Perren brought the ledger in himself, rather than sending word ahead, which told Rael something before he’d even opened it.“I wasn’t looking for this,” Perren said, setting it down carefully on the table like it might bite. “I was pulling procurement records for something unrelated, a routine favor for a friend still inside. This was buried three layers deep in an appendix nobody was supposed to bother reading.”Nova had it open before he’d finished the sentence, scanning fast, the old hunting instinct sharpening her whole posture. “Authorization for a closed research initiative,” she read aloud. “Under Kell’s direct oversight. Stated purpose.” She paused. “Vague enough to mean almost anything. That’s not an oversight. That’s deliberate.”“Keep going,” Perren said. “It gets worse.”She did, tracing the funding line by line, the way she’d once traced her aunt’s ledger, patient and merciless, until the trail resolved into something none of them wanted it to. “The money’s routed through

They moved faster than they had for anything since the mint, no time for the careful, layered planning that usually preceded a decision this large, just Nova calling the route while the others fell in behind her, out the door and into the outer ring before the ink on Seran’s authorization tracing had even fully dried.The address matched the file exactly, a narrow house at the end of a lane crowded with washing lines and the ordinary noise of a neighborhood going about its evening. Rael reached the door first and knew, before he’d even finished knocking, that something was wrong. It swung open too easily under his hand, unlatched.“Empty,” Seran said, moving past him into the front room, scanning it fast, professional. “Recently.”It was. Drawers half open, a chair knocked slightly askew, the particular disarray of people who’d left in a hurry but not in panic, taking what mattered and abandoning the rest without ceremony. Nova crouched by an overturned basket of linens, running her f

Nova sat with the ledger a long time that night, the way she hadn’t allowed herself to sit with it in weeks, not searching it for anything, not cross referencing a single name against a single date, just holding it, the worn leather cover soft under her thumb in the places she’d worried it smooth over months of carrying it everywhere she went.Rael found her like that when he came to check on the packing for tomorrow, sitting alone at the small table with the ledger open in her lap and her eyes somewhere far past the page.“You don’t have to bring that tomorrow,” he said gently, settling into the chair across from her. “It’s not going to help with the extraction.”“I know.” She traced the cover once more before finally closing it. “I’m not planning to bring it. I just wanted to sit with it tonight.”“Why tonight specifically.”Nova considered the question longer than he expected, turning the ledger over in her hands, weighing something she seemed to have only recently worked out for h

Rael found the mint fragment where he always kept it, tucked in the small pouch at his belt, and drew it out of old habit more than any real intention, the way he’d done dozens of times since Nova first noticed the low pulse humming through it months ago.He turned it over once in his palm, and reached toward its resonance the way he’d learned to reach for anything with a pulse worth listening for, patient, careful, waiting for the familiar low hum to answer him back the way it always had.Nothing answered.He frowned, and tried again, reaching deeper this time, past the ordinary surface of the crystal toward whatever quality of awareness had always lived somewhere underneath it, faint but unmistakable, a pull that had accompanied the shard since the night they’d taken it from the mint vault.Still nothing. No pulse. No recognition. No sense of something on the other side of his attention reaching back to meet it. Just cold, ordinary crystal, dulled and inert in his palm, the way it m

Seran didn’t ask permission before he did it.Rael found out only after the fact, when Nova came to find him with the news already spreading, her face caught somewhere between alarm and something close to awe.“Seran sent it,” she said. “Before the extraction even started. A message to every garrison contact he’s still got willing to receive one from him.”“Sent what.”“Everything.” Nova held up a copy someone had already gotten to her, the ink barely dry. “He named Kell’s research initiative directly. Named the girl. Named the annex’s exact location. He didn’t soften a single word of it.”Rael found him a short while later, alone near the edge of the group’s staging point, watching the last light drain out of the sky with a stillness that didn’t look like regret, though it didn’t look entirely like peace either.“You know what you just did,” Rael said, coming to stand beside him.“I do.”“Every contact you’ve spent months carefully rebuilding trust with, every fragile bit of standing