Ray crossed the street without waiting to see if the others followed, though he heard them anyway — Corvin's quicker footsteps, Nym's quieter ones, and behind them both, the soft scrape of Wren stirring awake against the crate, confused and half-asleep.
"Stay with her," Ray said to Nym, not slowing down. "Both of you. If this goes wrong, someone needs to get her clear."
Nym didn't argue. He crouched instead, murmuring something low and steady to Wren as she blinked herself awake, while Ray reached the door Finn and Zelene had disappeared through an hour ago.
It wasn't locked.
That, more than anything, told him what he needed to know before he even pushed it open. A place doing what he suspected this place was doing didn't leave doors unlocked by accident. It left them unlocked because there was nothing left inside worth guarding.
The hallway beyond was empty. Silent in the specific, hollow way of a building recently used and recently abandoned — no voices, no footsteps, only the faint, lingering smell of tannin and something staler underneath it.
Corvin came up beside him, blade already drawn. "Empty."
"Recently," Ray said, crouching near a scuff mark on the floorboards — drag marks, two sets, heading toward a door at the hall's far end. His stomach turned cold at the shape of them. "Someone was pulled through here. More than one someone."
He was already moving toward the door at the end of the hall, jaw set, when the trail beyond it — wherever it led, however far it went — became a question for a different pair of eyes entirely.
---
A few of the nearer women had turned their heads at the sound of her voice, watching her with cautious, exhausted eyes. One, older, with grey threading through dark hair, shifted closer along the wall.
"You're new," the woman said, voice hoarse and low. "Tonight's batch."
"How long have you been here?" Zelene asked.
"Long enough to stop counting the days properly." The woman's eyes flicked briefly toward Finn, then back to Zelene, something like pity crossing her face. "Your friend took a hard hit. He fought them, when they grabbed you. Wasn't smart. Wasn't cowardly either."
Zelene's throat tightened. "Is there a way out? A hatch, a door, anything?"
The woman's expression answered before she spoke. "They've had longer than you to make sure of that."
Zelene looked past her anyway, forcing herself to study the room properly instead of only feeling it — a single door at the far end, likely leading to stairs up toward the deck; no windows, no other visible exit; the low ceiling ruling out any hope of standing space to fight, should it come to that.
Think. There has to be something.
Her eyes caught, briefly, on a woman near the far wall — younger, with a plain apron still tied at her waist, the kind worn by someone who'd been taken straight from her work without warning. Something in the shape of her face, the set of her jaw, tugged at memory.
"Della?" Zelene asked quietly, hope rising too fast to stop it.
The woman's head lifted, startled at her own name. "How do you know—"
"Your daughter sent us," Zelene said, and watched something break open across the woman's face — disbelief, then grief, then a desperate, fragile hope all at once.
"Wren," Della whispered. "Is she—"
"She's safe. She's with friends." Zelene crawled closer, taking the woman's trembling hands in her own. "And we're going to get you back to her. I promise you that."
Around them, a few more heads had lifted at the sound of the conversation — quiet, careful hope flickering in eyes that had clearly stopped expecting it days ago.
Zelene looked around the crowded, dim room once more, at Finn's still unconscious form, at Della's shaking hands, at every frightened face turned toward her now like she might actually have an answer worth believing in.
I don't have a plan yet, she thought. But I have time, and I have people who are already looking for us.
That has to be enough. For now.