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Chapter 160
I wasn't there for what happened next. I only caught it in fragments over comm while I held the chamber, and heard the rest properly from Corvin himself once we were both able to breathe again, later that same night. He's told it to me since more than once, and by now it plays in my head almost like I lived it.He hadn't run like that since the earliest days of his exile, when running had meant the difference between another year of hiding and a bullet in an alley he'd never see coming.Kael kept pace beside him without effort, cutting through traffic and side streets with an instinct for the city that put Corvin's own decades of experience to shame in places, though he still had the edge on knowing which shortcuts wouldn't get them stopped by security checkpoints along the way."Left here," Corvin said, at an intersection that looked, to anyone without his particular history, like nothing at all. "There's a service corridor behind
Chapter 159
For a moment, Han's words didn't fully land, the way truly bad news sometimes takes a beat longer to arrive than it should, as if some part of the mind refuses it out of pure self-preservation."Say that again," I said, sharper than I meant it, though nobody in that chamber seemed inclined to hold it against me."The east breach was the real threat," Han said. "What just came through the chamber wall was a diversion, meant to pull our attention and our forces here. Something considerably larger is moving toward Lillian's command post, and it's moving fast."The floor tilted under me in a way no physical blow had managed all afternoon. Everything else in the room, the residual adrenaline of the fight we'd just survived, the aching bruise forming on my shoulder, the delegates still gathered anxiously near the center of the chamber, all of it receded to background noise against the single, overwhelming fact of what Han ha
Chapter 158
There wasn't time to grieve the recognition before it became a fight, and that, more than anything, told me how much this day had already cost all of us.They came through the breach fast, spreading wide to prevent us from bottlenecking them at the gap, and I understood in the first half-second of motion that whoever had trained them had trained them well, better than the decoy inside had let on, better than the presumed-dead operatives from Singapore had needed to be. This wasn't a desperate last push. This was a unit that had drilled for exactly this scenario.I met the first one at an angle, catching his strike on a forearm block and turning it past me rather than absorbing it head-on, the same principle Han had drilled into me a hundred times over the past year, redirect before you resist, never meet force with force when you don't have to. He recovered fast, better than most opponents I'd faced, and for a moment we traded
Chapter 157
Voss's words settled over the chamber like a second lockdown. Quieter than the first. Heavier still."How fast," I said."Fast," Voss said. "If they were already staged to move on discovery, which every part of this suggests they were, we could be looking at minutes, not hours. And I'd rather be wrong about that than right and unprepared."I didn't waste time on disbelief.I'd stopped affording myself that particular luxury somewhere around the moment Ferro's hand closed on my arm. Back when two hours had still sounded like a generous margin."Then we stop thinking about this as a lockdown," I said, "and start thinking about it as a siege."The shift in the room was almost immediate.Five Lords and their people falling into the kind of coordinated motion I'd only seen in fragments before now. Always constrained by old suspicion, old rivalry, the careful distance territories kept from each other even when they claimed alliance.Not this
Chapter 156
For one second, maybe two, I let myself simply stand there with what Lillian had said. Because moving too fast in the wrong direction now would be worse than moving a beat late in the right one."Don't react visibly," I said, low, to everyone still gathered around Han's tablet."Anyone who turns to look at Draeger right now hands the whole thing away. Corvin, walk with me. Casual. We're two men having a conversation, nothing more."Corvin fell in beside me without a word.Together we started across the chamber floor, weaving through knots of delegates with the same unhurried ease Cho and Kael had used minutes earlier. Except this time every step felt like walking across something that might give way beneath me.I kept my expression loose. My pace even. All the training that had once felt like armor now doing exactly the job it was built for.The chamber, viewed from this angle, felt larger than it had all afternoon. Every face
Chapter 155
There was no time to process what Zhao had just told us. Not really. Only time to move, and moving became its own kind of thinking."Do not approach him directly," I said, before anyone's instincts could get ahead of their judgment. "If he's rigged to trigger on contact or on panic, we lose whatever window we have left.""Cho, Kael — you two have the eyes for this. Quiet approach, natural cover. Treat it like an extraction, not an arrest."Around us, the ceremonial portion of the Convergence carried on exactly as it had been scripted to. Delegates circulating with drinks they weren't really drinking. Translators murmuring into earpieces.The whole practiced theater of five territories pretending, for the cameras and the historical record, that this was simply diplomacy rather than the closest this world had come to open war in a generation.None of them had any idea what was moving beneath the surface of their polite conversa
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