Grace's group came from the south.
Grace first, then Samantha, then Kristen who blinked in and out twice ahead of them to clear the way and arrived at the junction slightly before her own body did, which was the particular quality of Kristen's power that the group had gotten used to and that still occasionally made Niall blink.
"The blood lab," Grace said to Thomas, before she had fully stopped moving.
"Katherine briefed me," Thomas said. "The vials."
"Not just creature blood," Grace said. "Chosen one blood. A specific selection. Old and recent." She looked at the group. "She has been targeting chosen ones for years and we did not know it. Individual incidents. Isolated. Things that looked unconnected."
The junction held this.
"Connected," Courtney said. Not a question.
"Connected," Grace confirmed.
Samantha was reading the air of the junction with the still blue eyes — not the air of the immediate corridor, something wider, the building-level reading she did when she was trying to map what was moving through a space in all its directions at once.
"The patrol is closer than ninety seconds," she said to Fenix.
Fenix recalibrated.
"Sixty," he said. "One of them moved faster."
"We're still two groups short," Carlyle said. Looking toward the west end of the corridor.
The west door opened.
William came through it with Emmet behind him and the Tempests behind Emmet, all four of them moving with the specific compressed efficiency of people who had been moving fast for longer than was comfortable and had more to move before they were done.
William had a file under one arm.
Mrs. Tempest had a device in her hand.
Mr. Tempest looked at the assembled group and did the count the same way Thomas did, with the automatic speed of someone for whom counting people in a room was a survival skill, and his count arrived at the right number and something settled in his posture.
"The spell is on the device," Mrs. Tempest said to Thomas. Directly. No preamble. The communication of someone who understood that the preamble was the cost they couldn't pay right now. "Complete. Encrypted copy. William can verify it."
"The filing room has the demon queen's real plan," William said. "The generals are not an army. Each one is designed to unmake one of the seven fundamental structures of the world. The demon queen doesn't want to rule it." He looked at the group. "She wants to end it."
The junction went very quiet.
"Forty seconds," Fenix said.
"We move," Thomas said. "Third floor. Now. Everything else gets said when we're in a room that isn't this one."
The group moved.
All twenty-three of them, together again, the junction becoming a corridor becoming a stairwell, the specific motion of a large group that had stopped being separate and had become the single thing it was when it was whole.