The facility sat in the middle of nothing.
That was the first thing Katherine registered when the transport dropped them at the tree line — not the building itself, which was low and functional and deliberately unremarkable, but the nothing around it. The flat northern Ontario landscape that stretched in every direction with the particular emptiness of land that had decided not to be anything in particular. No city sounds. No lights beyond the facility's own. Just the cold and the dark and the trees and the building sitting in the middle of them like something that had been placed there specifically to be difficult to approach without being seen.
William had said Victor chose contingency locations for exactly this quality.
Katherine believed him.
Thomas stood at the tree line and looked at the facility with the green eyes and the expression he had before things began — not tense, not uncertain, the expression of someone who has done enough of this to know that what you felt before it started was not the useful thing. The useful thing was what you did after.
"Groups," he said.
The twenty-three of them — chosen ones, Thomas, Dean, Tierney, Emmet, William, the Tempests — reorganized in the dark with the quiet efficiency of people who had rehearsed this in the basement for two days and were now doing it in the actual cold with an actual building in front of them.
Five groups.
Group one: Tierney, Katherine, and Fenix.
Group two: Dean, Carlyle, and Niall.
Group three: Thomas, Courtney, and Jasper.
Group four: Grace, Samantha, and Kristen.
Group five: Emmet, William, and the Tempests.
Five entry points. Five different angles of approach. Five different parts of the facility to find and map and move through before the groups reunited at the center — the location William had identified from Victor's patterns as the most likely place to find Victor himself.
Five simultaneous problems for the facility's attention to manage.
"Signal if you find something significant," Thomas said. Not loudly. The night absorbed his voice the way northern nights absorbed everything. "Do not engage anything you cannot handle quietly. We are not here to fight — we are here to find. Fighting comes after finding."
He looked at the groups.
"Two hours," he said. "Then we find each other."
He looked at Katherine last.
She looked back.
The dark element of her power was cycling in its spiral — not the slow contemplative spiral of the house, but the tighter faster spiral it did when something old was close and the world felt thin between the present and whatever lived on the other side of it.
The demon queen was in that building.
Katherine could feel it.
"Two hours," she confirmed.
The groups split.
The dark took them.