The storage room was not designed for sleeping.
The single lamp that had burned all night and was now out of oil, and the fact that at some point in the small hours of the morning he had apparently decided that Isolde's proximity was preferable to the cold and had not moved away from it, and neither had she, and they were both very carefully not acknowledging this as Marcus Hale opened the door at six in the morning with a cup of coffee in each hand and the expression of a man who had seen stranger things and was not going to comment.
Aim sat up. Isolde was already awake, she had the quality of someone who woke completely and immediately, no transition, which Aim had always found faintly alarming.
His coat was across both of them.
He retrieved it without ceremony.
"Good morning," Marcus said, handing them each a cup. "You have work."
---
The walk to the investigation division took them through two corridors and a staircase, during that—Marcus decided to break the silence.
"Twenty years ago," he said, without preamble, "when the RMO was founded, it had one thing that the Military Police and every other state institution lacked—it had magic. Catalyst-issued, Palace-sanctioned, visibly impressive magic." He turned a corner. "Young people with ability stopped applying to us. Why join the Military when you could join the organization with divine backing and glowing hands? Same thing happened with Palace Affairs—old institution, good connections, all the smart recruits going there for the prestige." He didn't sound bitter exactly. More like a man describing a structural problem he had been watching develop for a long time. "What we have left in the investigation division is six people. Two of them I trust. The other four are here because someone wanted them here, and the reason someone wanted them here is not because they are good at investigation."
"Bribes?" Aim asked.
"Connection-building," Marcus said, in the tone of someone using the polite word for the accurate one. "Cases redirected, reports adjusted, evidence that takes a long time to arrive and sometimes doesn't. In exchange, someone somewhere gains a favor they can call in later." He stopped at a door. "I'm telling you this so you're not surprised when you see it. I'm also telling you this so you understand why I need people." He ended his sentence sharply.
He looked at Isolde.
"Your father chose this institution over others when he could have gone elsewhere," he said. "But why you?" He held her gaze for a moment. "What I need to know is whether you're here because you have nowhere else to go, or because you actually care what happens to this city."
Isolde didn't hesitate.
"I've cared about this city my entire career," she pause. "I think you need to know one thing clear—I didn't choosed RMO because of the prestise, the connection. I choose it because magic and purification were useful toward the nation at that moment."
Marcus nodded once. He glanced at Aim.
Aim met his eyes and said nothing, but his expression said something that Marcus apparently found acceptable, because he turned back to the door and opened it.
---
The investigation division was one room.
It was a reasonable size for one room, and an unreasonable size for the amount of work it was theoretically responsible for. Six desks—four of them occupied by people whose looked up when the door opened have the specific looks of employees calculating how much millisecond until today's shift end and wheter new comer would benefit them or not on their face.
A board on the far wall held maps and notes and the kind of organized information that suggested someone had been working on something seriously. The desk nearest to the board was Emil's, though Aim didn't know that yet.
"This is Aim Reed and Isolde Lethward," Marcus said. "Special auxiliary. They'll be working the Sanctuary investigation alongside the existing team." He paused, in the way of someone leaving space for questions. No one asked any. "Good."
He left.
The room was quiet for approximately four seconds.
Then the man with blonde hair stood up.
He was perhaps early twenty, slight, with the kind of face that was naturally readable—curiosity and skeptic both visible at once, not because he was careless but because he hadn't yet learned to suppress either one efficiently. He looked at Aim and Isolde with the focused attention of someone who noticed details and found inconsistencies in them.
"I don't recognize you," he said. Not hostile. Just factual. "Either of you. And I know everyone who's gone through standard recruitment in the last three years because I read the intake reports when I have nothing else to do, which is not often, but I read them." He crossed his arms. "So where did you come from."
Aim looked at him for a second—the second it took to assess the question and decide what kind of answer fit the room.
"Palace Affairs," he said. "Former. Marcus knows me from that period. He brought me in directly." He let it land with the confidence of someone who had said true things in service of incomplete information many times before. "The intake reports wouldn't have me because I didn't go through intake."
The blonde officer processed this. His expression suggested he found it plausible and also slightly suspicious, which was accurate on both counts.
"Emil."
The voice came from the desk nearest the board—a man in his early thirty, leaning back in his chair with the relaxed posture of someone who had made a deliberate decision about how much energy to spend on any given situation. He had the look of someone who had once been considerably more invested in things and had since recalibrated. Not lazy — selective. There was a difference, and it showed in his eyes, which were paying more attention than the rest of him suggested.
"Leave it," he said.
"I'm just asking—"
"You're interrogating people who were brought in by the deputy." The Senior looked at Emil with the patience of someone managing a younger colleague's enthusiasm for the manys time that week. "Deputy Hale does not bring in dead weight. We've established this."
Emil opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Aim once more with the expression of someone filing something under unresolved rather than dropped.
"Emil Weiss," he said finally, because apparently introductions were going to happen regardless. "Junior investigation officer."
"Rafael Dornier," the older man said, from his chair. "Senior. Acting lead." He looked at them with the calm assessment of someone who had stopped expecting things to improve and had become very good at working within that expectation. "Aim Reed. Isolde Lethward." He said the names back as though confirming he'd stored them correctly. "The other four—" a slight inclination of his head toward the opposite side of the room— "are here for their own reasons."
The four in question did not react to this. They had the practiced indifference of people who had been described this way before and found it more convenient than denial.
"Right," Emil said, apparently deciding that the interrogation could be resumed later. He turned toward his desk, then turned back. "Well. Come on then. We have a board."
He said it with the energy of someone who had been waiting for people to talk to about the board for considerably longer than was comfortable.
---
Three days later.
The front of the Palace was never entirely quiet, but on the morning that Goddess Flaure appeared for the press address, it was as close to organized as it got — Palace Affairs officers forming the inner perimeter, RMO with catalysts active on all four sides, Military Police managing the press line with the focused attention of people containing something that wanted to move in several directions at once.
Flaure stood at the top of the steps in the way she always stood for these—composed, unhurried, the particular stillness of someone who had done this many times and had learned that stillness read as authority.
The journalist from The North went first.
"Your Majesty—reports are circulating that RMO units were deployed against members of the Sanctuary of the Turning Wheel in the eastern district. Can you confirm this, and can you address the growing claims that RMO purification operations are start failing and not according to the officially reported?"
Flaure answered. The words were measured and elegant and covered the relevant ground without touching any of the actual substance of the question, which was, in its way, an impressive skill. Everything was in hand. The RMO operated within its mandate. The safety of Orenthel remained the Crown's highest priority.
In the back of her mind, a different voice: Is that the right answer? If he asks again—if he noticed the—
"—if you'd also like to expand on the institutional relationship between the Palace and RMO operational decisions, Your Majesty—"
I should have said it differently. If I had just—
"—that would be—"
"Everything is," she said, and her voice held, "under the Crown's considered oversight. The details of operational protocol are not appropriate for public disclosure, as I'm certain you understand."
The journalist paused. He had noticed the half-second. Most of them hadn't. He had.
He pressed.
She answered again. This time cleaner.
The other journalists surged forward.
She managed them.
She was good at managing them.
---
At the edge of the press line, a Palace Affairs officer made his way toward her with the careful navigation of someone moving through a crowd without drawing attention to the fact that he was moving through a crowd with a purpose.
"Your Majesty." He was not young nor middle age yet, from a minor noble family—a Baron's house, unremarkable—and his expression had the slightly anxious quality of someone delivering something they'd been asked to deliver and were not entirely comfortable with the errand. "I apologize for the timing. It was from someone of the Lethryniel. He claimed that he has a prior connection to you, and asked that it be delivered personally."
Flaure looked at him.
The name landed the way it always did—quietly, in the chest.
Lethryniel.
It was her last name.
Flaure raised her hand to signal the guard.
"Let him."
Almost no one knew that name, and almost no one know it was her lastname. She turned the count over in her mind and arrived at a number that made the letter both impossible.
But she has no family and no one to even share this lastname with at first?
She took it anyway.
"That person know who to deliver this."
Of course, who could get near Her Majesty as close as the Palace Affair Officer?
"Thank you," she said, and walked back toward the Palace entrance.
---
???
In a room that wasn't lit well, a woman stand before a mirror.
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, to nothing:
"Lucia Lethryniel." The name came out with the weight of something that had been held for a long time. "One step beyond the line, I see."
A pause.
"Yet you still choose to play along with fate."
She chuckled and toss the letters away.
Then she was quiet again.
Something shifted in the room — not light, not sound, but the quality of the air, the way it changes when someone who has been very still decides to move.
"Interesting," she said softly.
"Very interesting."
"Very interesting!"