POV: marasi
Summary
Marasi drafts the only kind of plan she can afford — a quick one. Moonlight and TwinSoul hold near the lab shack's window, ready to break in; Marasi works her way along the side of the rectangular structure to place a slowness grenade at the door so its bubble bleeds through the wall and pins the two guards posted inside. As she charges the weapon, Moonlight ducks around and hisses that the guards have just moved — they are pulling gas masks out of a bin near the scientists. Marasi cannot let the invel pellets come out of their tin.
They go in now. Marasi kicks the door and hurls the grenade across the room toward the cluster of scientists and guards. *Sorry, TwinSoul,* she thinks, knowing his window post is well within the catch radius. The grenade activates and freezes two of the three scientists — including, crucially, the one holding the labelled tin — but the two guards spring clear and one of the other scientists also gets out of the way.
The fight goes hand to hand. Marasi cracks one guard's gun arm with her rifle butt; he rams her back into a counter of glassware. The old quiet voice — the one that still whispers she does not belong — is quieter than it used to be. She belongs. This is her operation. She lets him over-commit, shifts her weight out from under his bulk, gets behind him, and slams his face into the counter. Across the room Moonlight has disarmed her guard, but he has her against the wall — and then the wall isn't a wall. Moonlight palms a stamp and falls backwards through a door she has just stamped into the brick, dragging the surprised guard with her so his cry doesn't carry; the door eats itself behind her, a glimpse of the seal vanishing with it.
The free scientist has used the distraction to start a fire in a trash can full of notebooks. Marasi curses, pulls her away, and kicks the can over to scatter the burning pages — too late to save the writings, just early enough to save the cover of one bound book. The same scientist then grabs a large kitchen knife and goes for Moonlight, who has reappeared in the room and is grappling her own surviving guard. The decision is quick. Marasi snaps her rifle up and shoots the scientist dead. The report rings through the tunnels like a condemnation — someone has heard.
They have what they can take. Marasi points her rifle at the two surviving scientists and tells them flatly not to test her on the day she is having; the woman with the gas tin sets it down and raises her hands. Moonlight enters and binds them. TwinSoul stumbles in last, leaning against the doorframe, having run afoul of Marasi's own grenade. He observes — two disabled guards, one dead scientist — that the operation went well. Moonlight takes the blame for the gunshot; Marasi takes it back; TwinSoul tells them both *it is done.* Moonlight pockets the burned scraps from the trash can: she can rewind that later, with a stamp.
Marasi turns to the locked cell at the back of the room and opens it, spilling light over twenty-odd ragged captives who pull back from it the way mistwraiths pull back from the night. *I'm Marasi Colms. Elendel Constabulary.* The first man out stumbles forward to take her hand and breathes *thank the Survivor.* She recognises him: Pielle Fromed, head of the opposition party on the Bilming Council, once an advisor to the Senate. Behind him she picks out the editor of the *Seasons*, a Terriswoman whose paper has been sympathetic to Elendel interests. Among the rest are ordinary citizens. Brazenly, *appallingly*, Entrone has not just been experimenting on captives — he has been experimenting on his political opposition.
The editor almost faints as Marasi helps her stand, but presses a notebook into her hands. *There isn't much, but you must believe me.* They have an army. Look for the place Entrone's people call *the Community*; she believes it is where the barracks are.
Marasi gets her team moving on extraction. While they do, TwinSoul confirms what they already feared: Autonomy's *very specialised troops* are hard to control and personally familiar to him, and an invasion by them could be as catastrophic as the bomb. Moonlight explains that the controlled local perpendicularity far to the south could not by itself admit them in numbers — but Autonomy has, on other planets, opened new perpendicularities *against all understood mechanics*, and might already have done it here. Entrone's errand at the Community is, by his own words, to *see to the perpendicularity*. So if Wax succeeds at stopping the bomb above, the invasion comes through below. They cannot run yet — they have to know what is happening with that army.
They herd the captives — slow, tired, underfed — out into the tunnel and start the long, dangerous walk back toward the elevators. Then Marasi hears noise from that direction and, with a sinking feeling, watches two dozen soldiers — probably the men who had been on watch in the factory above — round the bend in formation. The quiet infiltration is over. This is war.