Lyra Stellwyn's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By noon the fox slept in a crate by the stove, and Lyra faced the harder problem. The egg was still inside the lab. She had no map of the building, no contact on the inside, and no plan beyond the ledger open on her table. She made tea she did not drink and paced the kitchen while the fox's flank pulsed slow blue against the straw. Then she remembered her grandmother's ledger held more than notes on wounds. The old woman had kept a list of names at the back, people who owed her, people she had helped, people who had once worked behind Severance walls. Lyra turned to the last pages. Most names were crossed out. Two were not. She drove to the nearest of the two before she could talk herself out of it. The address was a feed store at the edge of a hill town, and the man behind the counter went pale when she said her grandmother's name. He would not speak inside. He walked her out to the loading yard and told her, fast and low, that he had swept floors in the west wing for six years. He said the egg was not in the west wing anymore. Three days ago they moved everything sensitive to a private site up the coast, a converted hatchery with its own generator. He drew the turnoff on the back of a feed receipt and pushed it at her. Then he told her to burn the paper and never come back. Lyra drove home with the receipt folded in her pocket and the fox waiting on her kitchen floor. She had a location now. She also had four days, maybe five, before the lab noticed one of their animals had never come back, and started looking for whoever had it. The sanctuary she had promised herself last night was no longer a plan for later. It was a place she had to build this week, somewhere the fox could not be found, while she worked out how to reach a coastal hatchery she had never seen.