Read Chapter 25: The Fallout

The door came off its hinges with a sound like a rifle crack. Ashworth was through it before the wood finished falling, his revolver sweeping the room in a low arc. Dust motes swam in the shaft of grey light from the stairwell behind him, and for a moment the basement was all shadow and silence.

Then Evelyn heard the breathing.

It was a wet, ragged sound from the far corner—a rhythm broken by small, animal whimpers. She pushed past Ashworth, her boots crunching on broken glass and plaster. The air was thick with the smell of damp stone and something metallic. Blood. She'd worked in enough field hospitals during her volunteer days to know it.

"Thomas?"

The figure against the wall was barely a figure at all. He was slumped in a wooden chair, his wrists bound behind him with wire that had cut deep into the flesh. His face was a ruin of bruises—one eye swollen shut, the other glassy and unfocused. His shirt was dark with dried blood, and his hands hung at unnatural angles where the joints had been pulled loose.

"Thomas." She was on her knees beside him, her voice breaking on the name. "Thomas, it's me. It's Evelyn."

His lips moved. A thin thread of saliva stretched and broke. He made a sound that might have been a word, but it came out cracked and dry.

"Water," Ashworth said. He was already at the far wall, sweeping the room for threats, his voice flat and professional. "We need to move. Now. Whatever made that noise will bring company."

Evelyn ignored him. She cupped Thomas's face in her hands, careful of the swelling, and tried to catch his eye. "Can you hear me? We're going to get you out of here."

His good eye rolled toward her, and for a moment she saw recognition flicker there—a spark of the man she knew, the one who quoted Latin poetry and mispronounced French wines with such earnest confidence. Then it guttered out.

"Songbird," he whispered. The word came out wet, desperate. "Songbird. Please. Tell her. Songbird."

Evelyn's heart seized. "Thomas, what? Who's Songbird?"

But he was already slipping away again, his head lolling forward, the name dying on his lips like a prayer unanswered.

Ashworth was beside her now, a knife in his hand. He cut through the wire binding Thomas's wrists with two clean strokes. The body sagged forward, and Evelyn caught him, his weight nearly crushing her. She could feel the heat of fever through his shirt, and the tremor that ran through him like a wire pulled taut.

"Can he walk?" Ashworth asked.

"Does it look like he can walk?" Evelyn snapped.

Ashworth didn't answer. He holstered his revolver and bent down, hauling Thomas's arm over his shoulder and lifting him with a grunt of effort. Thomas's head lolled, and the word came again, softer now, like something slipping beneath water.

"Songbird..."

Evelyn grabbed Thomas's other arm, and together they half-dragged, half-carried him up the narrow stairs. The basement opened into a scullery that smelled of old grease and coal dust, and beyond that a narrow corridor led to a service door. Ashworth kicked it open, and cold London air rushed in, carrying the distant rumble of early-morning traffic.

"We've got maybe four minutes before someone notices the door is gone," Ashworth said. "Can you get him to the motor?"

Evelyn didn't answer. She was focused on Thomas's face, on the way his lips kept moving even as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Songbird. The word circled in her mind like a trapped bird of its own.

---

The safehouse was a narrow townhouse off Pimlico, one of the nondescript properties that Room 40 kept for exactly this purpose. A physician was summoned—a tired-eyed man named Talbot who asked no questions and kept his own counsel. He worked on Thomas for three hours while Evelyn sat in the front parlor, staring at the gas fire without seeing it.

Ashworth stood by the window, his back to her, watching the street. He'd taken off his tie at some point, and his collar was open. There was a smear of Thomas's blood on his cuff.

"You should eat," he said without turning around.

"I'm not hungry."

"The physician said he'll live." Ashworth's voice was carefully neutral. "Reasonable chance of full recovery, if the infection doesn't take hold."

Evelyn didn't answer. She thought about the word Thomas had breathed into the dark. Songbird. It wasn't a code name she knew. It wasn't in any of the German traffic she'd broken. And yet it had come out of him like a cry of recognition, like a name he'd been repeating for days until it wore grooves into his soul.

She thought about the letter from Edward. *He is not the man you remember.*

"Is it him?" she asked. "The way he was? Or has he—"

Ashworth turned from the window. His face was unreadable, but there was something in his eyes that might have been gentleness if he'd allowed it. "I know what you're asking. I can't answer it yet."

"The way he said that name. Like it was a promise." Evelyn pressed her fingers to her temples. "Edward did something to him. Broke something that can't be unbroken."

"Or left something in him that can be used." Ashworth crossed the room, and after a moment's hesitation, he sat in the chair across from her. Close enough that she could see the lines around his eyes. "We have to consider the possibility that he wasn't just tortured. That he was given information to bring back."

"He's not a carrier, Ashworth. He's my—" She stopped. The word caught in her throat. She hadn't let herself say it since Le Touquet. "He's my Thomas."

Ashworth studied her for a long moment. The fire flickered between them, casting shadows that made his face look older than she remembered.

"He was in that basement because he went looking for the truth about his brother," Ashworth said. "Because he trusted someone who betrayed him. That doesn't make him a traitor. And it doesn't make him beyond saving." He paused. "But if Edward wanted to use him, Thomas is a wound that never healed. And Edward is the kind of man who pours salt into wounds."

Evelyn looked at her hands. She'd scrubbed the blood from them in the scullery, but she could still feel its slickness beneath her fingernails. She thought about the airstrip in France, the forged papers in Margaret's valise, the trap they'd laid for the Meridian. All of it seemed impossibly distant now, like a story someone had told her about another woman entirely.

"I'm not the woman for this work anymore," she said quietly. "I thought I could separate the pieces. The cipher intellect from the woman who loves him. But they're the same. They've always been the same." She looked up, and her eyes were dry but bright. "I'm tendering my resignation. To Fitzroy. To you. To whoever needs to hear it."

Ashworth didn't move. The gas fire hissed. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked as the physician moved above them.

"Ask me to stay," she said, and her voice cracked on the words. "If you're going to try to change my mind, do it now. Because I'm one step from walking out that door, and I don't know if I have the strength to come back."

Ashworth was quiet for so long she thought he wasn't going to speak. When he did, his voice was low and rough, stripped of its usual armor.

"Edward is still out there. And he took something with him when he fled that basement." Ashworth leaned forward, his eyes holding hers. "He took the identities of every agent we've placed in the German network. If we don't stop him, he'll be selling them to Berlin within a week."

Evelyn's stomach turned. She hadn't known. The physician had kept her below, away from the noise of the operation upstairs.

"We lost him," Ashworth said. "He was gone by the time we secured the perimeter. He knew we had backup because he knew the plan." He watched her, waiting. "He leaked his own escape route to us because he wanted to see our response. He's one step ahead of us, Evelyn."

"Then you'll have to outstep him." She rose from the chair, her legs unsteady. "But I can't be part of it. I can't—"

Ashworth stood too. He was close enough that she could smell the cordite on his coat, the faint lavender of the soap he used. "The man who wrote you those letters, who taught you to love Keats and to think in German because it made your mind sharper—if Edward turned him, Thomas is the key to finding Edward. You know how he thinks. You know the words he'd use, the paths he'd take."

"And if I can't find him?" Her voice was barely a whisper. "If what Edward left in him is too deep?"

Ashworth reached out. His fingers brushed her cheek—a featherlight touch, as if he were testing whether she was real. "Then we'll dig together."

The silence stretched. Somewhere above them, Thomas called out in his fever, a word that might have been a name. Evelyn closed her eyes.

"Songbird," she said. "I need to find out what that name means."

Ashworth nodded slowly. "Then that's where we'll start."

It wasn't a promise. It wasn't a declaration. It was a task, plain and small—the kind of purpose that could anchor a person when everything else had gone adrift. Evelyn opened her eyes and looked at the man standing before her. The same man who'd kissed her on a rooftop and then watched her walk away. The same man who'd believed her when she'd said she could do this work.

"One more mission," she said. "To find out what Edward did to him. To find out why he said the word he said." Her voice steadied. "And then I'll decide."

Ashworth's lips curved, just barely, into something that might have been a smile. "That's all I ask."

From the stairs, Thomas's voice came again, ragged and faint, a name repeated like a litany.

*Songbird. Songbird. Tell her.*

Outside, the first grey light of dawn was beginning to bleed through the curtains, and somewhere beyond the city, in a place Evelyn had never seen, the Meridian was already making its way toward the coast—followed by hounds that didn't yet know the hunt had changed.