All Chapters of BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

POV: CalderI found the source on the fourth day.Not because I was lucky. Because the person who built the relay was good but not careful, and there is a difference between those two things that most people do not discover until the gap between them closes on their fingers.The relay had been constructed in layers, the way careful people construct things they do not want found. Each layer pointed to the next through a different channel. Commercial correspondence. Territorial administrative filings. Once, inventively, through the enforcement committee's own document distribution network, which told me the builder had been inside the committee long enough to understand its architecture. Four months of monitoring. Eighteen months of preparation before that.I sat with the source for twenty minutes before I went to Rose.Not because I was afraid to tell her. Because I wanted to be certain. Because the name I had found was the kind of name that, once said, could not be unsaid, and I had l

POV: RoseThey had known about the settlement for six weeks.Not from the relay. Not from Selene's channel. From a source we had not identified, which meant there was a third thread we had not yet found, which meant the network Ferris Dael had built in fourteen months was larger and more layered than we had understood.I sat with this for thirty seconds. Then I moved.Wren's account was precise. Forty-seven minutes of conversation between Dael and Mast, in a room they believed was private, about three things.The first: they had a contact in the settlement. Not Etta. Not any of the twelve women we had spoken with. One of the six girls. A fourteen-year-old named Soli who had been receiving correspondence through a channel that ran outside the settlement's official network, established by someone who had visited the settlement two years ago under the cover of being a territorial land assessor. The assessor had identified Soli as the settlement's most isolated member, the one who had gro

POV: RoseI went to Soli alone.Etta had suggested this. Not because the others could not be trusted, but because Soli had spent two years building a relationship with people who had come to her in the guise of offering something. More people arriving in the same guise would not help. One person, without performance, without the weight of an official visit, was more likely to produce an honest conversation.Etta met me at the settlement's edge at dawn."She knows something is wrong," Etta said. "She has known for three days. She is not going to run. She is not that kind of girl." She paused. "She is the kind of girl who stays and faces things because she does not know how to leave the people she is responsible for, even when she has done something that has hurt them.""Does she know what she did," I said."She knows some of it," Etta said. "She told me last night that she had been talking to someone outside the settlement. She did not know what the information was used for. She believ

POV: DorianI needed three days with the document before I would be able to tell anyone what it fully contained.This was not because it was long. It was eleven pages, which in the script Saren had been taught to read was approximately four thousand words. It was because the document was not a straightforward account. It was layered. The surface reading was an instruction set. Below that was a second layer written in a substitution cipher that used the primary script as its base, which I identified on the second day and which took most of the third day to fully decode.The substitution layer changed everything.I went to Rose on the fourth morning.She was in the office. The third mirror was on the desk, still wrapped. She had not unwrapped it. She had told me the previous evening, when I had asked, that she was waiting until she knew what the document contained before she used anything it directed her toward. This was correct. I had told her so, and she had nodded in the way she nodd

POV: RoseHe was gone for nineteen days.I know this because I counted, which I did not tell anyone, because it was not information that needed to be shared, but it was information I needed to have, the same way I needed to have Cain's position at the edge of rooms and Dorian's notebooks in their correct drawers and Luca's dinners with his brother on the correct Thursday. The specific locations of the people who mattered were a form of knowing that I did not think I could stop doing, even if I tried.The work continued during the nineteen days. Soli arrived in Ironmoor on the fourth day, with Etta, and spent the first week in Dorian's record-keeping room reading with the focused intensity of someone making up for two years of partial information. She asked better questions than most adults I had worked with, and she asked them without apology, which I found useful.Saren had taken a room in the lower city. They appeared at the Council building on most mornings, not asking for a role,