"I'm not anything you built," I said, and heard how thin the conviction came out sounding even to my own ears.
"You're exactly something I helped build," Ashe said, gentle, almost kind about it, which was somehow worse than if he'd said it cruelly. "Not alone. I'll grant Shinji his cut of the credit, though he's grown squeamish about claiming it lately, now that the actual costs have started coming due in places loud enough that even a man who signs checks for a living has to occasionally look up from the ledger. But the substrate, the seed, the entire principle this operation runs on, that's mine. Your father's blood carries the first stable trace of it anyone ever managed to keep alive past initial exposure. Yours carries considerably more than a trace."
Something cold and furious moved through me at that, sharper than anything I'd felt since the alley in Corvane, and I found my hand had already drifted to the bow at my back before I'd consciously decided to move it there.
"Where is he," I said. "My father. Is he here. Is he one of those things in a cage back there."
"No," Ashe said, and something in the way he said it, easy, almost bored, told me he was telling the truth about this particular question even while lying about a hundred others. "Rennick's usefulness to this facility concluded some years ago, and I don't discard useful things carelessly, whatever else you've decided about me in the last several minutes. He's elsewhere. Comfortable, relatively speaking, and considerably more aware of what he traded than you currently are of what you're about to."
"What does that mean," Savage demanded, stepping half in front of me without seeming to decide to do it, the same instinct that had put her between me and a stranger's blade back in that Corvane alley apparently firing off again without her permission.
"It means," Ashe said, and for the first time something sharper moved behind his mild expression, "that I did not come down here to have this entire conversation with you tonight. I came to see whether the boy who spared a mercenary two days ago out of some newly rediscovered scruple would do the same thing standing over Merit Dane's cage, given the chance, and I already have my answer, because none of you have so much as glanced toward the door that would let you free her since I started talking. You're all far too busy with me to remember she's still back there."
The accusation landed harder than I wanted to admit, because it was true, and I hated that it was true, and Ashe watched that hatred cross my face with the same fond, clinical interest he'd been watching everything else about me with since he'd first stepped into the doorway.
"That's the actual thing I came to observe," he said. "Not your father. Not the mine. You, Jon, and how much of what's eroding in you is choice, and how much of it is simply the design finally asserting itself the way design always eventually does, no matter how hard the person carrying it insists otherwise." He smiled, small and genuinely, unsettlingly pleasant. "I have every confidence in which one it'll turn out to be, given enough time. I'm a patient man. I've had to be."
It struck me, even with everything else happening, that this wasn't what Yomi had described. She'd told me flatly, once, in that blank white nowhere of hers, that Corvin Ashe wanted me dead. Nothing about the man standing in that doorway looked like someone in any hurry to make that true. Patient wasn't the same word as dead. I filed the difference away next to everything else I still didn't have an answer for, and hoped I wouldn't need one before I understood it properly.
He stepped back through the doorway and rapped his knuckle twice against the stone frame, a sound that carried further into the mountain than it had any right to, and somewhere beyond the cage chamber I heard the distant clatter of boots on stone, several sets, moving with purpose.
"I've left you a small parting gift on the worktable," he said, already retreating further into shadow, his voice trailing back toward us with the same unhurried calm it had carried the whole conversation through. "Consider it an invitation rather than a threat, though I understand the two often look identical from where you're standing. Highhollow was never the destination, Jon. It was only ever the doorway. Whether you walk through the next one depends heavily on what you decide to do about Merit Dane in about the next thirty seconds, before my men arrive and the decision gets made for you."
And then he was gone, folded into the dark of the deeper shaft in a way that didn't look like running so much as simply ceasing to be somewhere, and the boots on stone were getting louder, and Savage was already moving toward the cage chamber at a dead sprint before any of us had finished processing that the conversation had ended.
"Luxy, the locks," she barked, sword already in hand. "Namey, grab whatever you can off that worktable and be ready to run the second I say run. Jon, with me."
I went with her, bow in hand, and found her already at Merit's cage, wrenching at a lock that hadn't been designed with quick escape in mind, and I put an arrow through the hinge pin at close range rather than waste time on the lock itself, the metal shrieking and giving way in a shower of sparks that made Merit flinch back hard against the cage's rear wall.
"We're getting you out," Savage said, low, steady, dropping to her knees at the opening even as the shape inside recoiled from her. "Merit. It's Savage. You hired me twice, remember, the Corvane run, you complained the whole way about my horse's temperament. I'm not leaving you in here."