Chapter 338: Diagnosing Our Problem

She materialized in full form, tall enough that Cressida had to look up from her chair. Red hair fell past her shoulders, her posture as composed as if she’d been standing in a throne room instead of a cramped company office. Her gaze swept the room once, reading every face, and settled on mine.

She didn’t ask. She waited.

’This is going to be worse than the tunnels.’

"Kassie," I said. "We found something in Waterwind."

Her eyes didn’t leave mine.

I relayed the message to her with no soft tone or lead-up. She would have seen through either and it would have insulted her. So I gave it to her the same way I’d given it to the room: flat, factual, complete.

Kassie didn’t move while I spoke. Her expression didn’t change. Her posture didn’t shift. The room might have mistaken it for calm.

I knew better.

The temperature in the room dropped. The air felt thinner, like the space around Kassie was pulling everything inward, compressing it. Cressida, who’d been hugging her knees, slowly lowered her feet to the floor as if she’d forgotten what she was doing with them.

Ophelia took a quiet step back.

When I finished, the silence lasted for three full breaths. Nobody in the room dared to be the one who broke it.

Then Kassie spoke.

"The acid solution I taught them." Her voice was level and perfectly controlled. "You’re certain."

"Milo confirmed the pattern."

She turned her gaze to Milo. He met it, but I could see his fingers tighten around the arm of his chair.

"I’m certain," he said.

Kassie looked away from him. Her eyes moved to the wall, to nothing in particular, and stayed there.

"I freed them because they were discarded by a world that did not consider them worth the effort of protecting." Her voice hadn’t changed. Still level. Still controlled. "I taught them to remove their brands so they could walk freely without the shame of what had been done to them."

She was quiet for a moment.

"And someone collected them. And killed them where no one would hear."

Her gaze came back to me.

"Where are the bodies?"

"In the drainage tunnels beneath Waterwind. We can’t go back down there right now. The trap is still active."

"The trap."

"Ten assassins who don’t stay dead. Whatever’s animating them doesn’t care about physical damage. I took their arms off and they kept coming."

Something crossed Kassie’s expression that I couldn’t name. Not surprise, she was eight thousand years old; not much surprised her. It was almost like she’d seen something similar before, a very long time ago, and hadn’t expected to see it again.

But she didn’t say what she recognized. She filed it away behind that composed mask and turned back to the room.

Her gaze lingered on the empty chair at the head of the table where Levi usually sat. The chair that should have had someone in it right now.

"I see."

"We need to find out who did this," Cressida said, uncurling from her chair. Some of the fire was coming back into her voice. "We can’t just sit here."

"We also can’t go charging into something we don’t understand," Milo said. "Those soldiers in the tunnels are proof of that. Cade and I barely got out, and we’re not exactly weak."

"Milo is right," I said. "Until we understand what’s keeping those things moving, going back down there is suicide. And until Levi gets back, we don’t have the full Company to work with."

Kassie hadn’t spoken again since "I see." She stood in the center of the room like a pillar, arms folded beneath her chest, her gaze fixed on the middle distance.

I wanted to ask her what she’d seen. What she knew.

But the look on her face told me she wasn’t ready to say it. Whatever she was turning over in her mind, she hadn’t finished with it yet. And Kassie didn’t speak until she’d finished thinking. That was one of the first things I’d learned about her.

"For now," Milo said, pushing himself to his feet, "we secure what we can. Odelia, I need you to pull the registry of every person Kassie freed from Manhattan. Names, last known locations, anything we have. If seventeen are dead, we need to know if the rest are safe."

Odelia nodded once and left without a word.

"Ophelia, can you get word to our contacts in the lower district? Anyone who’s seen unusual movement in Waterwind over the past week."

Ophelia was already moving toward the door.

"Cressida."

She straightened.

"Stay here. If anyone comes to the building that we don’t know, you don’t open the door."

Cressida’s jaw tightened, but she nodded.

Milo turned to me last.

"Get some rest. You look like you crawled out of a grave."

"Sewer, actually."

"Same difference in Waterwind."

He walked toward the back office, adjusting his cracked glasses one more time.

The room emptied. Chairs scraped. Footsteps retreated. The building settled back into its usual quiet, but it felt different now. Thinner. Like the walls had heard what we’d said and weren’t sure they were thick enough.

Kassie remained where she stood. I remained where I leaned.

"You recognized something," I said. "When I described how they moved. How the blood behaved."

She didn’t deny it.

"I am not certain yet." Her gaze finally moved from the middle distance and found mine. "When I am, you will be the first to know."

’That’s not reassuring, Kassie.’

Her expression softened. Just barely. The kind of shift that most people wouldn’t catch.

"Rest," she said. "You did well to bring Milo back alive."

Then she dissolved into red sparks and was gone.

I stood alone in the empty room for a while, listening to the muffled sounds of the Company moving around me. Odelia pulling files. Ophelia at the back door. Cressida pacing somewhere upstairs.

I pushed off the wall and went to find somewhere to sit that didn’t smell like sewage.

It was going to be a long night.

Or so I thought... until Kassie made an unexpected move.