Kade closed the door with a quiet click that felt like a decision. The Prince's side room smelled of chalk, hot metal from ward plates cooling on a cart, and tea that had gone past kindness into medicine. Maps lay layered on the long table, corridors sketched in pencil over older vellum routes that had belonged to other headmasters and other empires. Lysanne set two black tokens in the center, side by side, notches at two o'clock like a matched mistake.
Rem placed the copied ward tab beside them. It looked harmless. That was the point. Harmless things get invited into locked rooms.
Evelyn took the blank ledger from her satchel and set it down with the care you give something that will be evidence later. She did not speak. The silence did the work until the Prince nodded once.
"Walk me through it," he said.
No drama. Just sequence. Rem gave him corridors and times, where the baseboard stood a thumb off true, where the chalk dust had pooled, how the door to Records Annex had released at a knuckle-touch when it should have sung. He described the way the token had spun, the way the lacquer had caught light and then refused it. He kept his voice even, as if this were a spar rather than a theft measured in fingerprints and minutes.
Evelyn supplied the details you only notice if you bend your head and listen with your palm. Same mirror hand. Same wrong sweetness under the chalk. Same quick smear that hoped to make a habit look like a mess. She did not say the dungeon's name, only the way its absence had smelled.
Kade stood still as weather behind the Prince's chair. His shadow looked like a second door. The Prince turned one token with a fingertip and then set it back where Lysanne had placed it, exactly aligned with its twin.
"We do not raid our own vault at noon," he said at last. "We watch who comes for it at night." He looked up, eyes clear. "Keys before names."
He shifted to Kade, and the man nodded once. "Rotation," Kade said. "Professor Ardent reads the pattern. Adjunct Vale watches the threads. Lady Verran and Avern run proximity patrols around Records Annex and Laundry East. I sit on the air that moves between offices and people who wish they had walls."
Lysanne's smile brightened and sharpened at the same time. "I will also plant two more lines tuned to different pluck frequencies. If they pinch one, the other sings with my name on it." She tapped her cuff. "Quietly."
The Prince took a measured breath and let it out without the show of relief. "Good. We do not give them a new story to tell. We let them finish the one they already started, in front of the right witnesses."
He turned to Rem without ceremony. "This will look like nothing. You will be tempted to make it loud. Do not. Close angles. Let the trap breathe."
Rem nodded. "Understood."
Evelyn met the Prince's gaze and spoke for the first time. "Avern's observations are clean. I back them." No embellishment. Trust reads louder when it is quiet.
The Prince raised his cup. His hand shook once and then remembered itself. "Keys before names," he repeated. "Remember that."
They split without chatter. Ardent intercepted them in a near-empty classroom that faced the yard, dust motes turning in a slant of late light. He had already filled half a board with thin lines that connected and refused to tangle. Chalk dust rimmed his nails like frost.
"Access," he said. He wrote it again for students who needed chalk to hear. "Opportunity." Another word, another neat circle. "Incentive." He underlined the last one and left it alone. "You cannot name motive before you know mechanism. This afternoon you know mechanism. Good. Now find where it meets convenience."
He marked three points with sharp dots. Laundry East. Records Annex. A corridor that cut behind the auditorium. He did not look at them as he set the chalk down.
"Where can a person stop for eight seconds without being obvious," Ardent asked.
Rem glanced out the window at the yard, down the hall, and then closed his eyes and ran his feet through the places he had walked since he arrived. He could feel floor dips the way other people remember songs.
"Under the east stair," he said. "Between the third and fourth steps. People lift the bucket there. They take exactly two breaths. Eight seconds if they are tired."
Ardent drew a neat X. "Where else."
"The corner by the second cistern," Rem said. "The floor dips and the smell hides you. You can listen to the laundry wheel and nobody hears your breath. Eight seconds."
Ardent marked it. "One more."
"The alcove by Records where the lamp chain sticks," Rem said. "You pull once. It hesitates. You stare at it because you think that will help. You leave. Eight seconds and nobody remembers your back."
Ardent nodded once, as if someone had finally lined his pencils up with his patience. "Avern. You stopped before you cut this morning."
"Once," Rem said.
"Do it again tonight," Ardent said. He shifted his attention to Evelyn, and there was respect in it that he did not dress as praise. "Marks in chalk. If he blanks, anchor. If he does not, do it anyway."
"I planned to," she said.
"Adjunct," Ardent said to Lysanne, "bait them without making noise."
"I was born to be quiet," Lysanne said, then grinned because that was a lie and everyone knew it. "I will be very quiet."
They bled into corridors where students still believed the day would continue because the Board said it would. Lamps woke up with clicks and small sighs. Laundry bucked and rattled beyond a wall. Evelyn and Rem took the long service hall at a pace that set the body for patience. The floor here had two languages: the smooth of years and the grit of last night.
Rem rolled his shoulder and felt the dagger tug. "Do you trust me to stop if it pulls," he asked.
Evelyn did not pretend to think. "I trust you to count out loud. I trust myself to pull."
The band at his wrist tightened a fraction, not ice, not a bite, just a hand closing around a thought. He glanced at her. She had already set her palm at the base of his neck. In four. Out six. He counted half under his breath. By the time he reached six, the band had eased like a dog that remembered it did not need to bark if the person at the door belonged.
Lysanne watched without stepping closer. She wrote a neat line in her book that was not about fear. "Logged," she said. "No cold. Only strain. Resolved with proximity and count."
"Normal," Evelyn said.
"Very normal," Lysanne echoed, and somehow made it sound like comfort.
They passed Records Annex without slowing. The door remembered how to look innocent. In the little anteroom where Lysanne had set her two-point line, she added a second above it, pins set with different tension, a filament thinner than hair. She palmed a ledger out of her bag. The leather smelled new and honest. She had left a harmless tell in the spine glue that only she could identify later.
"They will spot one if they are proud," she murmured. "Let them. Pride is loud."
"Lead the way, Nerd," Rem said under his breath.
"Stay on my marks," she said, and that was the closest she ever came to smiling in public.
Kade appeared with three silent steps and a folded letter. He could have been a shadow except for the clean white seal impressed at the bottom. Demeanore's office had sent it five hours ago. The letter said very little. It said enough.
They did not need it until they did. A senior administrator arrived with apology and frost arranged on his face. He did not raise his voice. "Evening hours are for study," he said. "Security presence in service spaces creates unease. Please relocate to the public yard."
Kade unfolded the letter like he was revealing weather. The seal looked small and final. The administrator read it once and learned something about gravity. He bowed out without losing face, which was his real job. His assistant opened his mouth, saw Ardent behind Kade, and closed it again.
Ardent did not comment. His mouth might have thinned. It might have been the light.
They walked a loop until the lamps took the last of the day and the corridors learned to be narrow. Laundry East rattled with the last turn of wheels. Records Annex wore emptiness like a habit. Lysanne's cuff threads lay quiet. Rem mapped eight-second halts with his body, felt where a hand could lift and press and not be caught by the wrong pair of eyes.
"Eat," Kade told them, and sent them to the pantry with a flick of two fingers. He took the post by a door that moved gossip better than any corridor.
They chewed bread that would be stale in an hour. Rem leaned his shoulder against cool stone and listened for the building under the building. Water in pipes, the sigh of a boiler, a tiny groan in a wooden doorframe that meant somebody leaned against it too often when they were tired.
"I do not like quiet when it is too clean," he said.
Evelyn handed him water and did not tell him to stop thinking. "Quiet is a kind of noise," she said. "You just have to decide if it is speaking to you or about you."
Lysanne finished a heel of bread, wiped her hands, and peeked around the door with cheerful disrespect for the idea of fear. "The first lie is that nothing is happening," she said, and her smile had edges. "The second is that you will catch them by being louder."
Rem snorted. "You do not like loud."
"I like precise," she said. "Loud happens on its own."
A bell somewhere tried to decide whether it was evening or fatigue and rang like both. The first thread hummed then, a thin pluck that traveled through Lysanne's bones to her cuff. A heartbeat later the second line sang lower, tuned to a different touch.
"We have company," she said.
They did not run. Running is a sound. They crossed the last stretch like a thought you only say aloud at the right moment. The anteroom looked like an anteroom. The door to Records looked like a door. The copied tab sat in the slot again, perfect as a counterfeit coin. A young man in a brown vest had his head cocked toward the thread, puzzled. He saw them and tried to make his whole body into a shrug.
Rem set two fingers on the edge where skin would not live in the groove and lifted. The door released with the same professional lie. Inside, the neat stack of clean ward tabs was gone. On the tray sat one tab that had been pressed onto a seal and then lifted too fast. The impression sat half-made, warm still, like a breath that had not finished turning into a word.
The courier in the vest flinched toward a side door. Kade was not there and then he was, a hand on the boy's wrist with the gentleness that keeps people alive and the firmness that makes them talk later.
"I am a courier," the clerk said in a voice already planned. He had sweat at the hairline and a smudge of chalk on his sleeve he did not know about. His shoes had a crescent of lacquer caught in the left tread, two o'clock like the token notch. "I pick up blanks on instruction. I do not write anything. I do not read anything. I was told to come during the pre-brief hours tomorrow. That is all. That is all. I swear."
"Who told you," Kade asked.
"A woman," the boy said, miserable and careful. Then he corrected himself because he had practiced the line wrong. "No, a voice. Through the laundry door. Coin in a dish. Black token through the slot. Pick up, leave. I have never seen a face. I do not want to see a face."
Lysanne watched the edges of his eyes while he spoke. He was not lying about the parts that mattered. He was also very proud of not knowing anything. That, too, was training.
Ardent's attention skimmed the room and settled on the half-impressed tab, then the warmth on the metal tray, then the clerk's shoes. He crouched, touched the lacquer flake with a thumb, and straightened.
"Courier is real," Ardent said. "Story is practiced. He believes it because it is small." He made the word small feel like a diagnosis and not an insult. He flicked a glance to Rem. "Keep his route in your head. Three points. Eight seconds."
They took the boy to the Prince's side room ten minutes later. The Prince had not moved from the map table. His cup had been replaced. The tea still looked like a negotiation. He studied the courier as if the boy were a ledger with handwriting that wanted to be better.
"We do not arrest him," the Prince said. "We seed him."
Kade turned the matched tokens in his hand and then handed one to the boy and held the other back. The notches looked like a private language. "Take this back," Kade said to the clerk. "If they ask what happened, say the front door was occupied and a man with a scar on his chin told you to use the side door. Do not embellish. Do not be clever. Be tired and hungry and small."
"I can do that," the clerk said, because that is what he had done his whole life.
Lysanne brushed the token with a clear jelly from a tiny vial. "If they exchange it in a hurry, I will know which hand touched it next. It will not glow. It will behave. Like me."
The Prince folded his fingers together. "The pre-brief tomorrow gives them cover and crowd. They picked it because it is an administrative fog. We will be in the fog. You will stand where the fog is thinnest."
He looked at Rem. "Close angles," he said again. "Let the bait breathe. If you see a blade, measure what you break."
Rem nodded. He felt the band tighten once and ease, as if it agreed.
They let the courier go with Kade's eyes on his back and Ardent's silence on his shoulders. The boy disappeared into corridors that swallow small men and do not burp. Ardent erased two lines on the board with his thumb and redrew them closer to the auditorium.
"This is not a theft of convenience," he said to no one in particular. "It is a rehearsal."
They stepped into the hall. The Academy had lowered its voice. Doors muttered, the way doors do when their hinges need oil and a person needs courage. The lamps seemed to listen.
On the way toward the auditorium, Lysanne tucked her notebook and hummed a scrap of a tune light enough to be a trick for her nerves and not a song anyone else could name. Rem walked on the inside where a wall could not surprise him without warning. Evelyn took the outer curve and marked points with her eyes the way a navigator marks a coast with a pencil: stair, alcove, curtain corner, door with a good shadow.
They passed an administrator who had found his smile and a junior who had lost his. A pair of lecturers whispered against a column and tried to make gossip sound like policy. Kade did not look at them. They stopped whispering anyway.
The auditorium stood open for air. The boards had been polished to a shine that taught shoes to be careful. Banners hung back from the stage with the sort of sternness that screams order without saying a word. The pre-brief would paint itself here tomorrow and people would believe it because the lights would be kind.
Rem stepped onto the lip of the stage and looked at the back curtain where a person could stand and be furniture. He ran the walk in his head. Step, halt for eight seconds, step, breathe, step, a hand lifts, presses, a seal learns a new habit. He pictured the courier in brown vest and felt how small the boy would make himself while he did something large.
"Measure what you break," the Prince had said. Rem looked at the curtain cords, at the fragile little pulleys in the rigging, the way the long drape pooled, and he could see three ways to end a man with fabric and two with a knot if it came to that. He let the thought pass like a trick of light on polished boards.
Evelyn paused halfway up the side stair and set her palm against the wall. The temperature bled into her skin a degree too cool. Stone under her hand thumped once, a polite knock from the wrong side. The sensation lived deep in the heel of her hand, where the body keeps memories it does not want in the head.
She marked the stair with a scuff her own eyes would see tomorrow and most would not. The wrong sweetness rode the air under the varnish. She did not name it. Naming is a promise. She was not ready to make it.
The band around Rem's wrist tightened a fraction in answer, as if something old had turned its head in its sleep. He looked at Evelyn. She did not look back. Her gaze had gone narrow and far, the way it had in the dungeon before the world learned his name.
Lysanne edged onto the stage and peered into the side wings with professional cheerfulness, as if she were looking for extra chairs and not saboteurs. "The auditorium smells like polish and speeches," she said. "I will bring a pen that does not leak on banners." She glanced at the curtain cord, then at Rem. "And maybe gloves."
"Bring both," Rem said.
"Bring patience," Evelyn added, and finally let her hand slip off the wall.
They stood for a moment in the space where announcements happen, where truths learn how to be official. The boards held a scuff at center stage where a thousand shoes had stopped and pretended not to shake. Light pooled across the first rows like a promise of warmth nobody could actually spend.
Rem stepped back off the lip. He could hear Ardent's chalk again, crisp and relentless. Access. Opportunity. Incentive. He would not know the third until it tried to sign its name.
They left the stage with the quiet you use when you do not want to scare a thing you plan to catch. Outside, the corridor breathed once and then remembered it was a corridor. Lysanne folded her hands behind her back and looked like a student who had never been anywhere near a crime in her life.
"Tomorrow," Kade said from the doorway, as if the word were a command and not a measure of time.
"Tomorrow," Evelyn echoed.
Rem adjusted the strap across his chest, felt the weight of the dagger settle where it belonged, and took one more look at the curtain. He could feel the eight seconds in his bones already, the place where breath slows by choice and lies for you. He did not smile. He did not scowl. He counted to four and let it out to six without thinking.
The auditorium smelled like polish and speeches. Under the varnish, the wall breathed once.