Rain slicked the cobblestones of the Records Office courtyard, turning the grey stone dark and slick. Kessa Tahr didn't slow down. She marched toward the heavy iron doors, her courier's cloak shedding water like oil.
"Voss eats clerks for breakfast," she said, not looking back. Her voice cut through the drumming of the rain. "He likes them scared, quiet, and disposable. You're going to be two of those things."
Silas adjusted the collar of his own stiff, cheap coat. It scratched his neck, a constant, itchy reminder that he was wearing another man's identity. "Which two?"
"Quiet and disposable." She stopped at the door, her hand resting on the iron ring. "Don't speak unless spoken to. Don't correct his math unless it saves him money. And for the love of the Tide, don't stare at his wig."
Silas blinked, wiping water from his lashes. "He wears a wig?"
"It's a hairpiece. And he thinks it's invisible." Kessa reached into her belt and pulled out a tight roll of parchment. She shoved it into Silas's chest with enough force to bruise. "Read this. Now."
Silas took it. The paper was damp, covered in Kessa's sharp, hurried scrawl. "What is it?"
"Ore Primer. Standard Crown grades. If you mix up slate and stillstone, he'll skin you and use you to bind the next volume." She pushed the door open. A blast of dry, heated air hit them, smelling of dead ink, old dust, and the sour rot of bureaucracy. "You have five minutes before he notices you. Memorize it."
She vanished into the gloom of the hallway, leaving him standing on the threshold.
Silas stepped inside, shaking the rain from his sleeves. He unrolled the scroll. It was a dense list of mineral densities, yield rates, and hardness scales.
Slate: Brittle, flakes under pressure. Use: Roofing, writing tablets. Basalt: Heavy, porous. Use: Foundations, sea-walls. Stillstone (Raw): Toxic dust, moderate hardness. Stillstone (Grade-A / Pure): 9.8 Mohs hardness. Diamond-equivalent structure. Resistant to impact, heat, and acid. Use: Fortress foundations, beacon cores.
"Diamond-equivalent," Silas muttered, tucking the fact away in the back of his mind alongside the courier routes and knife angles he'd learned in the last two days. Harder than steel. Worth more than gold. And apparently, Voss is losing it by the ton.
He walked into the main hall.
The Records Office was a cavern of silence. Rows of clerks sat at cramped desks, scratching quills against paper in a rhythm that sounded like insects eating wood. The air was stifling, heated by massive iron braziers that burned smokeless coal. It felt less like an office and more like a sweatshop for accountants.
High above them, on a raised podium that looked dangerously like a throne, sat Director Halven Voss.
He was a small man made large by his furniture. He wore a velvet coat that was too rich for the room, the deep purple fabric clashing with the grey stone. And there, sitting slightly askew on his sweating forehead, was the hairpiece. It was a tragic thing, stiff and unnaturally dark, like a sleeping animal that had died on his scalp.
Silas approached the podium. He kept his stride stiff, his shoulders hunched. Arlen Mora was a creature of paper, not blades. He needed to look like a man who feared ink stains more than death.
"Director Voss?"
Voss didn't look up. He was signing a document with a flourish that threatened to tear the page. The scratching of his quill was aggressive, violent. "Mora. You're late."
"I'm exactly on time, Director," Silas said, pitching his voice to a helpful, terrified tenor. "The bell just rang."
"In my office, 'on time' is late." Voss finally looked down. His eyes were watery, magnified by spectacles that cost more than Silas's entire cover identity. They swam behind the glass like fish in a bowl. "It implies you were waiting for the bell instead of the work."
He gestured to a stack of books on the corner of his desk. They were leather-bound, heavy, and covered in a layer of dust that suggested they hadn't been touched in months.
"Audit these. Spoilage logs from the deep veins. If the totals don't match the weight, stay until they do."
Silas took the top book. It weighed as much as a shield. "Yes, Director."
He found his assigned desk—a wobbly table in the back row—and sat. The chair was hard, the wood biting into his spine. The light was poor, filtered through grime-streaked windows high above.
Perfect.
He opened the book. The numbers were a mess of scratching and corrections, a chaotic jumble of digits that would have given a normal accountant a migraine. But Silas didn't see the ink. He saw the patterns.
The Courier Mind took over. It was a habit from his life on Earth, running semi-legal packages through the streets. You learned to scan fast. You learned to spot the anomaly in the stream, the glitch that meant a trap. He wasn't reading; he was parsing.
Page 40. Shipment 402. Raw Ore. Spoilage: 12.5%. Page 42. Shipment 403. Refined Slate. Spoilage: 12.5%. Page 45. Shipment 404. Grade-A Pure Stillstone. Spoilage: 12.5%.
Silas paused. His finger hovered over the column.
He thought back to the damp scroll in his pocket. Grade-A Stillstone. 9.8 Mohs hardness. Diamond-equivalent.
You could drop a crate of Grade-A from a tower and it would only chip the pavement. It didn't crack. It didn't crumble. It certainly didn't "spoil" at the exact same rate as cheap, brittle slate.
You lazy, greedy bastard, Silas thought, a smile touching the corners of his mouth. You didn't even randomize the theft. You just set a flat tax and hoped no one would read the primer.
It was arrogant. It was sloppy. And it was exactly the lever he needed.
Silas stood up. The scrape of his chair leg against the floorboards was loud in the quiet room. The scratching of quills stopped. Every head turned. In Voss's office, you didn't stand until you were dismissed.
Silas walked back to the podium. He could feel the eyes of the other clerks on him. They were waiting for the execution. They wanted to see the new guy get chewed up and spat out.
"Director? A moment regarding the Grade-A manifests."
Voss didn't look up. "File it under 'Resolved', Mora. I don't pay you to ask questions."
"I can't, sir," Silas said, loud enough for the front row to hear. "The math is... perfect."
Voss's quill stopped. "Perfect?"
"Yes. It implies the mine captain is cracking diamonds at the exact same rate as slate. 12.5% across the board." Silas tapped the book. "The primer says Grade-A is impact-resistant. If this log goes to the Crown, they won't think it's spoilage."
Voss turned slowly. The watery eyes narrowed. The smell of expensive cologne wafted down—lavender trying to mask the sour scent of fear-sweat.
"Are you questioning my books, clerk?" Voss asked, his voice a low warning.
"Never, sir," Silas said, meeting his gaze with wide, helpful eyes. "I'm questioning the mine captain's competence. If he's wasting 12.5% of the Crown's best ore, he's stealing from you. I'd hate for the Crown to think you missed it."
The silence stretched. Voss stared at him, searching for the threat. He saw a boring clerk in a cheap coat. But he heard the steel underneath.
I know you're stealing, Silas was saying, without saying a word. I'm offering to help you hide it better.
Voss licked his lips. He looked at the book, then back at Silas. He realized the trap. If he fired Silas, the "error" would remain. If he denied it, he admitted he was too stupid to catch it.
"You have a sharp eye, Mora," Voss said softly. "Dangerous."
"Only for people who make mistakes," Silas replied. "I don't."
Voss reached into his vest. He pulled out a small, iron key and slid it across the polished wood of the podium.
"The real books are in the back archive," Voss said, his voice flat. "Fix the math. Make it... organic. Then we'll talk."
Silas took the key. It was cold against his palm.
"Consider it optimized, Director."
Silas turned and walked back to his desk. He could feel the eyes of the other clerks on him. They weren't looking at him like a victim anymore. They were looking at him like he was a wizard, or a monster.
He sat down and dipped his quill. The ink was black and wet.
Day 3, he thought. And I already have the keys to the kingdom.
Voss thought he'd hired a cleaner. He didn't realize he'd just handed a regicide the murder weapon. If the Regent was building a war chest with stolen ore, this key didn't just open a door. It opened the path to Varis Calder's throat.
The Archive smelled of dry rot, cheap glue, and the dust of a thousand dead trees.
Silas closed the door behind him. The lock clicked with a heavy, oiled thunk that sounded too loud in the silence. The air here was still, thick enough to taste. It felt less like a library and more like a tomb where paper went to die.
Voss doesn't keep skeletons in his closet, Silas thought, eyeing the rows of towering shelves that vanished into the gloom. He files them in the basement.
He moved down the central aisle. His footsteps were silent—a reflex that had nothing to do with Arlen Mora. The floorboards were warped, but Silas knew how to walk on the balls of his feet, distributing his weight to silence the creaks.
Dust motes danced in the single, narrow shaft of light filtering down from a grate high above. It was the only illumination. The rest of the room was swallowed by shadow, the shelves looming like canyon walls.
He scanned the spines. Fiscal Year 990. 991. 992.
The script was archaic, a curling, decorative hand that prioritized aesthetics over legibility. To a normal eye, it would have been a headache. To Silas, it was just data.
Auto-Language Sync: Active.
The interface provided by the Void Citadel flickered in his peripheral vision. The curling letters smoothed out, overlaid with crisp, blue text.
[Fiscal Year 998 - Ore Output & Spoilage]
Year 998. Whatever calendar this world runs on, I've got a date to work with.
It was useful, but it took the romance out of discovery. There was no puzzle to solve, no ancient riddle to decipher. Just a database query running in the background of his brain. It made him feel less like an adventurer and more like a biological terminal.
But it gave him an edge. He could read their secrets as easily as he could read a menu. And if he needed to forge their lies? He could do that too. The Sync didn't just translate; it taught. He could feel the shape of the letters in his hand before he even picked up a quill.
He stopped at the section marked Current Quarter.
The records here were newer, bound in grey leather that hadn't yet cracked with age. He ran a finger down the spines, feeling the texture of the hide. It was rough, cheap. Cured rat-skin? Or something worse.
He pulled Volume 4. It was heavy, dense with the weight of unread numbers.
"Bureaucracy," Silas muttered, the sound of his own voice startlingly flat in the quiet room. "The art of making theft look boring."
He carried it to a small, slanted reading desk near the light shaft. He didn't sit. He stood, opening the book with a reverence it didn't deserve. The pages were thin, almost translucent, crinkling under his touch like dried leaves.
He skipped the first few sections—Output (Kilos), Purity (%), Transport Costs. It was all noise. Voss was a careful man; he wouldn't hide the bodies in the front of the book.
Silas flipped to the back.
Spoilage.
The header was written in red ink. A subtle choice.
He expected numbers. He expected to see "12.5%" written in neat, fraudulent columns, matching the fake books outside. He expected to see weights, measures, perhaps a note on "vein collapse" or "seismic instability."
What he found was a list of names.
Silas froze. His hand stopped mid-turn.
The columns were perfectly straight. The handwriting was precise, indifferent. It was the penmanship of a man who didn't care what he was writing, only that it fit within the margins.
Tuesday (Second Day).
Daven, Lira. Grade C. Spoilage.
The memory hit him like a physical blow.
The plaza. The white glare of noon. The smell of hot iron and wet cloth.
The girl with the unfocused eyes. A neck that snapped like dry wood under the axe.
Spoilage.
The word tasted bitter. They didn't even call them casualties. They didn't call them prisoners. To Voss, to Varis Calder, they were just bad ore. Material that hadn't met the standard. "Grade C."
Silas felt a cold, hard knot form in his chest. It wasn't anger—anger was hot, messy. Anger made you sloppy. This was clarity. It was the difference between a brawl and an assassination.
Why her? he thought, staring at the name. She looked like she'd already given up. What kind of threat was a broken pit-worker?
They aren't executing criminals, he realized, his eyes tracing the line. They're clearing space... for what? Terror? Compliance?
He flipped the page. The sound of tearing paper was a gunshot in the quiet room.
He scanned the dates. Each day's entries—names accumulated for the next public reckoning. Wednesday. Thursday. The list went on. Name after name. Some marked "Grade D," some "Grade F." All marked "Spoilage."
Then he saw it.
Friday (Fifth Day). The ink was fresh here—the next batch, not yet sent to the plaza.
Rihl, T. Grade B. Scheduled.
Silas stared at the name. Rihl.
The name meant nothing to him. He didn't know a T. Rihl. Just another collection of letters. Another "unit" of spoilage scheduled for the furnace or the chopping block.
Scheduled.
That was the only part that mattered. Lira Daven was dead. Her entry was closed. But T. Rihl... T. Rihl was still alive.
Silas closed the book. He didn't slam it. He closed it carefully, aligning the edges with the precision of a man handling a bomb.
Save one. Just one. See if it changes anything.
No, Silas corrected. I'm going to kill Voss. Not for the mission. Not for the rebellion. I'm going to kill him for the paperwork.
He memorized the name. Rihl, T. Friday.
He had forty-eight hours to find out who T. Rihl was, and why he was on the list.
But first, he had a job to do.
Silas carried Volume 4 back to the reading desk. These were the real books—the ones Voss and Varis Calder hid from the Crown auditors. They contained the truth of the theft, recorded in flat, lazy percentages. Voss wanted them "fixed" to look like natural variance, just in case someone with a key ever came looking.
Silas dipped a quill in the dry inkwell, adding a drop of water to revive the sludge. It was a mundane task, absurd in the face of what he'd just found. But "Arlen Mora" was a good clerk. Arlen Mora did what he was told.
For the next hour, Silas didn't plot murder. He did math.
He adjusted the yield columns, smoothing out the 12.5% theft into a chaotic, organic curve of natural error and vein impurities. He added simulated "transport loss." He created "moisture evaporation" variances. He made the lie look like the truth.
It was tedious work. It was the kind of work that numbed the soul. But Silas focused on the ink, on the numbers, on the rhythm of the quill. Scratch. Dip. Scratch.
When he was finished, the books were perfect. Voss would look at them and see exactly what he wanted to see: a messy, profitable reality.
Silas wiped the quill and closed the volume. He placed it back on the shelf, sliding it into the gap with a soft shhh.
He turned and walked back to the door. The silence of the Archive didn't feel heavy anymore. It felt like a held breath.
He locked the door behind him. The click echoed in the hallway.
He had the key. Now he just needed the knife.