"The moment we decode it the owner will be notified," Bianca said, her voice stripped of everything except the fact. "It is a sensory device. It sends an alert automatically."
"Is there another way in?"
"There is not." She was already running calculations on her end. "What I can do is seal the surrounding access points. Lock everything down so he cannot send backup in. But it will also lock you inside on the way out." A pause. "I cannot promise your safety."
"Do it."
"Silas." Tesni's voice came through carefully. "Are you sure?"
"I have already wasted two minutes." He looked at the pad in front of him. "Start now."
He pressed the ball shaped device against the panel and held it there. On the other end of the line he could hear Bianca working, the rapid sound of keys and the low hum of systems being pushed hard. Then a deep mechanical sound moved through the wall and the safe opened.
The room on the other side was money. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, stacked and arranged with the kind of order that suggested someone had spent considerable time thinking about how to store more of it. He pulled the black sack from his coat and started moving.
"Four minutes remaining on the lasers," Tesni said.
"Leave the lasers. I will find my own way through them."
"That gives us six minutes total," Bianca said.
"Then let us use them."
He moved fast through the warehouse with the sack heavy across his back, reading the laser patterns as he went, ducking and angling his body through the beams with the focused economy of someone who had trained for exactly this kind of problem. Three minutes burned through by the time he reached the warehouse door. It swung open slowly and he stepped out.
The lights were doing something wrong.
They pulsed in an irregular pattern, on and off, the kind of malfunction that was not a malfunction at all but a signal.
"He is here," Tesni said.
Silas did not slow down. "I am not dying tonight."
"Run, Silas. He is approximately fifteen feet behind you."
He ran. His hand caught the edge of the wall and he dragged himself toward the tunnel entrance, found the opening and pulled himself up into it, climbing hard, the sack banging against the stone walls around him.
"Almost there!" he called out.
Ravi set the briefcase down on the warehouse floor without hurry.
He crouched beside it and pressed the latches open. Four white cobras uncoiled from inside, rising slowly, their pale scales catching the flickering light. He reached out and ran his fingers across each of their heads in turn, almost tenderly. They regarded him with flat black eyes.
"You know what to do," he said quietly.
He stood. They hissed once, in something that sounded almost like agreement, and then they were moving, flowing up the wall and into the tunnel with a speed that made no sound at all.
"Ten seconds until the door opens," Tesni said, watching the feed. She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. "If he keeps climbing at this rate he should come through before—"
The scream tore through the communicator.
Tesni's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
A few seconds later the cobras reappeared at the tunnel base, dropping back to the floor one by one and coiling themselves neatly back into the open briefcase. Ravi latched it closed without looking down.
"Silas." Tesni's voice had gone very quiet. "What happened?"
The response came through broken and slow, each word costing him something.
"Snakes." A long pause. "I have been bitten. Both of them." Another pause, longer than the last. "I am going numb. Everything is going numb."
Try to stretch your hand !" Tesni's voice pitched higher. "The lock is open, Silas. You can get through!"
"I cannot move." His voice had become something else entirely, slow and thick, like a man speaking from the bottom of deep water. "I am numb everywhere."
"Tesni." Bianca's tone cut across the line sharp and urgent. "Someone is approaching your position. Disable your camera. Now."
"Silas, I—"
"Hurry." His breathing was audible now, laboured and shallow. "I am already dead. The venom has reached everything." A pause that lasted too long. "At least try an alternative route. For your goal. For Aine. Do not fail here." His voice dropped to barely anything. "Failure is not an option. Disable the camera, Tesni."
Her hands found the control panel before she had made the decision to move them. She worked through the sequence slowly, deliberately, every motion feeling heavier than the last. The feed went dark.
She turned around.
Bianca was sitting completely still, staring at the blank screen where Silas had been. Then she brought her fist down on the table.
"Damn it."
"I hate you, Ravi." Tesni said it quietly, to no one in particular, to the dark screen, to the room. "I genuinely hate you."
Bianca looked up. "You know his name?"
"He is a mafioso. Silas sent me footage and photographs from the mission before he went in." She reached for her phone and tilted the screen toward Bianca.
Bianca leaned forward and then went very still. "Tesni."
"What?"
"I can't see his face clearly from the warehouse footage.He is in a nose mask".
Tesni looked at the image again, something cold moving through her chest as the recognition assembled itself piece by piece. "He looks exactly like the person who took Aine."
"Did you ever see his face directly?"
"No. Silas told me he never reveals it." She looked at the screen. "But the build. The height. The way he carries himself."
"It is him," Tesni said flatly.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
In the warehouse below the chapel Hayland stood at the entrance of the tunnel, looking down at what lay at the bottom of it.
"What should I do with the body, sir?"
Ravi set his briefcase down and held out his hand without looking up. "Get me a dagger."
Hayland produced it and placed it in his palm handle first.
Ravi crouched beside Silas and studied his face for a moment with something that was not quite respect but was adjacent to it. Then he pressed the tip of the blade to the skin and drew his mark with the practiced ease of someone who had done it many times before.
"He is the first person to ever breach this location," Hayland said.
"Yes." Ravi straightened and handed the dagger back. "What a waste of talent." He looked at Silas one last time. "Display him outside. Somewhere visible." He turned toward the exit. "I want to remind this world who I am."