The folder was still on the table in the morning.
Aim had half-expected it to be gone — taken back by whoever left it, the whole thing revealed as something he had imagined. But it was there, in the early grey light coming through the window he had closed and locked before going to bed, sitting exactly where they had left it.
Isolde arrived at four with two coffees and the expression of someone who had not slept particularly well either.
She set one cup in front of him and sat across the table, looking at the folder.
"So," she said.
"So," he agreed.
They had read through it twice the night before. Operational orders. Purification deployment schedules. Personnel transfer approvals. All of it bearing the Palace stamp above the RMO letterhead, all of it predating the RMO's own internal records by at least forty-eight hours on every major decision. The RMO hadn't been making choices and reporting them upward. The Palace had been making choices and sending them downward, and the RMO had been executing them and calling it institutional judgment.
"Someone wanted us to know this," Isolde said.
"Yes."
"Someone who had access to Palace-stamped RMO documents."
"Yes."
"Which means either someone inside the RMO with very high clearance—" she paused— "or someone inside the Palace."
Aim turned his coffee cup slowly on the table. "Or someone who has access to both and answers to neither."
Isolde looked at him. "Const," she said flatly.
"I didn't say that."
"You were thinking it."
He had been thinking it. He hadn't said it because thinking it led immediately to the next question, which was how a twenty-three year old refugee with no institutional affiliation had access to classified joint documents from two of Orenthel's most secured institutions, and that question didn't have an answer that made Const look like a simple academic eccentric.
"I'm setting it aside for now," Aim said. "We have a more immediate problem."
"The Palace controls the RMO."
"The Palace controls the RMO," he confirmed. "Which means every cover-up we've seen — the Omen site, the fake newspaper, the vanished witnesses — those weren't RMO decisions. They were Palace decisions that the RMO carried out." He looked at the folder. "Which means if we want to understand why, the RMO archive isn't where we need to be looking."
Isolde followed his reasoning to its conclusion without him having to say it. Her expression shifted to the look she wore when a case had just become considerably more complicated and she was deciding whether to be annoyed or interested. She landed, as she usually did, on both.
"The Palace," she said.
"The Palace," he said.
She drank her coffee. "You have a plan."
"I have one."
---
At RMO outfit. Today was the day that new officer will be bestowed with purification magic catalyst and magic guide book from her majesty
"Rennnn, wanna tag with me to palace? I will just go grab those the catalyst directly from royal ordnance so we can have excuse to visit our old friend at palace!"
"I know you already have one you secretly stole from when we used to be cadet.. fine," Renfield agreed to the Palace visit with the specific reluctance of a man who knew he was being used as cover and had decided that pointing this out would take longer than just going.
"You said old friends," he said, as they walked the upper district road toward the Palace administrative entrance.
"We have old friends there," Aim said.
"You have a reason for needing me specifically."
"You have Palace liaison clearance. I have a Whitecoat badge that's two days old. Together we look like a legitimate errand."
Renfield was quiet for a moment. "What are we actually doing?"
"Collecting my purification catalyst. New officers get them from the Palace Ordnance liaison. That's legitimate."
"And? Why don't just wait for the catalyst to arrive here with other new officer?"
"So we can meet our old friend and I kinda miss palace too!"
Renfield looked at him with the expression of a man updating his internal record of how much trouble a person was capable of causing. "Fine.."
"But don't you dare cause any problem. And you have to use one day off for this visit."
"Bet."
---
The Palace was everything the RMO building wanted to be and had given up on. The outer administrative section alone was larger than the entire southern district headquarters — stone the color of pale bone, brass fixtures that actually gleamed, windows tall enough to make people feel appropriately small when standing beneath them. Guards at the entrance, ceremonial but functional, checking credentials with the practiced efficiency of people who did it two hundred times a day and missed nothing.
Aim's badge and Renfield's liaison clearance got them through without incident. Inside, the main corridor ran the length of almost hundred metres lined with administrative offices and side passages leading deeper into the complex. It was busy in the organized way of a place that ran on schedules—clerks moving between offices, aides carrying documents, some patrician moving room by room with the self-conscious dignity of someone who knew they were being watched.
The Ordnance officer office was on the ground floor, east section. A pleasant woman behind a desk confirmed Aim's new officer status, produced a standard purification catalyst — a glove engraved with the Goddess's seal, warm to the touch in a way that had nothing to do with temperature — and handed over the accompanying magic guide with the cheerful efficiency of someone doing the fifteenth identical task of their morning.
Aim thanked her, signed the receipt, and pocketed the catalyst.
He looked at the glove for a moment before sliding his hand into it.
*Wait.*
The thought arrived quietly, the way Aim's thoughts tended to—not a sudden realization but a question settling into place like a key finding a lock.
Purification catalysts were Palace-bestowed to RMO, Basic magic catalyst to universities—fifty per institution and to RMO officers through the Ordnance system. That was the entire distribution chain. Controlled, documented, traceable.
Const had used magic in the park. Water threads, precise and practiced, the habit of someone who had been doing it for years. A refugee—no institutional affiliation, no government posting, no university enrollment—using magic that required a catalyst that had no legitimate path to him.
The question was simple and had no simple answer.
*Where did he get his catalyst?*
Aim filed it in the back section of his mind—the section that was getting crowded and kept walking. Renfield was waiting near the corridor junction. Aim caught his eye and say
"I need to get to restroom real quick."
"Whatever, I will wait here. Quick."
---
The document vault was two floors up, inner section—not like the administrative records, which were kept in the east section and required standard clearance, but the operational archive that connected the Palace's executive decisions to the institutions they governed. Aim had learned its location three years ago during his work as Palace Officer.
The inner corridor was quieter. Fewer clerks, fewer officers, the kind of quiet that meant the people who worked here know not to mess with this. The gas lamps were spaced wider apart, leaving stretches of corridor in the dim amber half-light between pools of full illumination.
Aim moved through it at the pace of someone with somewhere to be—not hurrying, not loitering. The vault anteroom had a unique lock that only palace officer know and a guard observer desk, currently unoccupied. He was through the lock in under a half a minute, inside in under one.
The vault itself was not large. Floor-to-ceiling shelving, organized by year and department, the air the same dry sealed quality as the RMO archive. He moved quickly—he had perhaps two minutes before Renfield's come after him or someone came back to the duty desk.
He pulled three folders from the Palace-RMO joint operations section. Thin ones, recent dates, nothing that would create an obvious gap on the shelf. Briefly read, note and copy the important with carbon paper then slip the folder back to folder and the replica inside his vest.
He was in the corridor again in three minutes.
The corridor was dim. Aim was in the stretch between two lamps. The officer squinted into the half-light, Aim kept his pace steady, neither speeding up nor slowing, the confident unhurried walk of someone who belonged here and had somewhere to be. He did not look at the officer. He did not look away. He simply continued walking.
"Mister." The officer come to his back and tap him.
"Yes?"
"Would you mind if i check your belonging?"
"Oh, of course you can."
The officer found nothing.
"Thank you, mister."
He replied with nothing.
Aim turned the corner and did not change his pace until he was on the main corridor and Renfield was within eyeline.
---
They were through the administrative entrance and onto the central district road before Renfield spoke.
"You took something," he said. Not an accusation. A statement.
"I collected my catalyst," Aim said. "Which I signed for."
Renfield looked at him sideways. "Aim."
"Thank you for coming, Renfield. Genuinely. Let's go back to the office."
Renfield stopped walking. "If something goes wrong—"
"Nothing will go wrong," Aim said. "And if it does, you weren't involved in anything. You were doing a legitimate liaison errand with a new officer who collected his equipment. That's all you know."
Renfield looked at him for a long moment with the expression of a man who had spent three years being careful and was standing next to someone who hadn't.
"Be careful," he said finally.
"I always am," Aim said, which was not entirely accurate but was the kind of thing that was more useful than the truth in this particular moment.
He and him traveled back toward the southern district. Behind him, the Palace administrative office gleamed in the afternoon light, brass fixtures and pale stone, guards at the entrance checking credentials with practiced efficiency and missing nothing.
Except, today, one thing.
---
Isolde was already at his apartment when he arrived, sitting at the table with the original folder open in front of her and a pen in her hand. She took day off today.
She looked up when he came in, read his expression, and looked at the slight additional thickness of his coat.
"How many?" she said.
"Barely, time too little to copy everything." He set them on the table.
She looked at them. Then at him. "Trouble?"
"An officer saw me in the corridor. Dark enough that he couldn't see my face clearly." He sat down. "But they'll know someone messed with the vault if they check."
"Any trace?"
"Renfield and I were logged at the entrance. If they review the entry records at the time they'll look at Renfield first. His clearance puts him closer to that than mine does. But i left little to no trace in the vault so it will be fine. Only few pencil graphite was left on the folder."
"Hope it was easy like that.." Isolde exhaled
They spread the copied pages across the table and started sorting.
Most of it was deployment schedules, resource allocation. But three names kept appearing across different documents, in different contexts, always in connection with Omen-related operations.
Morgan. Stein. Travis.
"Who are these people?" Aim asked.
Isolde was quiet for a moment, her finger tracing a line on one of the pages. "Travis I've heard of. Redcoat. He was stationed in our district office about a year ago." She paused. "There was a rumor—not official, just the kind of thing that passes between officers—that he was trying to file an internal report about something he'd seen during a purification operation. Something that didn't match the standard incident classification."
"What happened to him?"
"Vanished," she said. "About eight months ago. The official record says voluntary resignation and relocation to north district." She looked up. "Nobody I've spoken to believes that."
Aim looked at the page. Travis's name appeared four times in the documents he'd copied—twice in deployment orders, once in a personnel transfer authorization, and once in something that wasn't labeled as any of those things. A single line, stamped with the Palace seal, bearing no department heading and no explanatory text. Just a name and a date and two words beneath it.
Case closed.
"Morgan and Stein?" he asked.
"I don't know them," Isolde said. "But look at the dates." She laid three pages side by side. "All three names appear within the same six-month window. All three in connection with the same operation classification." She tapped the repeated code at the top of each page. "And all three of them stop appearing in any document after a certain point."
"They're gone," Aim said.
"They're gone," she confirmed. "Ordered directly from the Palace. Filed under national security protocol." She sat back. "Which means if someone decided we were asking too many questions—"
"They have a process for that," Aim finished.
The room was quiet for a moment.
"If it was truly manageable," Isolde said, slowly, "they wouldn't need to bury it this deep. They wouldn't need to make people disappear over it." She looked at the pages spread across the table. "Whatever they're hiding — it's not under control. It's just hidden."
Aim didn't answer immediately. He was looking at the Case closed document, at the Palace stamp above it, at the clean administrative language that had been used to make a person stop existing in the official record.
"We need to be more careful," he said finally.
"Yes," Isolde agreed. "We do."
Outside the window, in the shadow of the doorway across the street, a figure stood without moving — watching the warm lamplight of the apartment above, unhurried, the way someone watches something they have been watching for a long time.
After a while, they turned and walked away into the dark.