Drev moved on the fourth day.
He had expected three. He had been watching the team's positions every morning from different vantage points in the lower tier and on the third morning two of them were gone from their usual spots. He had thought that meant the misdirection was still holding.
He had been wrong.
The fourth morning he came back to Fen's room and the door was open.
Not broken. Just open. The kind of open that meant someone had gone in and come out and not bothered closing it behind them because there was nothing left to find.
He stood in the corridor and listened. The building had the sound of a place that had been recently vacated of any specific attention but might not be entirely clear. He stood very still and heard nothing that suggested anyone waiting.
He went in.
The room had been searched efficiently. Not ransacked. Searched. The kind of search done by someone who knew what they were looking for and was working quickly. Fen's few belongings were not destroyed. They were moved, checked, replaced in positions that were close to their originals but not exact. Professional.
He stood in the center of the room and thought.
Fen had not been here when it happened. He had sent Fen to the mid-tier market that morning on a false errand, a habit he had developed over the past week of sending Fen somewhere innocuous whenever he felt the threads getting tight. Fen was safe. Fen's room was compromised.
He left immediately.
He went to the communication service two streets away and sent a single message to Fen at the predetermined contact point they had established three days ago. Two words. New location. Then he named the street corner and the time.
He spent the next four hours moving through the lower tier on routes he had not used before, varying his pace, checking for follows. He found one. A man he had not seen among Drev's original team, which meant Drev had expanded. He filed that. The recovery team was larger than Fen had heard.
He shook the follow by going through a delivery access in a mid-tier warehouse that connected to a different street on the other side. He had mapped it two weeks ago as a contingency. The contingency was being spent now.
He found a new place to sit and thought about his position.
His third identity was now compromised. Fen's room was known. Drev had more people than the original estimate. He had no room. He had the journal and the Erren Cole identity and a small amount of money and the systems.
He also had the Mirror fragment from two nights ago. Himself running in a corridor.
The Mirror didn't give him threats in order to frighten him. It gave him information. Running in a corridor meant a corridor existed where running would be necessary. That was forward information. Near future.
He needed to understand the shape of Drev's move before it completed.
[Drev is not moving against you yet,] the Archive said, as if reading the question he had not asked aloud. [He found the room. He is using it to map your network. He now knows Fen exists. He is running Fen's release record through the Compact system.]
He went still. "How long before he has enough on Fen to use him."
[Fen's record is clean. There is nothing to use in the formal sense. But Drev is not limited to formal methods.] A pause. [He will approach Fen directly. He will offer him money or threaten him with the association charge. He will tell Fen that being found near a Grade Zero sexual assault case will attach to his record regardless of legal technicalities.]
He thought about that.
That was true and they both knew it. He had told Fen as much three times. Fen knew the cost. But knowing the cost and having a professional recovery agent say it to your face in a corridor were different things.
He sent a second message to Fen. Longer this time. He told him what was coming. He told him what Drev would say and what the actual legal reality was and what the social reality was and he left the decision entirely to Fen. He wrote: you do not owe me this and I am not asking you to hold.
He sent it and waited.
Fen responded in an hour.
Tell me where to meet you.
He sat with that for a moment. Then he put the journal away and thought about what Drev's approach told him about Drev's position.
Drev had lost his administrative cover. He had a fugitive with no collar, no tracked location, a compromised identity, and a small network of one person. He had expanded his team. He was now using the network rather than the fugitive himself as the pressure point. He was being careful.
But careful also meant slow. And slow meant Drev was not going to make a direct move for at least another two days while he rebuilt his intelligence picture.
Two days was enough for what came next.
He had been thinking about Selira Voss for four days. Every time he came back to it he came back to the same problem. He had a Mirror fragment showing them sitting across a table from each other. The fragment existed, which meant the meeting was going to happen. The question was whether he walked into it blind or whether he understood something about her before it happened.
[We can tell you something about her,] the Mirror said.
"Tell me."
[She has been in the upper first tier for six days. She has had three private meetings with a Compact legal advocate. An advocate who specializes in conviction review.] A pause. [She is not here for any reason connected to the Clan Head directly. She came back because of your conviction record.]
He processed that carefully.
"She is looking at the conviction."
[She is looking at the conviction. She has been looking at it for some time, apparently. Long enough to retain a legal advocate who specializes in this area.]
He thought about what that meant. About a woman who had allowed a fabricated conviction to stand under her name. Who had found out afterward and said nothing. And who had apparently, at some point in the months since, decided to do something about it.
He thought about the letters. The protected deposit. The Clan Representative under pressure from the law firm. The Clan Head in quiet panic. Drev operating without administrative cover.
He thought about what adding Selira Voss to the board would do to all of it.
He did not reach a conclusion.
He went to find Fen.
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Author's note: Sorry guys, my bad, I'm pretty sick right now. Hence, cant post more chaps. Will make it up next week.