Chapter 33| A Channel She Wasn’t Supposed to Have

Chapter 33: Chapter 33| A Channel She Wasn’t Supposed to Have

Kira stood in the farmhouse kitchen and looked at the table and thought about seventeen operations and what it meant that this one felt different from the first exchange onward and whether the difference was in the target or in her and couldn’t fully answer that question which was itself an answer of a kind.

She looked at the coffee rings on the table.

’They went east,’ she thought. ’Three to eight hours journey perhaps. A destination significant enough to move toward with three days left on a deadline rather than away from.’

She pulled up the regional map on her field tablet and looked at what sat to the east of the farmhouse within an eight hour radius and began the methodical work of elimination that had produced seventeen successful retrievals and was now producing something she didn’t have a name for yet.

Not a retrieval picture.

Something else.

She looked at the map for a long time.

Then she closed the Warden’s channel completely, not suspended, closed and opened a different one. A private frequency that wasn’t in any Nexarion communication log and that she had been maintaining quietly for eight months without telling anyone.

The channel connected after three tones.

"It’s me," she said. "Something’s changed. I need to talk."

_ _

Back at Eren’s cottage the afternoon had settled into the specific quality of a late day that had held too much to process quickly.

Damian sat with the encrypted drive in his hand and looked at the fire and let Eren’s voice continue in the background. He talked details about Facility Four’s external infrastructure, approach routes, the commercial cover operations that surrounded it. Useful information. Information he filed in the place he filed things that had a specific future use even when the future was further away than he wanted it to be.

Sable documented everything without comment.

At some point Eren stopped talking and looked at Damian with the expression he’d had since the door. The one with thirty years of weight in it.

"She would be proud of you," he said. "For getting out. For getting here." He paused. "For being what you are rather than what they tried to make you."

Damian looked at the fire.

’She went back for the documents,’ he thought. ’She was clear and she went back.’

’I’ll go back too,’ he thought. ’When I’m ready I’ll go back too.’

"Thank you," he said. To Eren. For thirty years of waiting and building and hiding trails in archives and carrying four words on a folded piece of paper in a jacket pocket.

Eren nodded once. The nod of someone who had been thanked for something they considered simply the shape of what needed doing and had never required acknowledgment for.

Outside the grey sky had darkened toward evening.

[Flux: 68%]

Passive dissipation had been running through the afternoon. He noted the number and noted that the next refuel cycle was approaching and noted that they were six hours from the farmhouse and needed somewhere to be tonight and that Eren Jaeger’s cottage had two rooms he could see and probably more he couldn’t.

He looked at Sable.

She was already looking at him with the expression that meant she’d been running the same calculation and had reached the same conclusion.

"We’ll need somewhere to stay tonight," she said to Eren.

Eren looked at them both with the mild expression of someone for whom this had been obvious since they knocked on his door this morning.

"I have a room," he said. "I’ve had it ready for some time." He stood from the table with the unhurried movement of someone whose joints had opinions about sudden changes in position. "I assumed you wouldn’t drive six hours back tonight." He looked at Damian. "There’s also something else I need to give you. Something that couldn’t go on the drive." He moved toward the back of the cottage. "It will keep until after you’ve eaten. You both look like people who haven’t eaten since this morning."

He disappeared into the back room.

Damian looked at Sable across the table.

She looked back at him with the specific expression she wore when she was thinking something she hadn’t decided whether to say yet.

"Kira’s deadline," she said quietly. "Three days left."

"I know," he replied.

"We’re six hours from the farmhouse," she said. "And she knows we went east."

"I know that too," he said.

She was quiet for a moment. "What do we do?"

He looked at the encrypted drive in his hand. At the folded paper on the table. At the fire that had been burning in this cottage for thirty years of waiting.

"We eat," he said. "We sleep. And tomorrow we figure out the next move with full information instead of half of it."

Sable nodded.

From the back of the cottage the sound of Eren Jaeger moving around a kitchen that had been waiting a long time to feed more than one person.

Outside the evening settled over the property and the hedgerow tunnel and the regional road beyond it and somewhere to the west a woman had closed a channel she wasn’t supposed to have and was talking to someone Nexarion didn’t know about.

Three days.

_ _

Eren’s spare room was small and honest about it.

A single bed, a chair, a window that looked out over the vegetable garden and the dark field beyond it. No unnecessary furniture. No decoration except a shelf of books that had been read enough times to have lost the stiffness of their spines. The kind of room that had been waiting for an occupant without presuming to know who that would be.

Damian stood at the window for a long time after Eren showed them upstairs.

The evening had settled fully over the property. No light pollution this far from anything, the dark genuine and complete in a way the city never allowed. Stars where the cloud cover had thinned. The vegetable garden below the window in orderly rows that caught the faint light and held it in the dew on the leaves.

Sable had taken the chair with her tablet and was still working. Documenting the afternoon’s conversation while it was fresh, organizing Eren’s information into the structured format she applied to everything. The quiet scratch of her stylus on the screen was the only sound in the room besides the wind moving through the hedgerow outside.