Chapter 110: Two Readings, One Frequency
Soren returned from class with a problem he hadn’t possessed when he left.
Mona was at the door before he reached it. She focused on him above all else; he was her singular point of reference.
What was not normal was that she wouldn’t come inside.
She bumped his ankle once, turned, went three steps toward the courtyard, came back, bumped his ankle again.
"I just sat through two hours of bond theory," Soren said. "Whatever you found can wait."
She did not think it could wait.
She went to the threshold and pressed her blunt face against the cold floor, staying perfectly still.
For Mona, this meant she was listening to something deep underground.
Selah was sitting at the reading table, her hands wrapped around a mug that had long since stopped steaming.
"The tea’s gone cold again..." she said, nodding toward the window where the draft was strongest.
"And she’s been doing that since you left. Pointing, resting and then pointing back again."
"Pointing at what?"
"The dorm hall, then pass it."
Soren crouched next to Mona and put his hand flat on the stone beside her face.
He didn’t feel anything.
He wasn’t built to sense through earth, but she was, so he watched her instead. Her whole body had aligned toward one direction and locked there.
She was tracking.
◆◆◆◆
Mona’s signature had never read clean on a Bureau scanner.
The mole bond came through the Quill wound, meaning her frequency carried something standard equipment couldn’t file,the same way Selah’s fusion or Dani’s moth bridge did.
Three bonds the academy’s machines couldn’t name.
Soren had stopped worrying about it when he lost the ability to read the future. A thing the scanners couldn’t classify was a thing they couldn’t build a case on, and for once, that was in his favor.
That was the theory.
The theory had a hole in it now, and Mona was sitting on the hole with her face against the floor.
He went to the window.
The monitor was in the courtyard. Not Voss. The second one.
Soren had only seen the second watcher twice, always at a distance.
While Voss logged the obvious things like the seal and the gate, this one recorded readings off a handheld device pointed at the ground.
She was pointing it at the ground right now.
He watched her walk a slow line across the courtyard, stopping every few steps. She was following a signal that strengthened as she moved.
She stopped where the ground was strongest.
She stood over that spot for a long moment. Then she crouched, set the device flat against the stone, and waited.
Underneath Soren’s floor, Mona’s whole body shifted to face that exact same spot.
◆◆◆◆
"She’s reading the dirt," Selah said. She’d come to the window. "What’s in the dirt."
"Mona thinks something is."
"Mona thinks you’re in everything," Selah noted, though she was watching the monitor too. The frost had begun to climb the back of her hand unbidden.
"She doesn’t point like that for nothing."
Soren ran it.
The second watcher logged ground frequencies, and Mona was an earth bond,the only beast in the pack that lived in the ground and read it.
Selah read cold; Mona read dirt. It was the same instinct, just a different element.
If the watcher’s handheld was tuned to subsurface signatures, there was a version of this where the watcher had been finding Mona for days, dismissing her as terrain noise.
That was the version he could live with.
There was a worse version.
Mona wasn’t pointing at the watcher.
Mona was pointing past the watcher toward the same focal point.
This meant both were reading a third thing,something below them that emitted a frequency strong enough to lead the academy’s machine straight to it.
Soren had felt that frequency before.
Weeks back, the night Mona first surfaced, there had been something under the campus that moved when she moved.
He’d dismissed it as a breach leftover,the wound left by the severed channel,and assumed it had gone quiet after the cut.
It hadn’t gone quiet.
It had gone deep.
The frequency hadn’t gone quiet; it had simply retreated.
And Mona, who could only sense his presence in this world, had just discovered something in the depths that resonated exactly like him.
◆◆◆◆
He watched the second watcher pick her device up off the stone.
She looked at the screen.
She studied the screen longer than a clean reading required. Voss had stood over the frost she couldn’t name for the same length of time.
This woman wasn’t photographing; she was comparing the screen to a recorded value.
Two readings. One frequency.
Soren didn’t need to see the screen to recognize a matched pair. The thing in the ground and the thing she’d been hunting on campus emitted the same signal.
Now she had both numbers side by side, and the only question left was what walked around upstairs carrying the second one.
The answer to that was in his dorm with her face against the floor.
"Selah," Soren said, not turning from the window. "Mona stays inside. She doesn’t go to the courtyard, and she doesn’t follow that signal down. Not until I know what’s holding the other end of it."
"You think she’d listen to that?"
"No, that’s the problem" He watched the watcher pocket the device and start back toward the admin wing.
Her pace was faster than a woman with nothing to report.
Down at his feet, Mona pushed off the floor.
She went to the door, then the wall, her clumsy body suddenly finding a line,a heading. She had decided where she was going and was only waiting for the floor to get out of her way.
She wasn’t tracking anymore.
She was leaving.
"Mona," Soren said.
She put her claws to the baseboard, at the seam where the stone met the dirt of the academy"s foundation, and she began to dig.
