The transport was a wide vehicle, a large private charter arranged through channels that KaSandra had established and that Thomas had confirmed twice before they left the warehouse, and it sat at the edge of a small regional airfield twenty minutes north of the city with its lights low and its engines running and the specific patient quality of a thing that had been paid to wait and was waiting.
They reached it without contact.
The city behind them had begun its response to what had happened in the facility, the kind of response that Victor's operations generated when something went wrong, quiet and internal and invisible to anyone not looking for it, the movement of suits through streets and the redirection of attention toward the facility district and the communication channels that ran beneath the city's ordinary surface like the infrastructure they were.
None of it reached the airfield.
Thomas had been watching for it the entire drive north and it had not reached the airfield and that was the margin they had built into the plan and the margin had held and they were at the transport and everyone was loading and that was the situation and Thomas let himself exhale one long breath that contained several things before he started counting people again.
Fourteen.
He counted twice.
Fourteen.
He got on the transport.
The transport lifted and the Canadian city fell away below them and the dark countryside spread out in all directions and somewhere in the south the facility sat in its ordinary looking block with its disrupted operational center and its empty lower level room and its patrol that had found a checkpoint that was not what it had been, and all of that was behind them now and the space between them and it was growing with every minute.
Katherine sat toward the rear of the transport.
Fenix was across the aisle from her, beside his mother, and he was looking out the window at the dark countryside below with the specific attention of someone who had not seen a view like this in some time and was relearning what it felt like to have unobstructed distance in front of them.
Mrs. Tempest had her hand over his on the armrest.
He had not moved it away.
Mr. Tempest was in the seat ahead of them talking quietly with Asher in the low voice of people exchanging information that needed exchanging, two men from the same world reconnecting threads with the efficient economy of people who knew there would be more time for the fuller version later and were covering the essential now.
Engel was asleep.
Katherine noticed this with something that was close to affection, the sight of a man who had been on operational alert for the past several hours and had made the entirely sensible decision to use the transport time to recover, his head against the window and his breathing slow and his hands loose in his lap, and Samantha beside him was not asleep but was close to it, her blue eyes half open and looking at nothing specific, the particular unfocused rest of someone who is too alert to sleep but too tired to be fully awake.
Grace was behind them.
She and Jasper were talking in the way they talked, low and unhurried, the conversation that had been ongoing since before New Orleans and that had changed in its texture since the operational center, since Jasper had used his power in a way he had never used it before and Grace had watched him do it and the watching had changed something between them that was going to take more time and space than a transport back from Canada to fully work through.
Carlyle was beside Jasper.
He was asleep.
This was not surprising.
Carlyle could sleep anywhere, a capability Katherine had marveled at since childhood, the ability to locate stillness in himself regardless of what was moving around him, and she watched him asleep in the transport seat and felt the twin bond between them warm and present and thought about how long it had been since she had taken a moment to simply be glad he was here.
Very glad.
She leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling of the transport and let the motion of it move through her, the steady vibration of the engines and the slight shift of the air and the low hum of a contained space moving through the dark, and she let her power settle, the cycling slowing from its operational pace to something closer to rest, fire to water to earth to wind to dark and back again, easier now, the way breathing is easier when the thing that was making it difficult has been removed.
She thought about Niall and Kristen and Courtney back at the house.
She thought about what she was going to walk back into, the weight of what they were carrying and the weight of what the three of them had been carrying alone in the house since the phone calls, and she thought about how to hold all of that alongside this, alongside the nine people who were not at the house yet and would be there soon and would change the shape of what they were building into something that was finally close to what it needed to be.
She thought about the assassin.
Still out there.
Still moving.
She thought about what KaSandra had said. Be careful. Not of him. Of what Victor will do when he realizes you have him.
Victor knew by now.
The facility had found the empty room and the disrupted operational center and the checkpoint and he knew. Whatever came next was going to come from a man who had just watched something he had built carefully over a long period of time be taken apart in the course of a single night, and the response of a man like Victor to that kind of loss was not going to be measured or patient.
She filed that.
She looked across the aisle at Fenix.
He had turned from the window and was looking at the ceiling of the transport the way she had been looking at it, head back, eyes open, the expression of someone in the middle of something too large to look at directly and finding the ceiling a useful place to rest their eyes while they worked through it.
He seemed to sense her looking.
He turned his head.
They looked at each other across the aisle.
"Can't sleep," he said.
"No," she agreed.
He looked back at the ceiling.
"My father told me something on the transport," he said. "Before everyone settled in."
"What did he say?" Katherine asked.
"He said the people who came for us tonight are the ones worth fighting with." He paused. "He said he could see it. The way they move together and the way they look at each other and the way no one had to be told what to do when things changed." He was quiet for a moment. "He said he'd been waiting for that to exist again since the old war."
Katherine looked at the ceiling.
"He said one more thing," Fenix said.
"What?"
"He said the dark element girl came through my door first." He turned his head and looked at her again. "He said that was not an accident."
Katherine looked at him.
The hazel eyes were doing the thing they did now, the thing that was different from the assessment, that warmer quieter thing that had been finding its way out since the warehouse and that was more present now in the low light of the transport with the dark countryside moving below.
"It wasn't an accident," Katherine said.
"I know," he said.
He looked at the ceiling again.
The transport moved through the dark.
Thomas, in the seat at the front, was looking at his phone with the expression of a man reading information he had been waiting for and was not entirely glad to receive.
Katherine watched him.
He looked up from the phone and found her watching.
He got up from his seat and came down the aisle and crouched beside her seat in the low space between the rows and held his phone where she could see the screen without it being visible to the rest of the transport.
She read it.
It was from KaSandra.
Short. Three lines.
The first line said the assassin had been active again. Two more incidents, details to follow.
The second line said that KaSandra had begun a reading and that the reading had shown her something she needed to share with the group when they returned.
The third line said: Tell Asher it is time.
Katherine looked at Thomas.
Thomas looked at her.
Then he looked at Asher at the front of the transport and something passed through his expression that was the specific quality of a man who had understood something he had not fully understood before, a piece sliding into a picture that had been waiting for it.
He straightened up.
He went forward to Asher.
Katherine watched him crouch beside Asher's seat the way he had crouched beside hers and show Asher the phone and watched Asher read the third line and watched Asher's expression do something that was complicated and brief and that she could not fully read from this distance but that carried the quality of a person receiving a message they had been expecting for a long time and greeting it with the mixed feeling of someone who knew what it meant and had made peace with what it meant and was still affected by it.
Asher looked up from the phone.
He looked at the transport ceiling.
Then he looked at his hands.
Then he looked at Katherine down the aisle with a look that was direct and clear and that said something she filed without yet understanding where to file it.
She looked out her own window.
Below them the dark countryside was giving way to the first signs of the city that held the house, the scattered lights of the outskirts spreading into the denser illumination of the inner neighborhoods, the geography of home becoming visible from the air, and she felt something in her chest at the sight of it that she recognized as the feeling of return, of having gone somewhere difficult and come back to something real.
Three blocks from the edge of the city the transport began its descent.
Fenix was looking out his window at the lights below.
"That's it?" he said.
"That's it," Katherine said.
He looked at the lights for a moment.
Then he looked at her.
"The ones who stayed behind," he said. "Niall and Kristen and Courtney."
"Yes," she said. She looked at him. "You know their names."
"My father told me about all of you," he said. "Over the years. Not by name. But the shape of what you were going to be." He paused. "When I was in that room I started putting names to the shapes." He looked back at the lights. "Niall. Kristen. Courtney." A pause. "They stayed to hold the house."
"Yes," Katherine said.
"They've had a hard few days," he said.
It was not a question. He was stating something he understood without knowing the specifics, reading the shape of it the way his father had apparently taught him to read shapes.
"Yes," she said.
He was quiet.
The transport descended.
The house was twenty minutes from the airfield and the night was late and the city moved around the vehicle that Thomas had arranged at the landing point and inside it fourteen people made their way toward a house that had been held by three people and was about to receive everyone back into it and become something it had not been before tonight.
Thomas was on his phone in the front of the vehicle.
He was texting, and Katherine could see from the angle of the screen that he was texting Kristen, because Kristen was the one who answered phones and texts when something was incoming and needed to be managed from the receiving end.
The reply came back fast.
Thomas read it and showed Dean and Dean read it and something moved through both their expressions that was not alarm exactly but was the specific heightened attention of people receiving information that required immediate integration.
Katherine was watching them.
Thomas looked back at her.
He held up his phone so she could read the screen.
Kristen's message was four words.
Someone has been here.