The cottage is smaller than it looked from outside. Warmer, too—heat from the fire presses against my skin as Corrine closes the door behind us, and I catch myself cataloguing exits. One door, two windows, a back room I can't see into. Old habits.

  I'd built a picture in my mind during the journey south—a haunted figure, gaunt and skittish, someone who'd been so thoroughly broken by the congregation that the cracks showed in every movement. That's what survivors look like, isn't it? That's what I see in the mirror every morning, what I see in Mei's careful movements and guarded eyes.

  But the woman standing before us is something else entirely.

  She moves through her space with quiet confidence, gesturing us toward chairs by the fire, her posture straight despite the weight of whatever secrets she carries. The smell of woodsmoke mingles with something cooking—stew, maybe, or soup—the ordinary domesticity of a life that seems impossible for someone who once served the congregation. How does she do it? How does she wake each morning and cook breakfast and tend her garden when she knows what she was part of?

  The marks warm beneath my ribs, curious or hungry or both. They always respond to other survivors, other people touched by the congregation's darkness. It's as if they recognize their own kind.

  Her gray-green eyes are calm, assessing us with the careful attention of someone who has learned to read threats in the way people breathe. Her hair is dark, pinned severely, and she wears the plain dress of a governess—but she wears it like armor, like something chosen rather than assigned.

  She's beautiful, I realize with a start. Not in the soft, yielding way that men usually mean when they use that word. Beautiful the way a blade is beautiful, or a storm. Something dangerous pretending to be domestic.

  The realization catches me off guard—I haven't noticed beauty in months. Haven't noticed anything except targets and threats and the endless catalog of faces I need to destroy. But something about this woman cuts through the numbness, makes me aware of my own body in a way I'd almost forgotten. The curve of her jaw. The way her dark hair catches the firelight. The defiance in her stance that speaks of survival, of fighting back, of refusing to be broken.

  My marks stir beneath my ribs—not warning, not hunger. Something else. Something I don't have a name for.

  "Sit." She gestures to chairs by the hearth, then moves to the stove where a kettle waits. "Tea? It's only herbs—nothing from the congregation's gardens, I assure you."

  Mei takes a chair but doesn't relax into it. "Mademoiselle Vane. Or is it Marchant now?"

  "Marchant. Has been for six years." Corrine pours water into cups, her movements precise and unhurried. She's positioned so she can see both of us, the door, and the knife block on the counter. Old habits. The habits of prey that has learned to expect predators. "You found me faster than I expected. I thought I had another week, at least."

  "We're not working for them."

  "Everyone says that." She hands me a cup, and her fingers brush mine—warm, calloused, the hands of someone who works. "The last one who said that was a man from London—very polite, very professional. He promised the same thing. Information for safety." Her eyes go flat. "They found him three days later. What was left of him."

  The tea smells of chamomile and something sharper underneath. I don't drink it.

  Corrine's gaze shifts to me, and I feel her attention like a physical pressure. When her eyes meet mine, something passes between us. My breath catches. Something flickers in her expression—recognition? Curiosity? I can't read her the way I'm learning to read most people.

  "Who is she?" Corrine asks Mei, though her eyes stay on mine. "Your apprentice?"

  "Eleanor Winchester." Mei says my name without hesitation, without the careful pseudonyms we usually maintain. "She survived the Dover ritual seven months ago."

  Something changes in Corrine's expression. A crack in the armor, quickly sealed. But I saw it—a flash of something that might have been recognition, or horror, or both.

  "The Dover ritual," she repeats slowly. "Seven months ago. You were there?"

  "I was there." I hold her gaze. "I was sixteen years old. They carved marks into my ribs and pushed me underwater while something ancient watched from below. And I survived."

  "No one survives the ritual."

  "I did."

  Silence stretches between us. The marks sharpen under my ribs, responding to something I can't name—the proximity of another survivor, maybe, or the weight of secrets about to be shared. Corrine stares at me, and I see her working through it—the impossibility, the implications, the questions that must be crowding her mind.

  "Show me,"

  I glance at Mei. She nods, almost imperceptibly.

  I unbutton my collar, pull aside the fabric to reveal the edge of the marks. They're glowing faintly—they always glow near the sea, that phosphorescent light that pulses with a rhythm that isn't my heartbeat, that belongs to the thing in the depths below. The marks are visible even through my chemise, thirteen lines of ancient text carved into living flesh.

  Corrine's breath catches. Her hand rises, almost reaches toward me, then stops.

  "Mother of God," she whispers. "It's true. You're actually—"

  "Connected. Changed. I don't know the right word for it." I button my collar, hide the marks. "The Deep One showed me faces. Eighteen people who were present at my ritual. I've killed five of them. Thirteen remain."

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "And you want my help."

  "We want your information. Your knowledge of how they operate, where they hide, who protects them." I meet her eyes. "You spent sixteen years inside that machine. You know things no one else knows."

  She's quiet for a long moment. I can see her calculating—weighing risks against rewards, safety against involvement, the quiet life she's built against the violence that's standing on her doorstep. The wind picks up, carrying the smell of rain and the distant salt of the sea.

  "Come inside." She steps back. "Before someone sees you."

  The Beaumont house is warm, well-kept, filled with the hush of a place where children have been sent away for the morning. Corrine leads us through a hallway lined with family portraits—generations of Beaumonts staring down at us with aristocratic disapproval—into a small parlor at the back of the house.

  She closes the door. Locks it.

  "The family is at church," she murmurs. "They won't be back until noon. We have two hours."

  "That's not much time."

  "It's more than you'll get anywhere else." She sits in a chair by the window, positioning herself where she can see both us and the door. Old habits. The habits of someone who has spent years expecting violence to find her. "Ask your questions."

  Mei takes the other chair, leaving me standing by the fireplace. The flames are low, barely warming the room, but I register their heat against my legs—real, physical, grounding in a way that the constant pulse of the marks never is.

  "Start with the hierarchy," Mei says. "Who leads the congregation now? Marsh is still high priest?"

  "Marsh is still high priest. He'll die in that position—probably soon, given his age, but he's been 'dying soon' for twenty years." Corrine's voice is clinical, detached. The voice of someone discussing weather patterns or market prices, not the structure of an organization that murders children. "Below him are the regional coordinators. Celeste handles London and the southern ritual sites. Ashworth has Lyon and the continental operations. There are others—Prague, Vienna, Munich—but those are the ones that matter."

  "Celeste." I speak the name carefully, feeling its weight. "She carved the marks into my flesh."

  "She would. It's her specialty."

  Corrine's eyes meet mine. A long pause.

  "Celeste is my sister."

  The words land like stones in still water. Sister. The woman who carved me open, who prepared me for drowning, who smiled while she did it—she's family to the woman sitting across from me.

  I feel the marks flare against my ribcage, responding to the connection. Celeste. Corrine's sister. The congregation's architect of rituals, raised alongside this woman who burned their brand from her flesh and ran.

  "You didn't mention that," Mei says quietly.

  "You didn't ask." Corrine's expression doesn't change. "Celeste and I were raised in the congregation. Third generation. Our parents were true believers, our grandparents before them. We were taught the rituals before we learned to read. It's all we knew." She pauses, something shifting behind her eyes. "Your mother was raised with us. Margaret wasn't born a Vane—the congregation brought her to my parents as an infant, an orphan from one of the coastal parishes. My mother raised her alongside Celeste and me. She took our name. She was our sister in every way that mattered, even if we didn't share blood."

  "What changed?"

  "I saw a child drown." Her voice goes distant, remembering. "I was sixteen. They brought a girl to the ritual site—eight years old, maybe nine. Beautiful child. Terrified. I was supposed to help hold the candles, speak the words, do what I'd been trained to do."

  She pauses. Her hands are trembling slightly—the first crack in her composure since we arrived.

  "She looked at me," Corrine continues. "Right before they pushed her under. She looked at me and asked if it would hurt. And I—" Her voice breaks. "I told her no. I told her it would be like falling asleep. I lied to her, and then I watched her drown, and something in me broke."

  Silence stretches between us. I think of the counting girl in the cellar. The twins who never spoke. All the children who trusted gentle voices and kind lies.

  "You ran," I say. Not a question.

  "It took me two more years to gather the courage. Two more years of rituals, of watching children die, of telling myself I had no choice." Her jaw tightens. "I burned the brand off my wrist with a hot iron and I—" She stops. Breathes. "I ran. And I've been running ever since."

  "But you stopped here."

  "I stopped everywhere, eventually. You can't run forever." She looks out the window at the gray November sky. "I thought maybe here—far from the sea, far from their usual hunting grounds—I might be able to build something. A life. Something real."

  "And have you?"

  She doesn't answer for a long moment. When she speaks, her voice is barely above a whisper.

  "I teach the Beaumont children French and mathematics. I eat dinner with the family every evening. I go to church on Sundays, even though I don't believe in anything anymore." She turns back to face us. "It's not a life. It's a performance. But it's better than what I was."

  My marks stir beneath my ribs. Something about her words resonates—the performance of normalcy, the careful construction of a self that can pass for human even when the human parts have been scraped away.

  I know that performance. I've been giving it since I walked out of the sea.

  "Tell us about Celeste. Tell us how to find her."

  Corrine's gray-green eyes hold mine. Something passes between us—understanding, maybe, or recognition. Two women shaped by the same horror, standing on opposite sides of a divide that might not be as wide as it seems.

  "I'll tell you everything." She hesitates. "But first, I need to know something."

  "What?"

  "The ritual you survived. The marks they carved into you." She leans forward, her voice dropping. "Do they hurt? Can you feel them all the time? The connection to that thing in the deep?"

  I consider lying. Consider giving her the answer that would make this easier, that would keep the walls up between us.

  Instead I tell her the truth.

  "They burn. They pulse with the tide. They show me things—faces, memories, glimpses of something I can't comprehend." I meet her eyes. "And yes, I feel the connection. All the time. Like a hook in my soul, pulling me toward something I can never escape."

  Corrine nods slowly. Her hands have stopped trembling.

  "Then we have more in common than I thought," she says. "Sit down, Eleanor Winchester. This is going to take longer than two hours."

  I sit. Mei takes the chair by the door—positioned to watch both Corrine and the windows, always the hunter even in moments of apparent peace. But I find myself studying Corrine instead. The way she holds herself, the careful distance she keeps from both of us, the occasional tremor in her hands that she tries to hide.

  She's been alone for six years. Running, hiding, pretending to be someone else. Building a life out of lies because the truth would get her killed.

  I know that feeling. The loneliness of being something that doesn't fit anywhere. The exhaustion of wearing masks.

  "Why are you helping us?" I ask. "You could have turned us away. Could have kept hiding. Why risk everything?"

  Corrine is quiet. When she answers, her voice is soft.

  "Because I'm tired of pretending the children don't matter. Tired of telling myself that running is enough, that surviving is enough." Her gray-green eyes find mine. "And because you're the first person I've met who might actually be able to stop them."

  Something shifts in my chest. The hollow doesn't fill that easily, but there's recognition, understanding.

  We're not the same. But we might be enough alike to trust each other.

  Outside, night has fallen over the village. Somewhere in the night, the old woman with her signal lamp is probably already sending word to whoever pays her. The Hound. The congregation. Someone who will come looking.

  But that's tomorrow's problem. Tonight, we learn everything Corrine knows about destroying the thing that made us both, and we pray that tomorrow comes before the Hound picks up our scent.