Chapter 96: Price of a Floor Plan

Chapter 96: Chapter 96: Price of a Floor Plan

Nyx came back at dawn.

Donald was awake already. His legs had stopped aching sometime in the night, and he was sitting at the War Room table with the reactor readout open in front of him.

[Dimensional Core Resonance: 62.2%]

[Estimated time: 31 days.]

The black cat dropped through the ceiling vent, landed on the table, and walked across the holographic map of the city until she was sitting in the middle of Sector 5. She looked at him and flicked her tail.

A moment later the shadow under the table moved, and Sylvia rose out of it. Her tactical suit was wet from the rain. She looked like she hadn’t slept.

"Your cat is very rude," Sylvia said. "She woke me up at midnight by sitting on my face, then ran out the window. I followed her."

"Where to?"

"Your watcher left his window at one in the morning. He walked to Sector 5, to the Rusty Nail. The back room." Sylvia sat down across from him. "He handed a written report to a man in a gray coat. Bald. Slanted eyes."

Donald put down his coffee.

"Damian," he said.

"Damian," Sylvia agreed. "I stayed in the ceiling shadow. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. He read the report, folded it, and put it in his coat. Then he looked straight up at the corner where I was hiding."

"He saw you."

"He can’t see into my shadow. Nobody can." Sylvia’s jaw tightened. "But he knew I was there. He took out a card, wrote on it, and left it on the table when he walked out."

She reached into the floor and pulled up a small white card. She slid it across the table.

The handwriting was neat and small.

Tell the Investor that I have the floor plans of the Crown Archive. My price is a conversation. D.

Donald read it twice.

[Valuation Eye]

[Item: Calling card]

[Mana Residue: Shadow affinity, A-Rank. Matches signature ’Damian’.]

[Note: No curse, no tracking spell, no trap.]

A clean card. Damian wanted him to know it was safe to touch.

"The Crown Archive," Donald said. "Not the Dragonheart vault."

"That’s what I thought you’d say," Sylvia said. "Ask Helena."

---

Helena came up from the eighth floor an hour later, still in yesterday’s gray dress, with chalk on her sleeves and a stack of notebooks under her arm. She had spent the night in her new lab and looked happier for it.

Evelyn walked in a few steps behind her, eating an apple. She stopped when she saw the card on the table.

Donald turned it so Helena could read it.

Helena read it, and her face went still.

"He’s right," she said. She set her notebooks down. "I should have thought of it. When Dragonheart sealed my research, they would have had to file it. Sealed research on gate theory is a crown matter. The Guild doesn’t get to keep it. It goes to the Crown Council."

"And the Council keeps it in the Archive," Donald said.

"Under the Council Hall in Aldmere. Seven floors down." Helena sat down slowly. "I’ve seen the Archive’s entrance once, from a gallery. The doors are sealed with a Council ward. Seven locks, one for each seat on the Council. All seven Guild Masters have to put their seal on it to open it."

"Or one Investor," Evelyn said, "with enough money."

"How much money do you have?" Helena asked.

Donald checked.

[Current Balance: 510,000 System Credits.]

"Not enough to buy seven locks," he said.

Evelyn finished her apple and dropped the core in the bin. "So we go in the other way. Sylvia takes us through the shadows, I break whatever needs breaking, and you buy whatever spells they throw at us."

"Under the Council Hall," Donald said, "with half the S-Ranks in the country upstairs."

Evelyn thought about it. "Okay. That part’s a problem."

Helena had been quiet. Now she looked at Evelyn properly for the first time, the way a scholar looks at something rare.

"You’re the Valkyrie," she said.

"I’m Evelyn."

"Your core output overloaded the Association’s arrays. I read about it in the papers." Helena looked down at Evelyn’s wrist, at the winged-blade tattoo. "And that’s the star-metal blade. I can feel it from here. It’s pulling at the mana in the room."

"Starfall," Evelyn said. She held out her wrist. "Want to see it?"

Helena reached out without thinking, then stopped and pulled her hand back, her cheeks going pink. "Later. When I’ve slept. I’ll want to measure it, and I’ll want to do it properly."

Evelyn grinned at her. "Garrick said the same thing."

---

Aris arrived at nine with her tablet and three printed letters.

She laid them on the table in a row.

"The three Capital investment houses I told you about yesterday," she said. "Harlan and Royce. The Marchmont Bank. Ashford Holdings. All three want a meeting with the Investor in Aldmere. All three will pay for our travel and put us up."

Donald looked at the letters. "You told me to turn them down."

"You told me to turn them down," Aris said. "I’m suggesting you don’t. Not anymore." She tapped the middle letter. "Marchmont Bank’s headquarters is on Council Square. Its private meeting rooms overlook the Council Hall. If you go to Aldmere as a guest of an investment house, nobody can stop you entering the city. You’ll have a reason to be there, a hotel, a schedule, and a dozen witnesses who will swear you spent every hour in meetings."

"And while I’m in meetings," Donald said slowly, "Sylvia isn’t."

"Exactly."

Sylvia raised one hand. "I can’t take anyone through the Archive’s wards without a map. If I go in blind, I’ll spend all night finding the stairs."

Everyone looked at the card on the table.

"Damian has the map," Evelyn said. "And he’s the reason half this city locked its doors on us. He sold Sterling’s blackmail to Vane. He’ll sell us to whoever pays him more."

"Yes," Donald said. "He will."

"Then why are you looking at that card like you want to call him?"

Donald leaned back.

"Because he isn’t trying to hide," he said. "Think about it. He knows Vane is finished. He knows Dragonheart is finished. He’s an A-Rank shadow mage with a head full of secrets and no one left to sell them to. He sent a watcher after Helena, and he let that watcher lead Sylvia straight to him. Then he wrote me a polite note and asked for a conversation instead of money."

"He’s looking for a new employer," Aris said quietly.

"Or a new owner," Donald said. "Someone he thinks can keep him alive."

Sylvia’s violet eyes narrowed. "Or it’s a trap."

"It might be," Donald said. "Valuation Eye will tell me which, once I’m in the same room as him."

Evelyn crossed her arms. "If he so much as twitches, I’m cutting him in half."

"If he twitches," Donald said, "I’ll let you."

---

He wrote the reply himself, on the back of Damian’s own card, in plain block letters.

Tomorrow. Noon. The Rusty Nail. Come alone. Bring the plans.

Sylvia took the card and sank into the floor with it.

When she was gone, Helena picked up her notebooks again. She stood at the end of the table and looked at the three of them: the Investor with his arm still stiff, the Valkyrie eating a second apple, and Aris already typing a reply to the Marchmont Bank.

"Thirty-one days," Helena said. "You’re going to rob the Crown of the whole country, with help from the man who tried to have you killed, while pretending to talk about money."

"That’s the plan," Donald said.

Helena shook her head. Then, to her own surprise, she smiled.

"Thomas would have liked you," she said. "He always said the only people worth working with were the ones who were a little bit insane."

She went back downstairs to her lab.

Donald watched the door close behind her. Then he looked at the reactor readout, still glowing in the corner of the table.

[Dimensional Core Resonance: 62.4%]

It had gone up while they talked.