Chapter 5 Undermanned
Chapter 5 — Undermanned
The alarm bell over the eastern ward line rang for the first time in two years on a Thursday, and it rang for four minutes before it stopped, which everyone in the House agreed afterward was the worst part.
Claire was in the library with Julian — an accident of proximity that had turned, over the past week, into something like a habit — when the sound rolled through the stone halls. Julian's face went the color of old paper.
"That's not a drill bell," he said. "Drill's three rings. That's continuous."
By the time they reached the courtyard, Theo was already half into his gear, shouting orders at two junior Wardens who looked barely older than Wesley. Marcus stood at the center of it with a field map unrolled across a stone table, and for the first time since Claire had woken up in this life, she watched him look genuinely afraid.
"Breach-adjacent surge," Theo said, fast, clipped. "Not a full breach. But it's pushing hard against the line near the old mill, and we've got six Wardens on that stretch instead of the eleven we should have."
"Because five of them are on the north rotation covering for the two we lost to injury last month," Marcus said, and Claire heard, underneath the calm command voice, the exact math she'd been doing at breakfast a week and a half ago. A House stretched thin, sitting on an asset they'd rather not use.
"I can go," Wesley said, already reaching for a blade half his own height.
"You're fourteen," Marcus snapped, and then, quieter, like the words cost him something: "You're staying here."
Claire watched Marcus's hands on the map. Not shaking, but close. She thought of Voss's voice in the training yard — your brothers are drowning and don't know it — and made a decision the strategist in her had been circling for two weeks and the sixteen-year-old in her hadn't fully caught up to yet.
"Send me," she said.
The courtyard went very quiet.
"Ivy." Marcus's voice had the particular flatness of a man refusing to let himself hear something. "No."
"You have five bodies short of what the line needs, a surge that's already outpacing your last drill numbers, and a sister standing right here who isn't actually as fragile as you've been telling yourself for three years." Claire kept her voice level, the way she used to keep it level in front of executives who didn't want to hear the numbers. "You don't have to trust me with everything today, Marcus. You just have to trust me with something. Let me anchor a support pull from behind the line. Nothing offensive. Nothing near the seal's edge. If it goes wrong, you'll see it coming from a mile off and you can shut it down yourself."
It wasn't quite true — Claire had no intention of letting anyone shut anything down that hadn't already gone exactly where she meant it to — but it was true enough, and more importantly, it was the sentence built out of exactly the words a man like Marcus needed to hear to say yes against every instinct he had.
Theo looked between them, unreadable. Julian had gone very still, the way he did when he was recalculating something.
"Five minutes," Marcus said finally, and it came out like it hurt him to say it. "You stay behind the second line. The instant I say fall back, you fall back. No arguments."
"No arguments," Claire agreed, and did not mention that she had absolutely no plan of falling back if it came down to it.
Daphne, who had appeared silently at the edge of the courtyard sometime in the last minute, said nothing at all. But her eyes, fixed on Ivy's back as the group moved toward the gate, held something that had stopped being simple fear a long time ago.
