Page 60 of Anomalies

“The Dame’s orders,” I reply.

Pax chimes in when I say nothing else. “Lucina shouldn’t be held responsible for her mother’s actions,” he tells Easton.

Easton’s dark shoulder-length hair shifts across his shoulders as he turns to Pax. “Her mother’s actions cost us our families, Samora.”

Silence falls.

My grip on the leather armrest tightens. Pax cares for her, I can tell. He insists it’s platonic—not that I care personally—but I can’t have his emotions interfering with his duties.

“I’ll rotate all of you through her watch at some point,” I say on an exhale. “There is no room for argument.” When no one objects, I continue. “On a more positive note, I think I found a way into the palace dungeons. I just need Delia to approve the details, but we’ll leave at the end of next month.”

“A rescue mission?” Hunter asks, and I nod.

I answer a few more of their questions before concluding our meeting, then everyone gets up to leave. I’m reaching for the stack of papers beside me when Pax turns back on the threshold.

“They’ll kill her, Cal,” he breathes, and my eyes dart up from the page. “If someone finds out who she is…”

A wave of anger crests through my veins, and it feels out of place yet…instinctual. I’m oath-bound to protect all Sol. Perhaps that’s what it is. “They’ll have to get through us first,” I remind him.

“But we can’t protect her forever, Cal.”

Something foreign tightens in my chest. Then a jolt of apprehension trickles through the fresh cracks in my previously impenetrable armor.

“We don’t need to,” I tell him. “She’s a Van Reenan, Pax. Once she’s trained, Lucina will be more than capable of protecting herself. She just needs someone to teach her how.”

After our meeting, I spent a few hours reviewing the mission plans that Delia returned to me. Her own opinions were crammed into the margins—things I’ve already considered but am prepared to risk anyway.

None of this will be possible without risks.

Our plan is simple; the next mission we take will be to get us as close to the dungeons as possible. Entering across the eastern border will be our best bet. It’s the same area we found Iris in—one of the lower districts that we once utilized for mining precious metals.

Delia thinks entering through that quadrant is, quote: the worst idea she’s ever heard. She underlined that note in the margin, explaining underneath that there isn’t a direct route to the palace from there, at least not one that would allow us to bypass the Rogue guard posts set up on either side of the gates. But…if she had kept reading, she would have known that I didn’t pick the district with the most complicated path without reason.

I picked it because the mines underneath run parallel to the palace.

According to the sublevel layout of Streatham that Pa pulled for me, there is an old mine shaft right beside the palace. That is exactly where we need to be, Iris said as much with her final breath.

Slaves. Cages. Underneath.

If we can get into the mines, we can potentially break into the dungeons through the wall they share without needing to enter through the palace gates.

It’s our only option as of right now.

The rest of Delia’s notes are barely worth reading. I don’t need her to happily agree with every detail of my plan; I just needed her to approve them, which she did…reluctantly. And only after I agreed to read her notes.

Reading them doesn’t mean I have to apply them.

I poured over the pages until nightfall, and now I’m here, approaching Devon, who leans casually against the front of Lucina’s cabin.

“Any problems today?” I ask, the sound of muffled laughter from inside intensifying the throb of my headache.

“None that were life-threatening,” Devon replies, kicking off the wood siding.

“Great.” I dismiss him and climb the porch steps, then I knock once. Twice. No one answers.

And that’s the end of my patience.

I raise my right hand and snuff out every light inside the cabin, wincing at the high-pitched shriek that follows. Selene yanks open the door with a snarl on her face, and I throw the light back into the lanterns.