26. Sebastian
SEBASTIAN
Three days after, the network starts bleeding harder. "Suppress the garage clip," I say. "Reroute through—"
"Already mirrored and decaying," Elias says without looking up. "It'll read as a hoax by morning. Lisbon's the problem. Cyrus isn't taking the network. He's making it bleed where humans can watch."
Controlled bursts. A man who wants me to look unfit, not destroyed. There's a difference, and Cyrus has always got that.
I have not slept in two days, since Jasmine left. The bond keeps reminding me of it. I keep busy, ignoring the pull, and fight what Cyrus and his clan are doing.
"Munich's gone quiet," Elias says.
"Good. Everything is salvageable."
It would be simpler to lock her away in a sealed cell. Have people at every single door. Her safe is better than her dead. Each thought that rises, I bury, because I have this war to deal with. Gid comes without knocking, sets a cup of something black in front of me.
"Drink that," he says.
"I'm working."
"You're swaying." He turns a chair, sits with his arms folded over the back. He doesn't say the rest. He's said it before, and he knows I've stopped hearing it.
I notice a silence between us all that I'm not used to. Elias has stopped clicking the mouse, and Gid isn't moving papers. I turn to see what is going on, and Elias' face is in a state of shock.
"What?"
"Permissions just contradicted themselves." His fingers move. "There's a record in one archive that shouldn't render for me. It's reading as deleted and sealed."
"Cyrus' people, poking at the archive?"
"No. This is old. But I think they are attempting to get to it." He turns the screen — a directory tree, half of it corrupted into symbols. "The metadata's stripped, but there's a name buried in it."
"A name?" He doesn't answer right away. "Elias."
"Carter," he says. "Mickey Carter."
"Her father died in a robbery," I say. "Twenty years ago. A mugging gone wrong. She told me." I don't replay the other information — the two small wounds at the throat the coroner couldn't explain.
"He's not filed as a robbery victim," Elias says. "He's filed as a mortal exposure risk. Human investigative contact. Monitored, classified, then—" he scrolls, "—buried inside restricted records. Not police records. Ours."
"Read it."
"I can't. That's the point. The file is protected under an old authority. All I have is the corrupted version. We didn't simply kill him and forget him. We documented him."
"So she's been grieving a story we wrote."
Jasmine has carried that grief for years, and underneath it the whole time was a lie with our fingerprints on it.
"The seal," I say. "Whose authority?"
"Stripped. But the suppression order that moved the file carries a partial mark. Dain-side."
Decades. Long before I ever felt the floor of my life shift when I met her.
She wasn't pulled into this because of me.
Her Dad had been in this world already. The bond made me her ending.
That's not why Cyrus is coming for her, he's doing it to protect himself.
Cyrus must believe she inherited whatever Mickey found.
He may think she carries answers she's never once heard spoken aloud.
Which makes her more dangerous to him empty than full.
"I can't open the file," he says at last. "But the suppression order references a physical packet. A sealed council docket, archived off-network the year Mickey died. If it still exists, it's in the old western vault. Whoever sealed it trusted the archives over servers."
"Then we go to the archives," I say. "Tonight."
The western archive sits beneath a shuttered coin exchange three blocks from the river, hidden under a business that has not sold anything to the living in thirty years.
Rain slicks the pavement when we arrive. Gid takes the street first, then the doorway, then the roofline across from us. Elias stays beside me with the archive reference open on his phone, the screen dimmed until the light barely touches his face.
"No guards?" Gid asks.
"Old places like this don't use guards," Elias says. "They use reputation."
"Reputation doesn't stop thieves."
"No. It only stops the polite ones."
I place my hand against the brass plate. The metal warms under my palm, and something inside the building answers with a deep mechanical click. The door opens inward.
Dust waits for us. Not office dust. Not the harmless gray skin of abandoned rooms. This is bitter with paper and sealed wood, the kind of air that has been left alone too long. The corridor slopes down, narrow and tiled, each step taking us farther from the city above.
Elias moves ahead with a small light. "No network signal."
"Good," I say.
The vault door at the bottom carries no keypad, no biometric reader, nothing modern enough to be convenient. Only a wheel set into black iron and three seals stamped into the frame. Ashford. Vandosse. Crowe.
Gid looks at the third seal. "You knew this existed?"
"I knew the archive existed," I say. "I didn't know it still held council dockets."
I turn the wheel. Iron complains softly, then gives.
The archive is smaller than I expect and more carefully kept.
Shelves rise from floor to ceiling, each row stacked with sealed packets, books, bone-colored boxes tied with cord.
Thousands of decisions no one wanted placed inside machines.
Thousands of truths judged too dangerous for memory and too useful for destruction.
"There," Elias says.
The shelf is labeled by hand. The ink has browned with age. Mortal Exposure Events. Human Contacts. Containment Actions.
Mickey Carter should be a packet among the others. His place is empty. The dust makes that clear. A rectangle of clean wood cuts through the shelf where something rested for years and was lifted recently enough that the air has not yet dirtied the absence.
Gid crouches, touches two fingers to the shelf, then smells them. "Someone beat us here."
"How long?"
"Hours. Maybe less."
The bond tugs again, sharp so I have to hold my hand around the shelf. Jasmine is out there, hunted by men who may know more about her father than she does. Elias opens the ledger beneath the shelf. His finger moves down the entries until it stops.
"Mickey Carter. Packet removed under emergency authority."
"By whom?"
"The name has been scratched out."
"Can you recover it?"
"No." He bends closer. "But the witness mark survived."
He turns the ledger toward me.
A circle. A thorned bird. A partial Dain stamp pressed so hard into the paper it bruised the page underneath. This is proof that Cyrus is trying to hide something. He's frightened of something and I realize I have a way to end this war if I can find the truth.