Three hours after dark the warehouse was a different place.
The low light that had been adequate for planning was now augmented by the specific preparations of people getting ready to move into something dangerous, weapons checked and rechecked with the quiet focused attention of people who had learned that preparation was not anxiety, it was respect for what you were walking into. The map had been studied until everyone could reconstruct it from memory. The timing had been run through until the sequences were automatic.
Nobody was loud.
Nobody was loose.
The particular quality of the silence in the warehouse in those final minutes before they moved out was the silence of people who had said everything that needed saying and were now inside themselves, doing the final private work of getting ready.
Katherine stood near the loading bay door and went through her own version of that work.
She felt for her power and found it cycling the way it always cycled, fire to water to earth to wind to dark and back again, restless and searching, and she let it move without trying to slow it and felt it settle into the particular readiness that was different from everyday readiness, sharper at the edges, more present in her hands and her chest and the space behind her eyes.
She checked her sword.
She checked the blades at her hip.
She looked at Thomas who was looking at his watch and then at Dean who was already at the door with the contained readiness of a man who had done this more times than Katherine had been alive.
"Two minutes," Thomas said.
Groups two and three were ready on opposite sides of the loading bay, the division between them physical now, each cluster carrying the specific energy of their assignment.
Engel stood with Samantha near the north side of the bay. He had his weapons on and his coat buttoned and he was looking at his daughter with an expression that was pride and concern and the deep steady love of a parent sending a child into something real, held in check by the knowledge that she was ready and that holding it in check was itself a form of love.
Samantha was looking back at him with her clear blue eyes and her particular stillness.
"Stay close to the wall when you clear the utility access threshold," he said to her. "The cold air coming off the northern face will mask your heat signature for the first twenty feet. After that you use the wind."
"I know, Dad," she said.
"I know you know," he said. "I'm saying it anyway."
Samantha looked at him for a moment.
Then she stepped forward and put her arms around him briefly, a hug that was short and tight and completely real, and he held her back with both arms and then let go and stepped back and they looked at each other and that was the whole of it, everything that needed to be said between them said in eight seconds without a word.
Grace was with group two, standing beside Carlyle with her hands loose at her sides, her light brown hair back from her face, her brown eyes moving between the map on the pallet and the loading bay door with the calm attentiveness of a woman who had returned to something she had believed she left behind and was discovering that the part of her built for it had never actually gone away.
Jasper was beside her.
He was doing his quiet thing, that deeper stillness that meant he was already partly in the space between, reading the presences that moved through the walls and the distance and the city between here and the facility, gathering information from sources that no one else in the warehouse could access.
He looked at Katherine across the bay.
She looked back at him.
He gave a single small nod that meant something specific, the nod of someone who had checked something and found the answer he was looking for.
She nodded back.
Carlyle caught Katherine's eye from across the bay and she read his face the way she had always been able to read it, the twin shorthand that didn't need words and never had. He was ready. He was with it. He had the particular set to his jaw that meant he had decided something completely and was not going to undecide it.
She felt the twin bond between them, warm and sure, the way it had felt when they held Samantha's signal together in the living room, and she let it settle in her chest the way a compass settles to north.
Thomas looked at his watch one final time.
"Group three moves in thirty seconds," he said. "Group two sixty seconds after that. Group one four minutes after group two." He looked at Engel and Samantha. "Stay on the comms. Short signals only. If something goes wrong you call it fast."
"Understood," Engel said.
Thomas looked at Grace and Carlyle and Jasper.
"The service entrance window is thirty seconds. Don't push it and don't hesitate. Once you're in you commit."
"We commit," Grace said. Flat and certain.
Thomas looked at group one. Katherine and Dean.
He didn't say anything to them. He didn't need to. The three of them had been moving together long enough that the briefing was already done, had been done since the night before and the morning reconnaissance and the hours of planning, and what was left now was simply the doing of it.
He looked at his watch.
"Group three," he said.
Engel lifted the loading bay door just enough and he and Samantha went under it and it came back down behind them and they were gone, absorbed by the darkness of the street outside.
The warehouse was quieter with two fewer people in it.
Katherine watched the second hand on Thomas's watch through the sixty count.
"Group two," Thomas said.
Grace went first through the bay door, moving with the swift low efficiency of someone who had not forgotten how to do this, followed by Jasper and then Carlyle, the door coming back down behind the last of them with a sound no louder than a breath.
Quieter still.
Four minutes.
Katherine stood in the warehouse with Thomas and Dean and counted.
She did not pace. She did not check her weapons again. She stood still and let her power move and thought about the map and the patrol window and the secondary checkpoint and the four minutes and what was on the other side of them.
Dean stood at the door with his hand resting near the edge of it and his eyes on a point in the middle distance, somewhere between the warehouse and wherever his mind went when he was preparing for something.
Thomas stood at the map.
He was not looking at it. He was just standing near it, as if proximity to the plan was its own form of readiness.
The four minutes were the longest four minutes Katherine had experienced in a series of experiences that had included several extended versions of that particular feeling, and when Thomas looked at his watch and said "Group one" the word landed less like a signal and more like a release.
They went under the door.
The night outside was cold and clear, stars visible in the gaps between clouds, the street empty in the specific emptiness of a city district that had been there a long time and had nothing to prove about being there. The vehicle was parked two streets over. They reached it in under a minute and Dean drove south without lights until they were far enough from the warehouse that lights were normal.
They did not speak.
The city moved past the windows, ordinary and ongoing, and Katherine sat in the back and felt for Samantha and Engel to the north and felt for Grace and Carlyle and Jasper moving through the western approach and felt for the facility ahead of them, the heat of too many bodies in too concentrated a space, and underneath all of it, deep in the lower eastern level, the bright pushing fire of a boy who had been in a confined space too long.
Still there.
Still burning.
Dean turned onto the service road approach and cut the lights entirely and they moved the last quarter mile in the dark and the quiet and when they reached the point Thomas had marked as the staging position they stopped and Dean cut the engine.
Ahead of them the secondary checkpoint sat at the bend in the service road, exactly where it had been this morning, four suits and a vehicle, and beyond it the facility.
Thomas checked his watch.
Two minutes to the patrol window.
The three of them sat in the dark car and waited.
One minute.
Katherine felt Samantha's signal from the north side of the facility, present and steady, which meant group three was in or close.
She felt the western approach and Carlyle's specific warmth moving through it, which meant group two was moving.
Thirty seconds.
Thomas had his hand on the door.
Dean had his hand on the door.
Katherine had her hand on the door.
The patrol vehicle appeared from behind the facility on its loop, headlights moving in a slow arc as it turned the corner and began its circuit away from the checkpoint, taking the four minute window with it as it went.
"Now," Thomas said.
The doors opened.
They moved.
The distance between the staging position and the checkpoint was a hundred and twenty feet of open service road and they covered it in a run that was as quiet as a run could be made, keeping to the shadows at the road's edge, Thomas first and Dean second and Katherine third in a line that moved with the practiced efficiency of people who had trained for exactly this even when they hadn't known they were training for it.
The checkpoint had four suits.
What it had was four suits plus the element of surprise working entirely against them, because a group coming from the staging position at speed in the dark was not what the checkpoint had been told to expect and the half second of recalibration that surprise produced was enough.
Thomas took the first one before the man fully registered what was happening, a movement so clean and fast that Katherine almost missed it, a controlled strike that dropped the suit without a sound.
Dean took the second with the particular efficiency that was simply Dean in a fight, no wasted motion, nothing dramatic, just the most direct path between the problem and the resolution of the problem.
The third came at Katherine.
She felt him before he reached her and stepped inside his reach instead of away from it, the move Thomas had drilled into her until it was faster than thinking, and her elbow caught him across the jaw with the weight of her forward momentum behind it and he went down hard on the road surface.
The fourth broke for the facility door and Thomas was already moving, three steps and a throw, a blade with the dark mist she recognized as his specific channeling catching the suit in the shoulder and spinning him into the wall beside the facility entrance where he hit and stayed.
Four seconds.
Four suits.
Thomas looked at his watch.
Three minutes and fifty six seconds of patrol window remaining.
"Move," he said.
They went through the facility door.