Chapter 238 - 239| Crossing the Atlantic

The transport lifted off from a private WHRIB airfield just after six, gray dawn light spreading thin across the tarmac, and Allen found himself, watching Hegeville’s own distant lights fade behind them, turning two years of accumulated purpose over with quiet, focused resolve.

"You’re doing the thing again," Irene said, settling into the seat beside him. "Going quiet and thoughtful."

"Just thinking about how far this has all traveled," Allen admitted. "From a bowl of stew in a run-down kitchen to this."

"Funny how that works," Irene said, managing a small, tired smile. "You never really see the distance until you’re forced to look back at it all at once."

Myria occupied the seat across from them, tablet already open, running through the operation’s finalized details with the same focused thoroughness she’d brought to every previous impossible plan, though her own pace carried none of the frantic edge it might have a week earlier. "Eldera will meet us at the staging point," she said. "She’s coordinating with Priya’s advance team already on the ground."

"How does the estate look, from her current vantage?" Vivian asked.

"Consistent with our last imagery," Myria said. "Security remains elevated. No further thermal spikes since the second signal. I don’t know whether that’s reassuring or concerning."

"Both, probably," Allen said. "The way most things about this operation have been."

Irene, listening from the seat behind them, leaned forward with a small, tired grin. "You know what I keep thinking about?" she said. "That very first dungeon dive. E-rank. Rustfang hounds, or whatever they were called. I was so sure that was going to be the scariest thing we ever did together."

"Feels like a lifetime ago," Allen said.

"It was basically a different lifetime," Irene agreed. "Funny how the scary stuff just keeps getting bigger, and somehow we just keep getting bigger to match it."

The flight stretched across several hours, the household settling into a strange, focused quiet that Allen recognized from every previous mission’s own final approach — not fear, exactly, though fear lingered somewhere beneath it, but something closer to readiness fully arrived, the accumulated weight of preparation finally converging toward its actual, inevitable moment.

---

Everlyn spent much of the flight with her notepad closed entirely, simply watching the ocean pass beneath them, and Allen settled beside her partway through, drawn by her own quiet, considering stillness.

"You alright?" he asked.

She nodded, then reached for the notepad after a moment’s consideration. I keep thinking about the children, she wrote. Three of them, the message said. I don’t know why that detail’s the one I can’t stop returning to.

"Because it’s the one that hurts the most to imagine," Allen said gently. "I think that’s true for all of us, whether we’ve said it out loud or not."

Everlyn’s expression carried quiet, grateful acknowledgment, and she leaned into his side for a while, neither of them needing further words to carry the weight of what still waited ahead.

"Do you remember," she wrote eventually, "the first time you asked me about my own voice? In the garden, that very first month?"

"I remember," Allen said. "You told me about the tunnel. The children you saved."

I think about them sometimes too, Everlyn wrote. Wondering if they grew up alright. Wondering if any of them remember the woman who screamed one impossible sentence and never spoke again. I never got to know what happened to them, after.

"Do you wish you had?" Allen asked.

Sometimes, Everlyn admitted. But I’ve made my peace with not knowing everyone’s ending. I think that’s part of what this is too — a chance to actually see one all the way through, for once.

Allen felt something in his chest settle at the quiet, hard-won honesty of it, understanding with fresh clarity exactly why this particular rescue had come to mean something so deeply personal to every member of his family, each for their own private, hard-earned reasons.

---

They landed at a private airstrip outside Lisbon as afternoon light began stretching long and gold across unfamiliar terrain, and Eldera met them at the tarmac’s edge, her own composed exterior carrying visible, focused resolve.

"Priya’s advance team has eyes on the estate," she reported, falling into step beside them as they moved toward the waiting transport. "Security patterns match our projections. I don’t see anything suggesting they’ve detected our approach."

"Good," Myria said. "That’s the first genuinely good news we’ve had in days."

They reached the staging point as evening settled fully over the Portuguese coastline, a modest, unremarkable safehouse Priya’s team had secured weeks earlier, and Allen found himself, standing at its rear window, studying the distant silhouette of the estate’s own considerable grounds for the first time with his own eyes rather than secondhand imagery.

"That’s it," Vivian said quietly, joining him, her own enhanced hearing already tracking details the distance obscured from ordinary senses. "I can hear the security rotation from here. Regular, disciplined. Nothing improvised about it."

Allen studied the distant lights a while longer, feeling the accumulated weight of everything that had carried them to this exact moment, and let himself, for one final quiet evening, simply stand beside the people who’d carried him this far, before tomorrow demanded everything they had left to give.

"Tomorrow," he said softly.

"Tomorrow," Vivian agreed, and together they watched the estate’s distant lights flicker against the deepening dark, twelve people somewhere within its walls, closer now than they had ever been.

Priya joined them a while later, her own tablet displaying the finalized approach plan, tomorrow’s pre-dawn infiltration mapped out in careful, deliberate detail. "Zero-four-hundred," she said. "Security rotation shifts at zero-four-thirty. That gap gives us our best window."

"Zero-four-hundred," Allen confirmed, feeling the plan’s weight settle fully into place.

The household spent the remaining hours in quiet, focused rest, each of them drawing whatever strength the safehouse’s temporary shelter could offer before tomorrow’s pre-dawn infiltration demanded everything they had left to give. Allen lay awake longer than the others, watching the estate’s distant lights through the window’s narrow gap, turning the accumulated weight of two years’ patient investigation over one final time before whatever came next finally arrived to meet it.

Myria found him there eventually, settling quietly beside him without needing explanation for his own reflective, wakeful silence. "You should try to sleep," she said gently. "Even a few hours."

"I know," Allen admitted. "I keep thinking about tomorrow morning. Whether we’ll actually be ready for whatever’s waiting behind that door."

"We will be," Myria said, with the same quiet, unwavering certainty she’d offered him at the very start of this compressed, difficult preparation. "Not because we’re fearless. Because we’ve done the work, and because we’re doing it together."

Allen let her steady reassurance settle over his own mounting unease, and finally allowed himself to be drawn toward rest, the estate’s distant lights still glowing faintly through the window as sleep, at last, began to claim him.