Kael's POV
He moved them before they could ask any questions.
"Left. Now."-
He didn't stop to see if they were following. He cut left through a gap in the wall, ducked under a collapsed beam and came out into a narrow passage between two buildings that his unit's new patrol route wouldn't reach for at least six minutes. He knew because he had committed the routes to memory. He'd written some of them.
Somebody had changed them and hadn't told him.
It either meant two things. Either Command had updated patrol grids since his last report - routine, possible - or someone in his unit had made a call he didn't authorize and hadn't reported up the chain.
He clenched his jaw at either option. Only one sent a chill down the back of his neck.
Footsteps behind him. Two sets. They were keeping pace.
He did not look back. No need for that. He knew where she was already.
That was the bit he wasn't thinking about.
The bond had locked the moment he'd grabbed her arm – and never let go. It wasn't loud. It wasn't a voice or a vision or anything that he could point to and name cleanly. It was as if the air pressure in his own chest had changed. A new thing, running under everything else, quiet and constant and impossible to turn off. She was three paces behind him, just a little to his left. She was mad. Below the angry was the afraid, but she had put the fear somewhere deep, and was running on the top layer, the sharp layer, the layer that made decisions.
He knew that as well as he knew when it was going to rain.
He loathed it.
His mother, once, sitting at their kitchen table with her hands around a cup of tea as though she needed something to hold on to, had described the bond. -It isn't romantic,- she said, and that was the part twelve-year-old Kael had found most baffling. -It's more like - you know how you always know where your hand is even in the dark? Not even when you don't think of it?He nodded. —It's that way. But for somebody else."
They'd first killed her sworn. Brought her in, shot him in the square, made her watch. Then they took her.
Kael had been told that it was necessary. That the bond was a security hazard. That Sworn-connected Sovereigns were twice as powerful and half as controllable and the Kingdom couldn't afford the chaos.
He'd believed them.
Fifteen years he had trusted them. He'd done his job. He had followed the orders and filled out the reports and told himself that every Sovereign he neutralized was a threat he was preventing, not a person he was killing.
He rejected them a second passage, then a third, going deeper into the part of the Red City his unit never swept because of the building density that made radio contact unreliable. Great for hiding. Bad when you call for backup.
But Lyra had already worked that out, he pointed out. He felt the small change in her, not relaxing completely, but recalibrating. Threat assessment. Update. She had decided the unreliable radio was an advantage to her as well.
It was right.
"Stop," he said.
He balled his fist. They waited.
He heard.
They had not followed them into this passage. He could hear the boots two streets east. They were sweeping in a grid pattern, which meant they were looking for something they hadn't found yet, which meant his lie still held.
For now.
He turned.
The brother was breathing heavily. Lyra was not. She stood perfectly still, watching his face with that sharp eye that missed nothing. He had the feeling she had been cataloging him all along the way he cataloged targets, looking for weak points, looking for the thing that explained all the rest.
He'd read her file. He knew she was clever.
Her file had not done enough to show what smart looked like on her face in real-time.
"You wrote the patrol routes," she said. That wasn't an inquiry?
--"Some of them."--
"But not new one.
-"No."-
-"Which means someone changed them after you reported us dead.She cocked her head slightly. -Which means somebody in your unit didn't believe your report.
-"Yes.
-That means we have less time than you planned for.-
He looked at her a second. -"Yeah."-
The brother raised his hand like they were in a class room. "Who's done it?"
"I don't know.
Can you find out? -
-"Not unless I make contact and making contact tells them where I am.
Lyra hadn't shifted. She was still looking at him in that way, that way that wasn't quite distrust and wasn't quite the opposite either, something careful and precise, like she'd put him in a category she hadn't finished labeling yet.
-You've done this before, she said. - 'Secret Sovereigns'
He said nothing.
-That's a yes,- she answered.
He looked aside. It wasn't that she was wrong. Because she was dead right. And she had got there in under an hour and he had worked very carefully for three years to make sure no one in the Kingdom had figured that out in all that time.
-"We need to move one more time,"- he said. "We are going in the ground in twenty minutes."
-"Underground where?"
-"Safe. Safe somewhere.
She made a noise that was not quite a laugh. - "You said that once before.
I meant it before. I mean it now."-
She looked at him for a second more. Then she nodded. Just once. Slightly. Like someone who has come to a decision they are not entirely comfortable with.
He turned to guide them forward.
His comms crackled.
He snatched it up fast, hit mute. But not fast enough. There had already been a voice, one word, low and deliberate, the voice of a man who never raised it because he never needed to.
"Kael."
Director Solen
No, Reth. Not Command. Solen himself on Kael's personal frequency, a frequency not on any unit roster, a frequency only three people in the Kingdom were supposed to have.
-"I know you found her," Solen said. -"I know what the bond feels like. Your mother told it to me before she died."-
Kael's hand paused on the comm.
"Bring her in," Solen said. -or I'll send someone who doesn't care if she lives or dies.
The line went silent.
Kael remained still for a full three seconds.
Then his eye fell on Lyra.
She'd heard it all.