Chapter 26: Thessa Holt's Letter

The letter arrived in a manila envelope with Aethermoor's administrative postmark — the blue ink stamp Evander remembered from eleven years of institutional correspondence, smudged at the corner the way it always was, as though whoever applied it had never quite managed to set it straight. Someone in the administrative office had forwarded it care of the resistance's contact channel, which suggested either a new level of institutional coordination or that Voss had quietly ensured his mail would find him regardless of where he was sleeping. He did not examine which.

He found it in the morning, three days after the extraction, tucked beneath a field report on Seren's temporary desk in the corner of safe house three's back room. His name on the outer envelope was not in her handwriting. It took him a moment to identify whose it was, because he had not seen it in years and because his brain, working on inadequate sleep and too much instant coffee, was operating at approximately three-quarters efficiency. Then he recognized the particular flat, unpracticed quality of the letters — Thessa had learned to write in an era when penmanship was functional rather than expressive, and she had treated it, like most things, with competent indifference ever since.

He took it out to the main room, which was quieter at this hour. Dravec had gone to the secondary safe house to debrief with Renwick. Falconer's aides had departed for the northern office. Cael was asleep on the fold-out cot in the far corner, turned toward the wall, a coat pulled over his shoulders because the safe house ran cold and the blanket allocation was, like most resource questions, insufficient. Petra was at the comm apparatus, headset on, eyes closed in the particular way of someone monitoring rather than resting. No one looked at him.