The Commissioner arrived at Unit 7 HQ at nine in the morning and left at nine forty-seven.
In those forty-seven minutes, he drank one cup of coffee, asked fourteen questions, and looked at Sam Atkins with the particular expression of a man trying to determine whether the person in front of him was brilliant or catastrophically overconfident — and arriving at the unsettling conclusion that the answer was both simultaneously.
He approved the operation on the condition of a weekly contact protocol, an immediate-return clause if the city required them, and what he described as a paper trail thin enough to deny but sturdy enough to protect.
The moment the elevator doors closed behind him, the room exhaled.
"That went better than expected," Maya said.
"I told him about the bridge," Baru said. "And the circus."
Maya turned to look at him. "You told him—"
"The parts I could prove." Baru settled back in his chair with the calm of a man who had correctly identified the one argument that would work and deployed it without theater. "The bridge made the news. The circus had forty civilian witnesses and a collapsed tent structure. The Commissioner is a pragmatist. Give a pragmatist evidence and let him draw his own conclusions."
"What conclusions did he draw?" Sarah asked.
"That Unit 7 handles things other units can't," Baru said simply. "Which is what we needed him to believe, because it's true."
Sarah nodded once. The approving kind.
The Commissioner's departure left the real conversation in the room, the one that couldn't happen while institutional authority was present. Sarah let it settle for a moment before she moved to the main screen and pulled up the compiled research — Sam's parents' files cross-referenced with Krish's footage, the fragment mythology laid out in clean sequential logic.
"We have until Seraphine finds the next location," Sarah said. "Once she recovers the first fragment and the chain reaction starts, she'll have a direction. So will we — but we'll be behind."
"Unless we move first," Sam said. He was standing, which he always did when he was thinking at operational speed. "The direction from Krish's footage pointed northeast. My father's map has a location marked in that region. And Krish's letter referenced a guardian family in Valdris specifically." He looked at the room. "We don't need the first fragment to start the chain. We need the second one. If we get there before Seraphine recovers the first piece and follows the trail, we hold the advantage."
"Barely," Maya said.
"Barely is enough," Sam said.
Maya looked at her tablet. She had been running logistics since Sam and Sarah returned from the apartment that morning with the research files, and the numbers were not comfortable. "Valdris is a closed-culture region — limited commercial transport, no direct routes. The travel time alone is significant. And we're walking into a place that doesn't welcome outsiders carrying a request that will sound, to anyone who hasn't spent forty years researching ancient mythology, completely insane."
"We have Krish's letter," Sam said. "My father's name. And we use the methodology — the notation system Krish passed to my father. The guardian family in Valdris knew Krish. They'll recognize the system."
"That's a significant assumption," Maya said.
"It's a calculated one," Sam said.
Maya looked at him. Then at her tablet. Then made the small internal adjustment that was becoming familiar — the one where she stopped arguing with his instincts and started building the logistics around them, because his instincts had, so far, been more right than her projections.
"I can have transport arranged by tomorrow evening," she said.
"Good," Sarah said. She turned to Baru. "Baru."
Baru had been quiet through the operational discussion, which was his default mode — he processed while others talked and spoke when the talking was done. "My family," he said.
"Yes," Sarah said.
A pause that contained a considerable amount of unsaid acknowledgment — that this was different from the bridge, different from the circus, different from every case that had kept him late and required explanation. This was indefinite. This was global. This was the kind of absence that couldn't be described as an extended shift.
"I'll handle it tonight," Baru said. The finality in it closed the subject respectfully.
Sarah nodded.
"Maya." Sarah looked at her. "Personal considerations."
Maya thought of Jeremy. The easy smile, the uncomplicated text he'd sent that morning that she hadn't responded to yet. "I'll handle it," she said. Then, because honesty felt more sustainable than efficiency right now: "It's complicated."
"It usually is," Sarah said, without judgment.
"What about you?" Sam asked Sarah.
The room noticed the question. It was direct in a way the operational discussion hadn't been — specific, personal, aimed at someone who had been running logistics and protocol without anyone thinking to ask.
Sarah looked at him.
"I don't have complicated," she said.
Something in the room shifted slightly. Maya filed it. Baru found something to look at on his phone.
"That sounds lonely," Sam said quietly.
It wasn't an accusation. It wasn't even particularly pointed. It landed the way Sam's observations always landed — precisely, in exactly the right place, without apparent intention.
Sarah held his gaze for a moment.
"We leave tomorrow night," she said. "Everyone get your affairs in order."
The team dispersed.
Baru left first — straight home, no detours, the focused economy of a man who knew exactly what needed to be done and how to do it without prolonging the difficulty.
Maya lingered at her workstation, ostensibly running final logistics, actually composing and deleting the same text to Jeremy four times before landing on something honest enough to mean something and vague enough not to violate everything she couldn't explain. She sent it before she could reconsider.
His response came in forty seconds.
I'll be here when you get back. Be safe.
Maya looked at that for a long moment.
Then put her phone face-down and finished the logistics.
Sam stayed in the facility long after the others had gone — going through his parents' research files with the systematic attention of someone trying to read a map that was missing half its pages. Dr. Thorne found him there at eleven PM and left a medical kit on the table beside him without comment, which was Thorne's particular form of care.
Sarah came back at midnight.
Sam looked up when she walked in. He didn't ask why she'd come back. She didn't explain.
She pulled a chair to the other side of the table and began reading the research files he had already been through, making her own notes. Cross-referencing. Building a parallel understanding.
They worked in silence for two hours.
At some point Sam made coffee. At some point Sarah accepted a cup without being asked if she wanted one.
At two in the morning, Sam sat back and looked at the ceiling.
"They were happy doing this," he said.
Sarah looked up.
"My parents." He was looking at a photograph he'd placed at the corner of the table — the three of them at the dig site, his mother laughing. "This wasn't a burden for them. The research, the fragments, whatever they were building toward." He paused. "They loved it."
Sarah looked at the photograph.
"That's in you," she said.
Sam glanced at her.
"The way you move through a case," she said. "The way you light up when something connects." She said it matter-of-factly, not tenderly — an observation, accurate and direct. "You think that's training. It's not only training."
Sam was quiet for a moment.
"They would have been good at this," he said. "At what we do."
"Yes," Sarah said. "They would have."
Sam picked up his coffee. Looked at the research spread across the table. At the map with his father's annotations pointing toward Valdris.
"Let's finish what they started," he said.
Not dramatically. Just decided.
Sarah picked up her pen.
"Then let's make sure we know what we're walking into," she said.
They kept working.
Outside, the city ran its usual late-night operations, indifferent and continuous, carrying no record of the two people in a basement facility finishing someone else's decade-old map and deciding, without fanfare, to follow it to the end.