Trask nodded. “Fine by me,” I said.

Haken looked at Lizbeth. “Clear?”

“Your funeral,” Lizbeth said.

Haken turned and left. “This is the most fucked-up operation I’ve ever seen,” Lizbeth said. “Can you believe this?”

“Mm,” I said. I was trying to see if I could eavesdrop on Haken’s call, but he wasn’t making it yet—he was just heading downstairs. Maybe if I followed farther . . . no, he was going to gate away first. Is he on to me? Worrying thought . . .

“Hey!” Lizbeth told me. “You awake?”

“I can watch for trouble, or I can talk to you,” I said. “Which would you prefer?”

Lizbeth glowered at me, then crossed her arms and looked away. Trask still hadn’t spoken, and Abeyance was still lost in the trance of her timesight. I looked between the three mages and inwardly sighed.

| | | | | | | | |

Twenty minutes passed, then forty. The noise level from below diminished as the Council security cleared out the building. A team arrived and set up on the landing, weapons ready. I wanted to go down and find out more, but I was too concerned about the possibility of what Haken had said. It sounded as though he was inviting Vihaela here to talk. By now she’d have to know what had happened here. Would she really leave her fortified base to walk into the middle of a Keeper team like this?

If I were Vihaela and I wanted to talk, I’d do it remotely. If I wanted to fight, I’d just blow up the building. There was no scenario I could think of in which Vihaela’s best option was to come walking through that gate, yet that was what Haken had set me to watch for. I checked future after future, looking for alternate lines of attack: a gate to a different part of the building, a triggered explosive, a toxin or gas. Nothing pinged. Maybe Haken was talking to Vihaela right now . . .

Something shifted in the futures, a ghostly possibility, there and gone again. I stopped, searched, lost the strand, found it again. Movement, lots of movement. A person . . .

My eyes went wide and I looked up. “Trask! Get Haken. Vihaela’s coming.”

Trask put a hand to his ear and started speaking, his voice low and urgent. Lizbeth snapped out orders to the security men on the landing and all of a sudden the room was full of movement. Footsteps came running up the landing. Cerulean was first in; he must have been very close. Haken and Slate followed. Within a minute the small attic was crowded with people. Slate and Trask were at the front, Lizbeth and Haken a step behind. Abeyance had made herself scarce. Half a dozen Council security took up positions covering the gate, kneeling with their submachine guns ready. They weren’t about to fire . . . yet, but between them and the mages, there was enough firepower trained on that gate to kill anyone. Vihaela wasn’t going to step through into that, was she?