The Accord keeps records of everything. This is its greatest strength. It is also, eventually, its only flaw.
— Lyra Vane — Archive field notes, year unknown
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The document was three pages long.
It was stamped with a seal Kael had spent six months learning to recognize — the inner seal of the Accord's Operational Division, the one that appeared on actions classified above the Director tier — and it was dated, and it bore a file reference number that he had memorized at age nine in a burning building in the Ashfields, and it contained his mother's full name, her former Accord designation, her research specialty, and the word ELIMINATED with a timestamp.
It also contained, on the third page, in a column titled COLLATERAL ASSESSMENT, a single entry that read: ONE MALE CHILD, APPROX. 9, NULL-STATUS CONFIRMED, DEPRIORITIZED.
Deprioritized.
He had been deprioritized.
He sat with that for a moment in the cold of the Accord's lower administrative archive — which he had accessed through a ventilation passage that connected to the building's sub-basement, a route he had spent three weeks mapping, entering twice before today to confirm that the patrol cycles had not changed — and he let himself feel whatever shape the feeling was before he put it away.
Then he put it away.
Then he read the rest of the document.
✦ ✦ ✦
The operation had been authorized at the Deputy Arbiter level.
Not Director. Deputy Arbiter — two tiers above Director Holt, the woman who had been running the Valos eastern division for eleven years and who was, in Kael's current assessment, the most immediate obstacle between him and the upper levels of the conspiracy. Deputy Arbiter was a designation that corresponded to the Accord's senior executive council — nine individuals who formed the governing body beneath the Supreme Arbiter himself.
The signature on the third page was initialed, not signed. Two letters: V.C.
Kael did not know, yet, what those initials stood for.
He photographed the document with the small lens he'd acquired three months ago from an Archive contact who asked no questions because Archive contacts were paid specifically to ask no questions. He replaced the document in its folder, the folder in its drawer, the drawer in the exact position it had occupied before he opened it — two centimeters from the left edge of the track, which was how whoever had last accessed it had left it, which was a detail that mattered.
He moved to leave.
"The patrol cycle changed last week," said a voice from the shadows near the door. Feminine. Unhurried. The voice of someone who had been there for some time and had made a considered decision about when to speak. "You have about forty seconds before the west corridor guard comes through."
Kael did not freeze. He located the voice — left, approximately four meters, near the shelving that separated the access corridor from the main archive floor. He did not reach for the blade at his ankle because reaching for a blade was a statement of intent that could not be retracted, and he did not yet know what statement this situation required.
"You've been following me," he said.
"For three days," the voice confirmed. "You're very good. I almost lost you twice." A pause. "Almost."
"Who are you?"
"Someone who was in this archive for her own reasons and noticed that the ventilation access she uses was recently used by someone else." A figure stepped out of the shadow between shelving units — a woman, mid-twenties, unremarkable in the specific way of someone who had worked to make themselves unremarkable. Average height. Clothing chosen for erasure. A face that was attentive in a way that most people would read as polite interest and that Kael read as professional assessment. "Thirty seconds."
He moved to the door. She moved with him — not behind him, alongside him, which was a specific choice.
They went through the door and into the service corridor and up two levels and through a maintenance exit that opened into an alley three blocks from the Accord building, and they did it in silence and without incident, and when they emerged into the Valos afternoon, the woman straightened her coat and looked at him with dark eyes that were doing the same thing to him that he did to rooms when he entered them.
"The document you photographed," she said. "ACCORD/OPH."
He looked at her.
"I have the other twelve pages," she said. "The ones they keep in the upper-level archive that you haven't accessed yet." She paused. "Twelve pages you don't have. Three pages you do. I'm proposing an exchange."
"What do you want for them?"
"Information on a separate matter. Something you've been close to without knowing it." She studied him. "You've been watching the eastern operation's supply ledgers. Three months of patterns. I want to know what you know about the distribution node in the Silkway district."
Kael was silent for a moment.
"You're Archive," he said.
She didn't confirm it. She didn't deny it.
"The Silkway node," she said. "And then the twelve pages."
"Why would you give me twelve pages of classified Accord documentation based on an information exchange with someone you've known for four minutes?"
She looked at him for a moment.
"Because I've been watching you for three days," she said. "And I've seen what you do and how you think and what you're willing to risk. And because the document you just photographed — the one with the two initials on the third page —" She let it hang. "I have a file on V.C. I've been building it for two years. And I've been building it alone." Another pause. Shorter. "You're the first person I've encountered who was looking in the same direction without being paid to look away."
The alley. The afternoon light cutting it into shadow and illumination. A woman he had never met telling him she had been investigating the man who killed his mother, for reasons of her own, for two years.
The world was full of patterns. Kael had learned to trust patterns over intentions, because patterns were harder to fake.
"My name is Kael," he said.
"I know," she said. "I'm Lyra." She reached into her coat and produced a folded document — thick, multiple pages. "The Silkway node first. Then these."
He looked at the folded document for a moment.
"How do I know those are the twelve pages?"
She unfolded the top third without hesitation. He saw the Accord seal. He saw the file reference. He saw, at the top of the visible page, a column header that read: SUBJECTS IDENTIFIED — NULL-BORN CLASSIFICATION — and below it, a numbered list whose first entry was his mother's name.
And whose fourteenth entry was his own.
"The Silkway node," Lyra said, refolding the document. "Tell me what you know."
Kael thought about the file. About the number fourteen. About the thirteen names above his mother's and the question of whether those people were alive or dead and what the answer implied about the operation's scope.
He thought about the initials V.C. He thought about a man two tiers above Director Holt who had authorized an operation with enough classification to be stored in an upper-level archive, and about what it meant that this woman had been building a file on that man for two years and was still building it and had apparently not been stopped.
He thought about patterns.
"The Silkway node is a front for the eastern division's off-ledger transport operation," he said. "It processes three shipments a week. The legitimate cargo is medical supply components. The illegitimate cargo is —" He paused. "You already know what it is."
"I know what I think it is," she said. "I want to know what you've confirmed."
"Personnel," he said. "Non-Awakened individuals. Transported without documentation to a facility north of the city whose location I have not yet established."
Lyra was quiet for a moment.
"I know the location," she said.
She held out the folded document.
He took it.
"The facility," he said. "Why haven't you moved on it?"
"Because I don't know what they're doing there," she said. "I know people go in. I've never confirmed that they come out." She looked at him steadily. "I thought you might be motivated to find out."
Kael looked at the document in his hands. Fourteen names. His own, at the bottom. An entry on the first page that read DEPRIORITIZED and that he had spent nine years converting from an administrative oversight into the most expensive miscalculation an organization had ever made.
"Yes," he said. "I think I might be."
He walked back into the city, and the city moved around him, and for the first time since he had arrived in Valos Prime eighteen months ago, he was aware of something that was almost — not quite, not yet — but almost like the sensation of a door opening rather than closing.
He had a name. He had an ally of uncertain loyalty. He had twelve pages he had not yet read.
And somewhere in the upper administrative districts of a city that did not know he existed, a man with the initials V.C. was making decisions he believed were permanent.
Kael looked up at the pylons humming at the city's peak.
He thought: I have been preparing for nine years to be invisible.
He thought: now I need to learn to be found.