The sun had been up for less than an hour and Germa was already looking for him.
He heard it before he saw it. Voices carrying across the compound's outer district, the clipped exchanges of an organised search. Boots on stone moving in sweeping intervals. A patrol passed the end of the street he was on and he stepped back into the shadow of a drainage alcove and waited, breathing shallow, until the footsteps faded.
Then another set, further east, moving perpendicular. Two soldiers crossed the open junction ahead without slowing, eyes forward, running a grid pattern that would bring them back around in roughly four minutes.
Judge had wasted no time.
Lucien moved between cover points, an equipment store, a low wall, the blind side of a generator housing, working toward the port in the gaps between sweeps. His left side ached with focused persistence.
The cut on his cheek had reopened sometime in the night and dried again. He had the file, he had his notebook, and he had a route to the port if he could stay ahead of the pattern long enough to reach it.
He was pressed behind the low wall of the equipment store on the compound's western edge when he heard the footsteps.
Small. Deliberate. Moving without any of the urgency that everyone else out here was carrying.
Reiju came around the corner alone and stopped when she saw him. She looked at him the way she looked at everything, that complete and unhurried inventory. The file under his arm. The state of his clothes. The cut on his cheek. Then his face.
"It was you," she said. "The fire."
"Yes."
"Father is very angry."
"I know."
She stepped closer without being told to, out of the open and into the shadow of the wall beside him, with the instinct of someone who understood cover naturally. He looked at her sideways.
Three years old, maybe four, and she had followed the logic of the fire back to its source and found him in a compound full of soldiers. He shouldn't have been surprised.
"Are you leaving?" she asked.
"Yes."
She absorbed this without reaction. Her hands folded in front of her in that neat precise way she had when she was thinking. To the east, boots on gravel, a patrol sweeping back toward the western edge. Neither of them moved until it passed.
"Will you come back?" she asked.
Lucien thought about the honest answer and gave it. "No."
She was quiet for a moment. He checked the path, found it clear, and looked back at her.
"Reiju." He waited until she met his eyes. "Your brothers. The younger ones. Watch out for them. Not the way they'll train you to, not managing them, not keeping them in line. Actually, watch out for them. They're going to need someone who sees them as people rather than products." He paused. "You're the only one other than your mother in that castle who can do that."
Something moved behind her expression. Carefully contained, but there.
"And your father." He kept his voice level. "He'll tell you that obeying him is the same thing as being good at what you are. It isn't. You're allowed to decide what you are. Don't let him make that decision so many times that you forget you ever had one. Be your own person, not someone else's."
She held his gaze without flinching, the way she held everything.
"Will you tell your mother I said goodbye?" he asked.
The shift at the corner of her expression was small and quickly contained. "You could tell her yourself."
"I know. You're better at it than I am."
She looked at him for a moment with something that wasn't quite a smile. More considered than that. The look of someone receiving information and deciding carefully where to put it.
"She liked you," Reiju said.
"I know." A beat. "She's good at it. Liking people." He looked at her. "So are you. Don't let them take that from you either."
He stood, checked the path, found a gap in the sweep.
"Go back," he said. "Don't tell them you saw me."
She looked up at him. "I know," she said, with the quiet precision of someone who hadn't needed to be told.
He turned and walked toward the port and didn't look back.
The port was busier than he'd hoped. Not with traffic, with soldiers. Four at the main dock entrance, two more moving along the berths in a slow methodical sweep. He stayed back in the shadow of a warehouse and found his berth by number without moving toward it.
His boat was gone. The mooring rope had been cut clean, not untied. Someone had done it quickly and deliberately.
He scanned the smaller berths further along the dock. Working vessels mostly, flat-bottomed and unglamorous, the kind that moved between Germa's islands carrying cargo rather than people. One sat low in the water with its rope tied loosely, recently returned, its owner not yet back. Small enough for one person to handle alone.
He waited until the patrol's back was turned.
Then he moved.
The rope came free in two pulls. He pushed off from the dock with one foot and let the current take him quietly away from the berth before he touched the sail. By the time the nearest soldier turned back around, there was only open water where the boat had been.
He didn't look back at Germa.
The wind caught the sail and the island began to shrink behind him, its engineered skyline retreating into the grey of the early morning sea. He held the tiller steady and let it go.
Ahead, open water. Behind him, a stolen file, a burned laboratory, and a small girl standing somewhere in a castle who knew exactly what she had seen and had decided, on her own and without being asked, to say nothing about it.
He thought that was enough.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out the textbook. It was thin and slightly warped from being pressed against his side all morning, a beginner's guide to genetics he had found in one of the facility's secondary reading rooms earlier in the week, the kind of introductory volume that sat on shelves because someone had ordered a complete collection and never checked what was actually in it. Basic enough that a child could work through it with patience. Detailed enough to be a foundation for something more.
He looked at it for a moment.
"All of that," he said to no one in particular, "for a beginner's textbook. Law better become a damn good doctor."
He set it on top of the stolen file and looked back out at the water.
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1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones. Please Do Support.