The call came at nine forty-seven in the evening.
Not to Aiden. Not directly. It came through a tertiary channel that had been dormant for eight months, one of the secondary communication nodes that Aiden had identified in his father's documents as a contingency line, the kind of line that only existed in the architecture of someone who had planned for the possibility of needing to speak without being heard. The fact that it was active meant something specific. It meant that the primary channels were no longer considered safe. It meant that the assessment had been made, the decision had been reached, and the father had moved from the phase of managing the situation to the phase of leaving it.
Aiden sat at the terminal and looked at the signal for a long moment before he said anything.
"He's activated the contingency line," he said.
The room attended.
Kael looked up from the map.
