“It’s Verus, not ‘fortune-teller.’ You’re not waiting for backup?”

“If you and Caldera are right,” Slate gave a sharp glance, “then we don’t have time. And to make sure, you’re going at the front.”

I sighed. “Fine. Then stay quiet and let me work.” I searched through the futures, picking out points of entry. White Rose’s base loomed up in the futures and the present, growing closer each second.

| | | | | | | | |

Keepers can move fast when they want to. It took the whole assault force less than five minutes to make it across the grounds and to the White Rose estate. To no one’s surprise, by the time we got there, the defending forces were alerted and ready for us.

When you’re doing recon, five minutes isn’t much time. With half an hour, I could probably have found a way to get in safely. With an hour, I might have slipped in a couple of other people too. Getting the whole assault force in subtly and cleanly was not going to happen, no matter how long I had.

Fortunately, “subtle” wasn’t on Slate’s priority list. The front doors of the White Rose estate were bound in metal, reinforced and warded. But the reinforcement didn’t extend to the entire building, and my divination found the weak points in the walls. The elemental mages did the rest.

At which point things got busy.

| | | | | | | | |

“Pull back!” Slate shouted into his communicator. “Stay in cover!”

I was lying flat behind a low rise in the ground. I could just make out the edges of the right wing of the White Rose estate, but not the central block, which was just as well because that was where the fire was coming from. A low-pitched, hollow duh-duh-duh sound echoed from the roof, repeated and overlapping, mixing with the distant sounds of bullets sinking into earth. The man who’d been hit in the first volley had stopped screaming: treated or dead, I couldn’t tell which. Slate shoved the disc away and glared at me. “Why didn’t you tell us about this?”

“I told you those things on the roof looked like bunkers,” I said absently. Most of my attention was on counting the sources of fire. There were only three that I could see, but that was enough to make it a bad idea to stick your head up.

“You didn’t tell us they had machine guns!”

“You didn’t give me a chance to check.”

“Fuck it.” Slate lifted himself up to squint out over the rise at the estate. “Let’s just—”

“Get down,” I said calmly.

Slate might have been obnoxious, but he wasn’t stupid. He ducked instantly. A bullet whipped overhead with an angry whizzing sound.

“Slate!” Trask called from twenty feet away. The big man was pressed up behind a tree. “Flanking team’s bogged down. Trap field.”

Slate swore.

“Landis is circling,” I said, still not lifting my head. “Once he gets to the top of the hill, he can melt those bunkers right off the rooftop.”