth. The boy's eyes in his memory — steady, specific, watching them go.