Director Mira Calloway was fifty-two years old, built like someone had compressed a larger and more formidable person into a compact frame, and she had the eyes of a woman who had been disappointed by institutions for long enough that she had stopped expecting anything else from them.
She met them in a parking structure in the Ashfields, which was not how Seraphine had imagined this conversation going, but Kael had pointed out with characteristic bluntness that the Authority's buildings were the least safe places they could possibly be, and Calloway had agreed with a grimness that confirmed several things at once.
"The Novia council," Calloway said, looking at Seraphine's documentation with the rapid, absorptive focus of someone reading as fast as they could think. "We've had threat indicators for weeks. Nothing actionable." She looked up. "You've been building this case alone?"
"Not alone," Seraphine said. "But largely."
Calloway's gaze went to Kael. Something passed between them — history, Seraphine read, and not all of it pleasant.
"Mourne," Calloway said.
"Director," he said.
"You left."
"You know why."
The pause that followed had the weight of something long unspoken. Then Calloway returned to the documents. "The laboratory request. I can authorize that. Level four clearance, the Novia facility, which is as clean as anything we have left." She set the papers down. "What I need in return is a timeline. And I need to know how many doses you're planning to produce."
"Enough," Seraphine said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I have right now." Seraphine held the Director's gaze. "I'm not handing the formula to any government wholesale. I watched what happened when my mother trusted people with her work. I'm not going to make the same mistake."
Calloway studied her for a long moment. "You're going to make this difficult."
"I'm going to make it careful. There's a difference."
A beat. Then, with the ghost of something that might have been respect: "Your mother was the same way."
"I know," Seraphine said. "She was right."
⁂
The Novia facility was six hours by train, and they traveled under cover documents that Calloway produced with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this for years. The train was quiet and the countryside rolled past in shades of grey and green, and somewhere around the third hour Kael fell asleep in the seat across from her — not peaceful sleep, the kind scored by whatever was playing in the deep cinema of his memory — and Seraphine watched him because there was nothing else to do and because she had given up pretending she wasn't doing it.
He had a scar along his left jaw that she hadn't noticed before — old, well-healed, silvery against the darker terrain of his skin. He had the hands of someone who had been using them precisely and with force for a long time. He had, beneath the careful construction of competence and containment, a grief that was so old it had stopped being acute and become simply structural, part of the load-bearing architecture.
She understood that particular grief. She had her own version.
She was dying, and she was falling in love with a man who had spent sixteen years trying to save someone he couldn't save, and the irony was not lost on her. She catalogued it with the same clinical detachment she brought to everything and then set it aside because she had a formula to finish and a world to try to preserve and she did not have the luxury of collapsing into it.
The train went north, through the gray morning.