Ouroboros ops never really sleeps, but at five in the morning it remembers it would like to. The room was steel, paper maps and the handful of people I trusted to keep the world from breaking, most of them holding tea they had forgotten to drink.
Rose set Charlotte's glass bead on the main table without a word. The chalk figures had come with it, lifted whole on a square of tile, and the hair-fine thread inside them still pulled west like a dog on a lead.
Cecilia was already there, stacking folders into neat, dangerous lanes. She looked at the bead, then at Rose, and then, for one breath, only at Rose. Whatever she saw there, she filed it somewhere private and let her face go back to work.
"We cut the spine," she said. "Now we break the legs." She tapped a satellite image showing a desolate canyon. "Evelyn's last spell left a thread. It points here. A pocket city, anchored by a fissure. The Order never disbanded. They just hid sideways."
