They opened the auditorium an hour before the bell. The wood had been polished until it remembered mirrors. Banners hung back from the stage like held breath. The air smelled of wax, wool, iron from the old light rigging, and the faint sweetness of citrus oil rubbed into handrails when the building wanted to look civilized.
Crowds make their own weather. Cohorts flowed in waves. Seniors took the rear gallery with folded arms, first-years packed the middle rows tight, and instructors settled like stones in a river and let the current find a way around them. Maintenance rolled a cart of spare lecterns along the side aisle and argued in whispers about screws that refused to belong to any known size.
Kade spoke without raising his voice. "Positions."
Rem nodded and slipped through the side door to the wings. He pressed his palm once to the curtain's thick edge and found the seam where fabric met rope and habit. He counted the steps from that edge to the service door in the back wall. Six slow paces, eight if you walked like someone who belonged in places people did not see. The bracelet tightened as if a hand had closed around his wrist, not cold, not warning, just a reminder.
Evelyn moved to the lateral aisle, one hand trailing the stone. She was not obvious about it. She touched the wall the way people touch walls when they live inside a place and forget it can bite.
Lysanne walked the central aisle with a stack of boring papers and a smile that could pass customs. At the baseboard near the service door she knelt as if to tie a shoe and set a clear filament the width of a hair across the plinth, pin to pin, then a second thread above it with a different tension. Her thumb brushed her bracelet once and the faintest light inside it answered, not for show, for her alone.
Ardent took the upper gallery and leaned his forearms on the rail. He studied the back-and-forth of the room until the pattern revealed its delays. The small pauses where guards were too polite, the longer ones where a student learned the wrong lesson from a rope line, the empty breath after a bell. He did not look down to find his team. He looked for the seven seconds that did not advertise themselves.
"Four," Rem said to himself, breath in. "Six," and he let it out. The bracelet eased. He settled behind the curtain, weight set, blade where it belonged. He could smell dust and old velvet and a ghost of smoke from when the Academy had allowed cigarettes in the wings. He could see a triangle of stage light through a cut in the fabric where a knife had once been careless.
Students kept coming. The Prince arrived without ceremony and took a seat three rows back from the dais with two plainclothes at the edges of his shadow. Even that changed the room. The instructors collected themselves into a line as if the floor had requested it. A wardmaster checked a plate and smiled at his own competence.
Kade drifted to the stage stairs and did not climb them. He was a fact disguised as a man.
The courier from the night before entered with his brown vest and his practiced smallness. He carried a satchel that could have held blank keys or bread or both. He hesitated as if deciding which door was more his than the others, then fixed his eyes on the service hatch tucked behind the curtain and went where he had been taught to go.
Lysanne's upper thread hummed in her cuff, then the lower one sang two notes lower. She blotted the sensation with her thumb and walked on so the signal would not read as signal.
Behind the curtain Rem felt air move across the back of his hand. The courier paused in the eight-second pocket. A second figure joined him, nothing to see from the house, a shape as ordinary as a backstage stool. Gloved hands met over the satchel with a grace that belonged to practice. A black token passed from one palm to another and came back different. The satchel lightened and then felt the same because humans do not know how to weigh paper by feel when they are afraid.
Rem did not lunge. He closed angle without touch. He watched the wrists. The gloves were not Association issue. There was a seam out of place on the inside wrist, a thread a shade too pale. Pearl gray, he thought. It felt like nobility pretending at work.
The gloved hand withdrew to the wall and slid through a narrow service opening no wider than a shoulder blade. The courier hunched his vest down and strolled out as if he had never learned the meaning of the word mission.
Lysanne had not stopped smiling. She crossed the aisle at a diagonal that read as aimless and brushed the satchel with the corner of her paper stack. The gel she had laid on last night's token answered inside her cuff with a quiet, satisfied thrum. Her eyes did not change. In her ledger she wrote one word: positive.
"Seven," Ardent murmured to himself, eyes on the way a light blinked a hair slow and then returned to work. "Eight. Nine." The room returned to itself on the ninth second. He noted the rhythm and filed it in the part of his mind that counts, not the part that names.
Evelyn reached the niche at stage left where the wall curved inward. She set her palm to the stone the way you set a hand on the chest of someone asleep. Warmth lived there that did not belong to masonry. The tab on the little tray in the recess had been pressed to a seal and lifted too fast. The impression was half-deep, half born, and the metal still held memories of heat. She did not touch it. She looked at it until her eyes believed what they were seeing and the rest of her believed nothing she had not tested.
A polite cough brought a deputy administrator to Kade's shoulder. "Security is very visible," he said, soft. "For the image."
Kade held up a folded sheet stamped with a clean white seal. "Authorized," he said. It was a word, not a negotiation.
The administrator swallowed his next argument and turned that swallow into a smile. "Excellent," he said, and backed away as if he had been planning to.
In the cover of that exchange the gloved figure cut across the gap between curtain and side door and handed the satchel to a second person near the rigging ladder. Rem felt the movement more than he saw it, the way you feel a draft when someone opens a door in a house you know very well. He did not chase. He matched angles using ropes and pulleys and the habit of fabric to hide motion. Predator, but with manners.
Lysanne's cuff thrummed twice in quick succession. She did not change stride. "The gel traveled," she told the air. "Person two."
The Prince took the dais and the room found the silence that good wood deserves. His opening lines were simple: travel logistics, ward limits, zones of fluctuating mana, rules about artifacts. His voice had the kind of calm that makes people believe the ground loves them. Rem watched the back of the drape move a little with the breath that speech gives rooms.
On the far side of the stage EveIyn felt a slow wave pass under the plaster like a fish under a boat. Wrong sweetness, faint. The same signature that had tugged her hand in the corridor. It rode the wall for two beats and then left as if it had heard its name on a tongue and chosen to be shy.
Ardent's gaze flicked once to the balcony clock, once to the rope that controlled the left banner, once to the seam where stage met wing. He did not signal. He did not need to. The nine-second window had passed again. Their craftsmen were professionals. They worked inside that window like it had been taught to them by a master.
The courier in brown had not left. He sat near the back, knees pressed together, hands folded on the satchel like a boy in a church pew. He looked down when the Prince spoke as if ashamed to be known to the same air.
Lysanne ghosted by and let the satchel brush her sleeve. The cuff hummed. The gel's marker had made the trip to the new token. The chain existed now in small truths, not ideas.
Rem slid along the wing and stepped through a narrow gap at the same pace a stagehand would use if he was pretending to look for a missing pin. He found the second handoff in the shadow under the rigging ladder, the satchel open just enough for a gloved hand to slip a tiny book inside, leather so new it still smelled like animals. He saw a wrist pivot toward a service panel, saw a shoulder hitch that meant someone had caught a snag a hundred times in the same place and resented that the world allowed snags.
He let the person move past him. It offended parts of him. He did it anyway.
"Not yet," he said under his breath, and felt the weight of the blade keep him honest.
Lysanne's thread along the plinth near the service door thrummed again, faster, higher. She did not look. She moved to the aisle nearest Records Annex and drifted into the source of drafts. "They are using the conduit," she said, bright as if she had noticed the weather. "Back to the room."
Evelyn reached the niche and saw the half-pressed tab had been set back slightly crooked. She made herself accept that detail without judgment. Let them finish. She did not like the way her fingers prickled. She ignored that too.
The Prince kept speaking, giving the room what it needed so the wrong people could believe no one cared about them. He was good at that. Rem heard the words without hearing them: group assignments, drop points, medical support, rules about unsupervised contact with native fauna. He knew how to be an audience when he had to.
Ardent marked an interval down to the breath. Seven to nine seconds, always in that band, never outside of it. The pattern was craft, not chaos. His mouth tilted. He preferred craft. Craft hangs itself with the rope it made earlier.
They did not make the arrest. They let the satchel go out the service door and into the conduit that led to the records hallway. They watched what the hands chose when no one told them where to put things.
The room exhaled when the Prince concluded and the wardmaster took the dais with a stack of forms and the patience of granite. People stood and scraped shoes. Banners fluttered in the breath that follows endings.
Kade touched his throat with two fingers. "Back hall," he said into the air.
They moved quiet. The conduit carried the satchel's smell like an admission. Records Annex was not empty, because Records Annex liked to pretend it had never been alone a day in its life. It was a good lie. They went around the lie with the ease of people who had met it yesterday.
The anteroom door released again at Rem's knuckle. Inside, in the quiet that only administrative rooms know, a ledger sat in a place where it did not belong. It looked identical to the others if you were tired or in a hurry. It was not. In the binding glue a tell no one but Lysanne would notice waited like a private joke.
She ran a fingernail along the seam and smiled for real. "Caught," she said softly.
In a drawer that should have held twine and wax lay a thin carnet of maintenance hours. The sheet on top did not match the schedules posted on the board by five minutes and two rooms. Ardent copied nothing. He read the pattern and spoke it. "They place themselves in the gap between the schedule and the version of the schedule people remember."
"Keys before names," Rem said.
Ardent tapped the edge of the ledger with one nail. "They write the world first."
Evelyn studied the shelves and the bare places where boxes had been and were not. Powder traced an arc on the floor where something had been lifted too fast. The wrong sweetness was a breath in the corner, old by an hour and still rude. She marked the location with her eyes the way guards mark exits.
"Leave it," Kade said. "Let them think the room still belongs to them."
They replaced nothing. They disturbed nothing they did not have to. They shut the door without making the latch speak and stood in the hall as if they had been talking about the weather the whole time.
The corridor carried normal again. A clerk coughed. A bell tried to be important and failed. The building went back to its best trick, which was to look like a building.
They were halfway to the stair when the wall to Evelyn's right thumped twice in a row. Not loud. Close. The bracelet on Rem's wrist tightened in answer. It felt like a hunter holding its breath.
Kade took a folded scrap from a runner who did not stop moving. He read the three lines, then read them again as if the second reading would be kinder. It was not.
"Change of plan," he said. "Pre-brief is the last calm hour you will get. The end-year assessment has been advanced by one day. Departure is tomorrow at dawn. Reason given: logistics."
Lysanne's eyebrows climbed, then settled. "It is adorable when they tell very big lies with very small words."
Rem looked at the ledger with the tell in the spine and then at the hall that had decided to be honest by accident. "They want us moving before we learn to close all the doors."
Ardent nodded. "The exam is cover. Good cover. On an island with partial wards, eight seconds becomes most of a life."
The Prince appeared at the end of the corridor with two escorts and none of the show. He did not ask what they had found. He looked at Kade's face and adjusted his stride by a fraction, as if stepping over a truth.
"Tomorrow," he said.
Evelyn's gaze slid to the wall once more. The stone was cool under her fingers, too cool for a building that had held so many people for so long. She lifted her hand and left a clean scuff at ankle height on the baseboard where only she and one other person would know to look.
Rem rolled his shoulder and felt the dagger settle. In the wings of his mind, the curtain moved again. Eight seconds behind it had been a trade. Eight seconds under open sky would be a creed.
The auditorium had smelled like polish and speeches. The island would smell like salt and wet leaves and something that had learned to be hungry a very long time ago.
Eight seconds behind the curtain was a profession.
On an island with no curtains, it was a religion.