They stayed in Iceland for two days.
Not because they needed two days to convince anyone of anything. That part had been settled around the table with the tea and the maps and Samantha's quiet certain voice saying he comes too. They stayed because Engel asked them to, not urgently, just simply, the way a man asks for something he needs but will not demand.
"One more day," he said the evening after Samantha agreed. "Let me show her what I know before we leave. Let me give her what I can while we are still in the place where I learned it."
Nobody argued.
The second morning Engel took Samantha out to the coastal land before anyone else was awake and they were gone for two hours. Katherine watched them from the window of the small room she had been given, two figures moving through the pale early light, the wind moving around them both in the particular way it moved around Samantha, easy and familiar. They stopped at the high rocks above the water and stood there for a long time and Katherine couldn't see their faces from this distance but she could see the quality of them standing together, the closeness of it, a father and daughter doing something they had done many times before and knowing this particular time was different from all the others.
She turned from the window and finished packing her bag.
Downstairs the house was waking up slowly. Thomas was already in the kitchen, which meant the coffee was on, which meant Niall had also been up for a while because Niall had developed an accurate internal alarm for the moment coffee became available. Kristen was at the table with her weapons out again, which was how Kristen processed things she didn't say out loud, the quiet methodical checking and rechecking of things that were already fine.
Courtney was looking at the maps on the wall.
Katherine came down the stairs and stood beside her.
The maps were old and well marked, lines and notations in different colors of ink laid down over years, and Katherine could read enough of it to understand that Engel had been tracking the movement of suits and the placement of Victor's operations for a very long time from this quiet house above the water.
"He never stopped," Courtney said quietly, not taking her eyes off the maps.
"No," Katherine agreed.
"Living here, raising Samantha, all of it. He never stopped watching."
"He was waiting," Katherine said. "Like KaSandra said."
Courtney turned and looked at her. "Do you think the others are the same? Jasper's mother. Fenix's parents."
Katherine thought about Grace Dove who had changed her name and raised her son quietly in New Orleans and taught him to be careful. She thought about Mr. and Mrs. Tempest in Canada with suits positioned around them like a slow siege.
"I think everyone connected to this thing has been living inside it even when they were trying to live outside it," she said. "I don't think there's been a single person who got to just walk away and be done."
Courtney was quiet for a moment.
"That's sad," she said.
"Yeah," Katherine said. "It is."
Dean appeared in the kitchen doorway with two cups of coffee and held one out to Katherine, who took it, and then he looked at the maps beside Courtney and his expression went through something complicated that he didn't put into words.
By midmorning everyone had gathered in the main room and Engel came back with Samantha from the coastal walk and they came inside and Samantha went upstairs without speaking, which nobody commented on, and Engel stood in the doorway of the main room and looked at the group assembled among his books and his maps and his accumulated years of quiet vigilance.
"New Orleans," he said to Thomas.
"New Orleans," Thomas confirmed.
"Grace Dove's boy."
"Jasper Vale," Thomas said.
Engel nodded slowly. "I knew Grace. Years ago. Before the war ended." He looked at the floor for a moment. "She was one of the strongest people I have ever known and she carries it very quietly. Her son will be the same." He looked up. "Don't make the mistake of thinking quiet means uncertain."
"Noted," Dean said.
"She will not let him go easily," Engel continued. "Not because she doesn't want what is right. Because she has spent his entire life protecting him from the thing that is now standing in her living room asking for him." He looked at Tierney. "Be patient with her."
"We will," Tierney said.
He looked at Katherine. "And you," he said. "With Jasper. He sees things others cannot see and people have not always been kind about it. He will look at you and he will look for whether you are the same as everyone else who made him feel strange." A pause. "Make sure he sees that you are not."
Katherine held his gaze. "I will."
Engel studied her for a moment with his clear hazel eyes and seemed to find whatever he was looking for. He nodded once.
Samantha came back downstairs with a bag, compact and practical, and set it by the front door with the ease of someone who had not packed too much or too little, who had known exactly what to bring.
She looked at the group.
"I've never been to New Orleans," she said.
"It's warm," Niall offered. "Relative to here."
"Everything is warm relative to here," Kristen said.
"That's fair," Niall said.
The almost smile. Fuller again than the day before.
"Is there anything you need before we go?" Tierney asked Engel.
He looked around his house, at the books and the maps and the fire burning low in the grate, at the life he had built in this place that was real and good and that he was now stepping away from for something larger and older than either of those things.
"No," he said. "Everything I need is leaving with me."
He looked at Samantha when he said it.
She looked back at him and said nothing and didn't need to.
They loaded into the car in the familiar organized way, bags in the back, Niall's knees against the seat, the quiet settling of a group that moves together. Engel took the seat by the window and looked out at the house with the green roof as the car pulled away from it, watching it the way people watch something they have loved for a long time and are not certain they will see again.
Katherine watched him.
She thought about what it cost a person to leave the place they had chosen as their shelter. She thought about Samantha on the rocks above the water that morning with her father, the last time they would stand there together for a long time, maybe the last time in the particular way it had always been, just the two of them and the wind and the honest Icelandic sky.
She thought about the map on the wall, all those years of careful watching, all that patient waiting, and a man raising his daughter to be ready for a day he couldn't name but never stopped believing was coming.
And it had come.
And here they were in a car leaving Iceland with the wind chosen one sitting two seats away watching the landscape go by with blue eyes that were calm and a little sad and entirely unafraid.
Katherine looked forward through the windshield at the road ahead.
New Orleans next.
A boy who could see ghosts and had learned to be quiet about it.
A mother who had spent his whole life keeping him safe from exactly this.
She thought about what Engel had said. Don't make the mistake of thinking quiet means uncertain.
She turned it over in her mind as the pale Icelandic coast fell away behind them.
She wouldn't.