Let me start by saying that I am not, at my core, a morning person. I never have been. My relationship with mornings is the same as my relationship with authority figures and nutritional advice—I acknowledge that they exist, I recognize intellectually that engaging with them would probably be good for me, and then I do exactly what I was going to do anyway and blame unforeseen circumstances for my now perilous predicament.
The difference between me and a morning person is simple. A morning person looks at a new day and thinks "opportunity." I look at a new day and think "who is responsible for this and can I file a complaint?"
That said, I was absolutely buzzing this morning, which I think says something important about how genuinely unhinged the previous twenty-four hours had been, because if the aftermath of poisoning a woman, extracting a brothel-ending secret, and spending three hours working out the finer details of an infiltration scheme with someone who would cheerfully kill me the moment the antidote situation resolved itself was enough to make me a morning person, then something significant had clearly shifted in the universe's relationship with my wellbeing.
My crew, for the record, didn't share my energy.
They sat around the table in various configurations of consciousness—Brutus fully upright but with the expression of a man who'd decided several years ago that mornings were a personal attack and had never revised the position.
Grisha took up approximately one third of available seating with the sprawling, boneless ease of someone who operated at half power until violence was required.
Willow with her chin propped on one hand and her emerald eyes doing that thing where they were technically open but the intelligence behind them hadn't fully reported for duty yet.
Lloyd had a cup of something hot that he was treating with the devotion of a religious artifact. Felix was next to me with his hair slightly flattened on one side from sleep, blinking slowly at the world with the gentle, uncomprehending benevolence of a creature that had only recently learned it existed.
Julius was the only other one who matched my energy, and he matched it with his usual commitment to excess, already dressed in something with unnecessary embellishment on the sleeves, his expression suggesting he'd been awake since before the concept of waking even came to fruition.
"All right, let's get down to business," I said before spreading the map across the table.
It was a map of the greenhouse. Seraphine's handwriting covered it in precise, small clusters—labels for sections, paths, access points, restricted zones marked in red with the dedicated specificity of someone who'd spent considerable time understanding the shape of the place and considerably more time wanting to forget it.
The map was good. The map was detailed. The map was, in one critical and extremely inconvenient respect, incomplete.
Because the hidden room wasn't on it.
This was something I'd known since Seraphine slid it across the table at the end of last night's meeting with the air of a businesses man making a concession they'd calculated the cost of in advance.
She'd described the room in detail, placed it in rough geography—deep inside the greenhouse, in a section of the structure that didn't appear on any public schematic because the public schematic had been designed with the specific intention of not appearing to have anything to hide.
She'd told me the walls were reinforced, the door was locked with both physical and magical mechanisms, and that the documents inside represented five years of meticulously maintained records of every event, every participant, every transaction, and every name attached to the operation.
I glanced up at my crew then. "Seraphine's contact within the supplier network is going to set up a channel for us," I said with cheerful confidence. "I'll go in through a staged kidnapping. Unregistered, undocumented, exactly the way every other person who's ever been brought into that greenhouse went in. Which means no one's looking for us, no one's tracking our disappearance, and we have complete freedom to move once we're inside—"
"When you say staged," Lloyd said carefully, with the tone of a man for whom the word staged had clearly arrived with several alarming subcontexts attached, "you mean that the kidnapping isn't actually—"
"Oh no, it's real," I said. "The kidnapping is completely real. I'll go in the same way everyone else does and look exactly like everyone else does, which is to say unregistered, undocumented, and entirely at the mercy of whatever system is operating in there."
I paused for a moment. "The staged part is that we know it's happening and have a plan, which is the primary distinction between this and an actual kidnapping, and I think is a meaningful one."
A silence settled over the table, having the specific texture of multiple people performing independent calculations about risk and arriving at results they didn't like.
"The greenhouse in normal operations is closed to slaves, and most of its sections are only open to high tier nobles. Sending in Julius alone means his movements would be heavily restricted. Alongside that, he can only maintain his illusionary magic for a short window of time. I could theoretically use my abilities to get inside undetected. I've done similar things before. The only issue is that during normal operations, the greenhouse is staffed by Velvets."
I let that land before continuing.
"If something went wrong, I'd be going up against people with Velvet-rank capability without backup." I slowly shook my head. "Too risky, and more importantly, unnecessary. Because here's the thing about a secret operation... the secrecy is its own vulnerability. The Velvets don't stay on during the event. The event exists specifically to stay off the official record, which means that the moment the annual closure begins and the participants arrive, the normal security presence is rotated out. The people running this operation can't have Velvet staff on duty during something this illegal—too many witnesses, too many people with official institutional ties. Security during the event is minimal by necessity, maintained only by personal guards brought by the attending nobles who have as much investment in secrecy as anyone else."
"The plan," Brutus suddenly said, in his flat, dry, beloved way that meant he was about to locate a problem I'd missed, "is contingent on getting to the hidden room before anyone realizes one of the people they've imported aren't actually there to be hunted."
He gave the map the look he gave everything he didn't fully trust, which was a look with a lot of mileage on it.
"This greenhouse is enormous. Even with the reduced security during the event, if you're wandering through a space this size looking for one room that's deliberately concealed, how long are you expecting that to take before someone notices you're doing the wrong thing entirely?"
I looked at Brutus with the specific affection I reserved for people who asked exactly the right question at exactly the right time, which is not an expression most people would be able to distinguish from my regular face but which I knew was distinct.
"Excellent question," I said.
Then I glanced up at Nara.
The effect was immediate and spectacular. Every eye in the room swiveled toward her with the synchronized precision of an audience watching a performer enter stage right, and Nara—who'd been existing in a state of moderate alertness with her white ears slightly tilted and her tail moving in small, idle twitches—went from operational to flustered in the span of a single second.
The crimson of her eyes somehow intensified, her ears went flat, and the color that flooded into her cheeks would've been very difficult to render accurately in paint.
"I—" she started.
"Your bunnies," I said.
Her ears came back up a fraction. "My bunnies," she repeated.
"You and I are both going in through the supplier channel," I said, keeping my voice easy and clear." Once we're inside and the immediate situation has been navigated your bunnies deploy. They're small. They're white, which in a greenhouse full of plants is better camouflage than it sounds. They find the room. They report back to you. And then we go directly to where we need to go instead of searching a space the size of—" I gestured at the map with frank acknowledgment of its dimensions "—this."
The transformation in Nara's expression was worth everything. The mortification didn't exactly leave—it never entirely left her face when she was the center of attention—but it was joined by something else, something that started in her eyes and moved outward, the bright particular excitement of someone who has been handed a task that plays to everything they're specifically equipped for.
Her ears came up, fully upright, rotating toward me with the focused attention of small satellite dishes that had located their signal. She began bouncing slightly on her toes in a way that was completely involuntary and absolutely endearing.
"Yes," she said, sharp and certain. "Yes, they can absolutely do that."
"Wonderful," I said, and I meant it, the relief of a plan reaching its load-bearing structure and finding it solid threading through my voice despite my best efforts to sound merely professionally satisfied. "Then we have a plan."
Felix, who had been quiet this whole time in the specific way that Felix was always quiet—not passive but present, tracking everything with those wide, expressive eyes—shifted next to me and reached out and poked my arm once. I looked at him. He looked at the map, then looked at me, then looked at the section marked with the restricted access indicators, and raised his eyebrows at me.
"I'll be fine," I said.
He poked my arm again.
"I'll probably be fine," I amended.
He considered this and apparently decided it was the most honest answer available, because he settled back with the expression of someone choosing to trust a process they have reservations about, which, as expressions go, was one I'd been receiving a lot lately and had made my peace with.
"This is a good plan," Brutus said eventually, and from Brutus this landed with the weight of a formal citation from a credentialing body, because Brutus didn't say things like this is a good plan about plans he thought were bad plans dressed in good plan clothing.
He said this is manageable or this is survivable if we're careful or occasionally I have survived worse and let the evaluation stand implied. Good plan was actual praise and I felt it accordingly, which I would never admit out loud.
"It's a brilliant plan!" Julius said, which he said about many things and therefore required contextual discounting, but his eyes were bright and his voice had that particular quality it got when he was genuinely impressed rather than theatrically supportive, and they were distinct if you knew him.
I rolled the map up, tucked it under my arm, and stood, because there was one more thing to handle before this piece of the architecture could stand on its own, and it was the kind of thing that couldn't be explained in passing, couldn't be delegated, and couldn't wait.
"Where are you going?" Brutus asked, with the reliable timing of someone who had developed a sixth sense for when I was about to do something alone that I hadn't mentioned to anyone.
"I have one last matter to attend to," I said pleasantly.
"What matter?"
"I'll explain when it's done," I said, which was the answer I gave when the alternative was a conversation I didn't have time for, and pushed through the door before anyone could identify the gap in that logic.