Coven Ep.9

Playa smelled like old summers and new rot. The waves beat a hollow time against the broken seawall, coughing glass and driftwood out of the surf and spitting them across the sand. We followed Lenore’s spoor not by footsteps—she moved in a way meant to confuse tracks—but by the small things she left: a curl of black ribbon snagged on a rusted lamppost, a smear of violet paint along a stair handrail, the faint, oily scent of pipe-smoke that her people liked to mask themselves with. Little sigils, small lies, the trail of someone who wanted to be found but not snared.

The ruins of Playa del Rey gathered themselves around us—boarded bungalows with their faces punched in, a collapsed pier that looked like a spine pulled from the ocean, a playground where a merry-go-round lay half-buried in sand. The city had given the place to wind and gulls and scavengers. Down a narrow lane iced with salt and shadows we came to the elementary school: pastel paint long gone in places, a mural of planets now streaked with soot, a rusted swing set that creaked when the wind touched it.

Lenore had gone inside, that much was certain. She had not cared to hide her route afterward; she had wanted it followed far enough to be useful.

We slipped through a busted side gate. The yard was full of small, overgrown beds where someone had once planted vegetables. Now they grew stubborn weeds, along with a row of herbs someone still tended. The front door swung inward at my touch with a long, complaining groan. Inside, the halls smelled like chalk dust and antiseptic and a dozen different meals, the warm, human smell of people trying to be ordinary in a world that would not let them.

The classrooms had been converted. Desks were rearranged into sleeping bunks; a chalkboard still bore a half-completed arithmetic lesson, the numbers blurred by smoke. On the wall, children's drawings hung in a tangled cascade—spaceships, stick families, a sun with too many teeth—that added a softness to the place that made the rest of the ruin feel criminal.

"We've been expecting you," a voice said from the shadow of a home-ec classroom kitchen.

She was not old, not in the way I expected; she was a woman whose hair had been cut short and whose hands always smelled faintly of ink and tea. She wore a faded name tag that proclaimed her as Ms. Corin. She walked as if she owned the building, though it was clear she owned nothing beyond the small garden in the yard and the respect of the poor souls who lived here.

Before I could answer, a small child—no more than eight—poked her head from behind the curtain. Her eyes were wide and too old for her years, the irises flecked with amber. She smiled like someone who knew an extra truth and could not keep it.

"You're Captain Sloan," she announced. "Lenore said you'd come. She said the woman with the blood would come."

"She has a name," I said, because names mattered. "She isn't just 'the woman with the blood.'"

The child shrugged. "Names taste like paper. Lenore tastes like rust and laughter."

I was not sure whether to be insulted or reminded that the people here did not waste words on politics. They used them for trade, for tending, for promises kept.

Maro leaned against a column. The brace along his leg had been stripped and rewrapped with oilcloth; it left him limping, but he breathed. Juno slumped into a chair in the remade kitchen, exhausted and wire-thin, fingers stained with code and printer smoke. The Black Hearts kept to the margins, rifles cradled against chests, eyes like mirrors.

"You're safe here—for now," Ms. Corin said. "We aren't a coven. We aren't with the Priests. We are patchwork." Her smile was small and honest. "We take anyone willing to work the garden or trade a song for a can of broth."

"How many?" I asked.

"A dozen," she said. "Two scarred men who used to work the docks, a woman who can stitch a wound with a singed prayer, half a dozen kids who know the routes out to the sea. Lenore has her people. But she doesn't stay. She drops bread, gossip, a sliver of truth, then she leaves a mess for the rest of us to clean up."

"She left more than gossip tonight," Juno said, voice raw. She held out a sliver of code on a palm-sized reader. "She slipped into Grey Line while we were there. She danced and set things on fire. She left behind a trick too—an arc-runic patch that confused servitor optics, something old keyed to new hardware."

"That would be...helpful," Ms. Corin said, and there was no heat in the word. "Lenore doesn't do kindness for free. She does destabilization when it pays."

"She's a coven ally," Maro said, blunt. "She just nearly killed us for sport."

"People who live hand-to-mouth learn to lie without flinching," Corin said. "Some of them keep promises. Some keep teeth. Lenore keeps her teeth."

We set the drive and the mirrored copy on a makeshift table under a dangling light. Juno unfurled cables and set to work with a kind of relentless patience, fingers moving with the same grace she used in the field—quick, exact. The drive hummed like an insect tucked into her tools. She had to strip the shell without waking every listener in the city; the mirrored copy would let her run pattern analysis without opening the Cathedral encryption itself. It was slow, and she cursed under her breath when the headers refused to yield.

As she worked, I walked the halls. The kids watched me with the bored curiosity of small creatures who had seen adults in many roles: soldier, thief, half-aunt. One boy with a freckled nose walked beside me and asked, without shame or flattery, "Are you a witch?"

"Not like the stories," I answered. "I have…family. Complications."

He nodded as if that explained everything. "My sister says witches are bad, but she also keeps gummy bears for the night watch, so she lies a lot."

The mural in the gym drew me like a lure—a faded universe of painted planets and a rocket ship stitched with names of children who must have once gone there and never returned. Someone had painted in a small trilune in the corner, just under a child's picture of a tree. It was faint, but it was there—the same broken trilune with the blood-knot at its center.

Aunt Gene’s rune.

My hands went cold and I felt the cloth at my hip warm in response, like a throat answering a call. I knelt and pressed my palm to the paint. It left a faint smear of dust on my glove, nothing more, but the room seemed to shift as if a seam had been found and a hand slid through.

"She was here," Ms. Corin said behind me. "She came through weeks ago. Left a message—said ‘patch the broken places. Don't expect saints; expect scaffolds.’"

"Did she meet Lenore?" I asked.

Corin considered. "They spoke. Quietly. After that, Lenore stayed away for days. She left us a load of dried fish and a note in code. Said to tell the captain—if she came—that the bridge was being built with nails made of old coins. She told us to watch for kids with amber eyes."

I thought of the child at my shoulder, of the way his gaze had been too old and too wise. The city birthed its magic in children sometimes—survivors who grew with talents like weeds in an abandoned lot. People like Aunt Gene planted themselves in places that grew strange fruit.

Juno's voice cut through the soft hum of the school. "I've got something."

We crowded around the lamp. The mirrored copy had given up a thin slice: headers and a single nested manifest. It wasn't enough to open the drive—Cathedral keys rebuffed the rest—but it was something.

"Listen," she said. "The manifest references Node-2, 'Special Discretionary: PVire'. There's a dispatch clause: 'Vault access: temporary loop—code OCEANIC-1. Time window: 0600-0800 GMT.'"

"A vault under the ocean?" Maro asked, incredulous.

"Nobody put vaults under the ocean before the war and called it sensible," Juno said. "But people did worse things. Vaults can be anywhere. 'OCEANIC-1' could be a code name for a sub-level facility under the old harbor. It could be a literal undersea vault or a metaphoric name for something else entirely. The manifest also opens to a short note: 'For Vire – seal until relocation. Do not release without Ecclesiastical sign-off.'"

"Ecclesiastical," I repeated. The Cathedral’s hand was deeper than we'd thought. Pod-3 shipments were marked ‘discretionary’ and locked behind theological seals. "If Vire's name is on it, that means someone high inside Seven authorized movement."

"Which means Vire isn't just Meticulous Archivist," Juno said. "Vire is a mover."

"We have a window," I said. "OCEANIC-1—0600-0800. We need to decide if it’s a vault we can get to and whether we can break it without cathedral keys."

"Or we can try finding Vire," Maro said. "If he's the one signing out shipment tokens, we find him and take the paperwork."

I thought about it—the vault under the ocean sounded monstrous enough; finding Vire sounded more surgical. "We need both," I said. "Find Vire and find the vault. One will lead to the other, or the other will burn the bridge so badly no one crosses."

Ms. Corin set a steaming mug before Maro. "Rest," she said, the order soft but iron. "You fight better with food in your belly. And keep your eyes open at night. Lenore doesn't like much sleep, and the Priests have ears like cats."

We ate, we patched wounds with prayer-stitch and medical gauze, we tried to sleep. The school folded around us like a bandage. I lay on a bunk and stared at the grimed ceiling, the trilune dusting the corner of my mind like a promise.

Before I slept, I took out Aunt Gene’s cloth and smoothed it between my fingers. Its thread hummed faintly, not with tech but with something older, a pulse like breath. I pressed it to my forehead and listened for secrets.

Outside, someone climbed to the roof and stood looking toward the sea, a shadow thin against the fracture of stars. I did not know if it was Lenore watching us or one of her children checking the horizon. Either way, the outline felt like an omen.

Below our feet, the city cataloged our names. Above our heads, the air breathed with the sea mists and did not care. Between those two movements, the bridge bent and creaked and waited to see whether we would walk across it or set it alight.

When sleep finally came, it was fitful and thin. I dreamed of glass and children with amber eyes. I dreamed of a woman at the edge of the pier—my mother—reaching for a shard that turned into a little mirror and then into a ledger, then into a child's crayon drawing.

I woke with the taste of salt and the feeling that we had a plan that could still be broken in half. The runes on the chalkboard stared down with their faint, patient cruelty: find the bridge, or be destroyed by it.