Morning came in through the gap under the door.

  Simon was already up. The forms took the time they took. He did not rush them. Outside, Edgewood was doing what Edgewood did at first light: carts on stone, a vendor calling something to someone three lanes over, the particular quality of air that belonged to the hour before the city fully committed to being awake.

  He finished the sequence and stood.

  Leya was at the table when he came out, her equipment already laid. She had her marking tools in front of her. The ward-posts. She had been thinking about them since last night and the thinking was visible in the way she had arranged everything. Ready. Ordered.

  She looked up when he came through.

  He read her expression. He did not say anything. She did not say anything. The morning had that quality yet, where there was still room for the plan.

  Then Thrynn arrived.

  ---

  She came through the door with a Registry notice in her hand. One page. She set it on the table without preamble and sat down.

  Leya looked at it. Then at Thrynn.

  "Drake subjugation," Thrynn said. "Ruins mouth. Three teams. Morning briefing at second bell."

  Leya looked at the page. Her hand moved slightly toward her marking tools and then did not.

  Simon watched her. One beat. She registered it. She set the tools aside and reached for her gear instead.

  Sylt came in from outside with water. She took in the notice on the table, took in Leya's face, and took in the equipment already laid for a different morning. She said nothing. She set the water down and began her own preparations.

  They ate what was available. Lowa had left bread and a covered pot of something that had been warm and was now less so. It was enough. The meal was real. The weight of the displaced morning had a physical anchor. Nobody needed to name what had changed.

  They went.

  ---

  The briefing was in a Registry workroom Simon had not been in before. Plain. A table, chairs, a wall map with annotations. The ruins marked on it in red. The coordinating officer stood at the front. His name was Orvyn. He was senior, precise, the kind of man whose competence had calcified into certainty over a long career.

  He had a standard plan. Simon could see it forming in the briefing's structure before Orvyn finished the first sentence.

  "The creature has been encroaching," Orvyn said. "Initially contained to the entrance. Now it is ranging further. Two days ago it engaged a Registry patrol. No fatalities, but two down and one still in Cradle care." He moved a marker on the map. "Standard doctrine. Combined pressure drives it back to the entrance. Forge team seals the mouth. Permanent containment."

  Simon looked at the map. At the red mark. He had been inside those ruins. He knew what the air tasted like near the mouth, what the saturation did to fine work, how the ambient pressed from every direction like a second atmosphere.

  A creature that had been inside that for an extended period was not the creature in the standard profile. He ran the calculation. He filed the gap. He said nothing.

  He looked at Leya.

  She was looking at the ruins on the map. Her expression had shifted from the one she wore for ward-posts to something more particular. She was already building the field. Sight lines. Cover. Distances. The mouth of the ruins against the surrounding terrain. She was doing it without being asked because she could not look at a map and not.

  The marking tools were back at the Cup and Pour. Tomorrow was still out there. It had simply moved.

  Orvyn looked around the room. "Questions."

  Sylt noted the ruins location. She noted the ambient saturation near the mouth was elevated but not interior levels. She ran the calculation on what her read would and would not be able to do. The result was different from what it would have been two months ago. She filed it. She said nothing.

  There were no questions.

  ---

  The approach was on foot. Three teams moving in loose formation, the ruins mouth visible from a long way out. Simon's patrol had seen it before. The other two teams had not.

  The other teams read it as a landmark. Simon's patrol read it the way you read something you had been inside.

  Leya moved slightly ahead of the group without announcing it. Not fast. Deliberately. She was taking angles, reading the ground, the rise to the left, the exposed flank on the right, the chokepoint near the treeline where a second line of cover became possible. She filed it as she walked. She would have the full picture before they arrived. Nobody asked her to. Nobody needed to.

  Simon read the ambient as they closed the distance. He tracked the feel of it against his attention and made his adjustments.

  On Orvyn's left flank a woman walked point. Her forearms caught the morning light at a particular angle, something in the skin that held an iridescent undertone, faint but present. Reedfolk. She moved with the loose-jointed ease of someone whose body had a different relationship with the ground than most. Simon noted it the way he noted anything. Filed it. Kept walking.

  Further back, holding the rear of the center team, a man who did not hurry. Ba'ag. Heavy through the jaw and brow, the build of someone designed for sustained load rather than speed. The formation moved around him slightly and he accommodated none of it. He was simply there, in the way a placed thing is there.

  Sylt opened her read carefully. Braced for the familiar discomfort. The pressure she had learned to anticipate, the ambient that turned her read into noise near saturation sources.

  What she found was different.

  The ambient pressed in. It registered as volume. Loud. The contaminated section did its work: excess routing efficiently, the pathways handling load they had been rebuilt to handle. It was not comfortable. It was not the sensation of pain she had been bracing for.

  She was reading. Here. At this distance from the mouth, in elevated saturation, she was reading.

  She said nothing. She kept the read open. She kept walking.

  The drake was already at the mouth when they arrived.

  Orvyn stopped walking.

  It was not a dramatic stop. One step, and then not another. The rest of the teams moved around him slightly before they registered what he had registered.

  "Void and rot," he said. Under his breath. Not performed. The involuntary response of a man who had run enough of these to know when the creature in front of him was not the creature in the file.

  Simon looked at the drake. Thirty paces. The word Orvyn had used in the briefing was accurate the way a label on a jar is accurate. There was something in front of him that had a name in a language he had not thought about since he was fifteen, sitting at a folding table with three other people eating chips and arguing about initiative order. The name did not help him. The creature had not read the stat block.

  He looked at it the way he looked at everything. Weight. How it was carrying itself. Where the load sat. The creature was still. Patient in the way large things are patient when they have decided a space belongs to them. The particular distribution of mass in the neck and head was wrong in a way he could feel before he understood why. Too much above the line. Carrying something forward it was not built to carry.

  He filed it. He did not know what it meant yet.

  Orvyn called the formation. His voice had returned to professional. The standard plan executing as planned.

  ---

  The plan failed in the way plans fail when they were built for a different problem.

  Orvyn's two flanking teams pressed in. Their shaping ran clean and landed wrong. What should have penetrated did not. The hide took the impact and spread it, absorbing what had been calibrated for something it was not. The creature did not yield. It turned.

  Simon was reading the engagement the way he read everything. Load. Commitment. Where the weight was going and where it was not. He had no doctrine for this creature. He had no frame for what the teams were hitting or why it was not working. What he had was the field in front of him and the calculation running underneath.

  The woman with the iridescent forearms had pressed forward on the left flank, her shaping running clean against the hide. It was not working. She was doing it anyway.

  Someone else had moved. Simon could not find where the gap in Orvyn's center team had come from. A practitioner who had been there was simply no longer there. Kiyit. No sound. No announcement. The formation had closed around the absence the way water closes around a withdrawn hand, and the man was now somewhere to the right of where Simon's attention had last placed him, already working a different angle.

  He felt something build in the creature. Not a read he had a name for. A change in how it was carrying itself. The head lowering. The throat coming forward. The weight shifting to support something the body was about to do from a fixed position.

  He did not know what it was. He knew the position.

  He moved. Not fast. Precisely. Two steps to the creature's right, baton low, placing himself where the drake's neck would have to track to hold him as a threat. The head followed. The angle broke.

  The discharge did not come.

  The build held for two seconds. Then the creature released it sideways, unused, the mana dissipating into the ground without a target. The body had nowhere calibrated to send it.

  Nobody on the field accounted for what had just happened. The engagement continued. The hide kept turning the shaping. The drake turned back to the center line.

  Simon returned to his position. He did not register what he had done as a thing that had happened. He filed it and kept reading.

  The drake's tail came around on the backswing. The Reedfolk woman had been pressing on the left flank and she read it a half-beat late. She got her arm up. The impact caught her across the forearm and the left side of her ribs and drove her off her feet. She went down sideways and her shaping cut out on contact, the concentration broken by the sudden rearrangement of where the ground was. She hit the dirt and rolled once and did not immediately understand why she could not pull a full breath.

  She got to one knee. She stayed there. The shaping did not come back. She pressed her forearm to her side and held it and worked on breathing.

  The man beside her broke position to get to her. The line thinned.

  The heavy man at the rear of the center team had not moved back with the rest. He was exactly where he had been when the plan started failing. Not frozen. Holding. His shaping was running and not landing and he was absorbing that information and holding his position anyway, the way a thing designed for sustained load holds.

  Leya worked the edge of the field. She drew twice and did not release. The angles were wrong. The hide was wrong. She was reading the engagement and filing what she found, looking for a shot that meant something.

  He felt it again.

  Same build. Same head position. The throat forward, the weight shifting into the same mechanical prerequisite. The creature had learned nothing from the first failure. It was running the same sequence on the same logic.

  Simon moved. Same mechanics. Cleaner this time, because he knew where he was going before the build peaked. He put his body in the position that broke the angle and held it.

  The discharge did not come.

  The build peaked and went nowhere. The mana dissipated again. The creature stood with the residue of an intention it could not complete.

  Then something changed in how it was carrying itself.

  The head came up. The throat pulled back. The weight redistributed from forward-committed to low and wide, the center of mass dropping, the hindquarters engaging. It was not preparing to breathe anymore.

  It came forward.

  The movement was not a charge in the theatrical sense. It was the forward progress of something that had resolved a calculation and was acting on the result. Mass at purpose. The formation had spent the last several minutes hitting something that would not yield. Now that something was moving toward them at full commitment and the shaping that had not penetrated standing still was not going to do better with it incoming.

  The line broke left. Practitioners who had held their ground against the hide fell back when the full weight came forward, because the doctrine for a standing target and the doctrine for a moving one were different and the moving one was larger than the profile.

  The heavy man at the rear of the center team did not fall back.

  He took the edge of the drake's shoulder at full stride with his feet set and his shaping braced and it moved him anyway, three feet of ground given in one lurch, but he did not go down. He locked. His legs found purchase and he stopped moving backward and the drake's momentum had somewhere to go that was not the rest of the formation. It cost him something. He held it anyway.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The line had a second it would not have had. The formation stabilized enough.

  Orvyn was running out of options. A competent officer watching his standard answers not answer. The two breath weapon attempts had not fired. The drake had adapted and come physical and the formation was barely holding the new problem. Simon could see the calculation happening in the man's eyes as they moved across the field, across the casualties, across the creature.

  The breath weapon residue was still showing on two practitioners who had caught the edge of the first dissipation. Not the discharge. The bleed-off. It had been enough.

  One sat with his back against the treeline, both hands pressed flat to his thighs, his channels visible as a faint luminescence at the wrists and throat. The mana was coalescing around the disrupted architecture in the slow way of someone the body had decided to try to stabilize. He was conscious. He was not going back into the field.

  The other was not sitting. She was down on her side with a practitioner from Orvyn's second team crouched over her. The light under her skin ran along pathways, frantic and uncontained. The body drawing what it could find from the ambient around it, the channels that had been working at full output now pulling volume they were not designed to carry. It was not the light of something working. It was the light of something failing.

  It was Vital Collapse.

  Sylt read them from where she stood. She filed what she found and did not move toward them. The engagement was still active. The field was still hot. She stayed in her position and kept her read on the drake.

  He looked at Sylt first. Then at Simon. Not a command. Something more precise. The look of a man who had been watching and had made a decision.

  He stepped back from the line. One step. Deliberate. He left a gap in his position and did not fill it.

  He gave a single nod.

  ---

  Sylt had been reading the drake since the approach.

  She had held the read open through the plan failing, through both breath weapon builds, through the casualties and the adaptation. The ambient volume was high. The contaminated section was handling the load, routing the excess the way it had learned to route it, but handling load and not feeling it were different things. It pressed. Every beat of the engagement it pressed harder.

  She held the read anyway.

  The picture came together the way pictures come together under pressure: not all at once, but the important parts first. She had been building it since they arrived, the creature's living channels, the pathways that had expanded with centuries of saturation laid over an original frame that had not expanded with them.

  She found the fault during the second breath weapon build. The neck. The convergence point. Too many pathways meeting a trunk that the original skeleton could not have grown to match. The body had been compensating since before they arrived. The compensation had become the baseline. The baseline was wrong.

  She reached. Not for her vocabulary. For the words she had been hearing for five days.

  Something moved in her read at the effort. Not pain. The particular sensation of a system doing more than it had been doing, the volume spiking upward, the ambient pressing into the open read from every direction at once. Her jaw tightened. Her head came forward slightly, the specific posture of someone taking weight they cannot put down.

  She held it.

  "The neck," she said to Thrynn. Quiet. Precise. The tone of someone reading the last instrument before a decision. "Where the channels pile up. The main one can't carry what's been growing through it. It's been pulled wrong since before we got here."

  Simon heard it. He did not look at her. Something described in one register arrived in his head in another. He was already reading the weight of the creature's head, the compressed junction underneath, what would happen if that specific point received more than it could forward.

  Leya was already drawing.

  ---

  She had the coordinate. Sylt had given it to her in five words and her spatial read had locked onto it like a surveyor's mark.

  The first arrow she changed the grade around and released.

  It went where arrows go when the grade is described and not changed. True and fast and entirely where the drake expected a threat to come from. It hit the outer hide and the hide turned it.

  She reached for the next shaft without expression.

  The second arrow she held longer. She changed the grade differently. Not a description. A change. The field responded. She released.

  The arrow arced. The grade had shifted but she had not held the whole line. It dropped before it completed its path. It arrived too low, too early. Skipped off the hide three inches below the junction.

  Three inches.

  She read the distance. She reached for the third shaft.

  The engagement was collapsing around her. The formation had lost ground. The creature was still forward, still pressing, and she was standing at the edge of the field pulling arrows from a quiver with the focused attention of someone who had a problem they had nearly solved.

  She held the third arrow.

  The grade had to hold the entire path. Every foot of it, from her hands to the junction Sylt had named, sustained and continuous. She held the space the way she had learned to hold a room, complete and unbroken, every corner and distance present at once.

  Not a point. A line. The whole thing. Hold it.

  She changed the grade.

  She held it.

  She released.

  The arrow did not come from Leya's position.

  It came from twelve degrees above and to the left, arriving from an angle the drake had no frame for, from a direction that should have been empty air. The drake's head had already begun to track toward Leya. The arrow arrived from somewhere that was not Leya.

  It hit the junction.

  Not through the hide. The hide was too dense for that. But the arrow found the place where the hide sat thinnest, directly over the fault Sylt had read, and it landed there and stayed. A point. A mark in a specific place that mattered.

  The creature flinched. A large thing flinching is a large thing with its weight briefly committed sideways, the neck pulling left, the junction exposed for one beat to the open field on the right.

  Thrynn saw the arrow land.

  She had been watching Leya's shots. She had seen the first go wrong and the second go closer and the third arrive from the wrong direction entirely, and when it landed she did not need to be told. The arrow was in the junction. Sylt had named the junction. The junction was the spot.

  The pieces assembled in the space of a breath.

  She had five days of thinking in her. The physics: stop routing the mana through her arms. Change the grade. Let it flow into the metal.

  She was already moving.

  Simon read the flinch residue. He moved to the creature's right, put his body and the baton in the path the drake's weight was trying to return to, changed the grade so the return committed further than it intended. The drake's head moved left to clear him.

  The angle held.

  Thrynn was in it.

  She routed the charge into the blade. No calibration. Volume. Sword Hall instincts applied to a technique built for precision she had not finished building. She pushed everything she had toward the metal.

  The blade lit.

  Not dramatically. The specific luminescence of shaping pushed past its ceiling, past control, past the boundary where invisible work becomes visible. Every practitioner still standing on the field saw it. The character of it was not clean. It was not the light of mastered work. It was the light of someone who understood the principle and had not yet built the calibration and had pushed volume into it anyway because the arrow was in the junction and the moment was now and the angle would not wait.

  The Reedfolk woman had been pressing with shaping that would not land for the entire engagement. When the blade lit she stopped. One beat. Her hands still raised, her shaping still open, and she was not moving. She did not have a word for what she was seeing from a Sword Hall practitioner. She did not need one. The word could come later. The thing itself was happening now.

  Thrynn drove the blade into the spot where the arrow had landed.

  ---

  Not an explosion.

  The charge at the junction overloaded the convergence point. Multiple pathways meeting at one location, all simultaneously carrying more than they were designed to hold. The mana had nowhere to route forward. It ran back through every channel fed by that junction at once.

  The architecture failed from the inside out.

  What the outside saw: the creature went into systemic failure. Fast. Not a dramatic magical event. A very large animal in rapid catastrophic collapse. The hide density dropped as the mana sustaining it stopped sustaining anything. The enhanced systems stopped functioning. What had been an apex predator became mass.

  It hit the ground.

  The weight of it was enormous. The sound of it was final.

  Silence.

  Every practitioner still standing processed the same thing.

  It was fighting. Then it was not.

  Simon looked at the practitioner nearest him. A woman from Orvyn's left team, experienced, hands still raised in a shaping posture that had nowhere to go. She was staring at the creature on the ground. Her hands were shaking slightly. Not fear. The particular tremor of someone whose system had been running at full output and had nothing left to push against.

  Nobody spoke for six seconds. Simon counted.

  Orvyn turned away and began moving toward his casualties.

  ---

  The two practitioners who had caught the dissipation were being worked on. One was still lit. The Vital Collapse luminescence had settled from the frantic coalescing into something slower and more contained. Sylt looked at them from across the field and read what she could at distance. Functional. Difficult. Cradle would have work to do.

  She looked away. She did not have the tools she would have needed and the engagement was over. She filed what she had read and she would give it to the Cradle practitioners who arrived.

  Orvyn's second team worked the perimeter. The coordinating officer himself was at his casualties, present and methodical, his professional register doing what it was built to do.

  Simon watched him work and knew what the man had been filing during the last three minutes. He had seen it in the quality of Orvyn's attention. Not hostile. The look of someone building something accurate.

  The patrol checked each other without announcing it. Thrynn had a scored mark across her left forearm. She wrapped it herself and did not mention it. Leya had a split knuckle from the bowstring's edge. Sylt had nothing visible.

  Simon checked Sylt last. She looked functional. She looked like someone holding a full container very carefully.

  Before they left, Orvyn looked at the patrol. Once. The look held for one beat longer than professional.

  Then he went back to his casualties.

  ---

  They went through the gate as the light was going soft on the walls.

  Registry Hall was two blocks up and one north. Simon had walked the route enough times to know how it felt: the grain of the paving stones inside the gate, the slight camber where the street drained toward the canal district. Vendors were pulling back from the market. Carts moved outward. The city was considering its evening.

  Shaw's office was on the second floor.

  She was at her desk when they came through the door. The report was in front of her. She had been reading it. She set it down and looked at all four of them the way she always looked: the quality of attention that finishes taking inventory before the door has fully closed.

  She looked at Thrynn's forearm. She looked at Sylt. She looked at Leya, who held the particular stillness of someone not yet fully back from somewhere. She looked at Simon.

  Nobody sat. Shaw did not gesture at the chairs.

  "The creature in the briefing file," she said, "was not what you engaged." Not a question. She was telling them what she already knew so they could hear that she knew it. "Orvyn's account is in the record. What he filed is accurate."

  The room held.

  She looked at Sylt directly. "Before Highmark," she said. "Cradle will want to speak with you. The read you ran today, the duration, the conditions." A pause. Brief and deliberate. "Schedule it before you travel."

  "Yes," Sylt said.

  Shaw looked at all four of them once more. Her expression was what it always was: not warm, not cold. The look of someone building something that required patience she had made structural.

  "The record holds what it holds," she said. "You did the assignment."

  A beat.

  "Go eat."

  They went.

  ---

  The walk from the gate to Edgewood was short. Quiet.

  The morning had become late afternoon. The light had that quality now, where the sun had done most of its work and was beginning to consider leaving.

  Nobody spoke.

  Sylt walked at Simon's shoulder. She had been walking at his shoulder since they left the ruins mouth. The spacing was slightly closer than usual. Not leaning. Not requiring anything. The specific proximity of someone running at capacity who had calculated that the particular distance was manageable.

  Halfway back she reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose. One motion. Held it for three steps. Then her hand came down.

  She did not explain it. Simon did not ask.

  He filed it. He kept walking.

  ---

  Lowa looked up when they came through the door.

  She looked at Simon. She looked at Sylt. She looked at Thrynn's arm. She went back to the kitchen without a word.

  They sat.

  Grant brought water. He set it down, looked at the table, looked at Simon, and went back to the bar. He had been in enough rooms to know when a room had been somewhere.

  Thrynn unwrapped her forearm and let the air at it. The score was shallow. It would be fine.

  Leya set her hands flat on the table.

  Sylt looked at the window.

  Lowa came out of the kitchen with bread and a pot of broth and something that had taken most of the day to become what it was. She set it down. She looked at Sylt once, the look lasting one beat past professional assessment, and then she went back.

  They ate.

  The fire in the corner was doing its work. The food was real. The weight needed somewhere to go and this was where it went.

  Thrynn ate without speaking. Leya ate methodically. Sylt ate slowly, with the careful pace of someone conserving something and not naming what.

  Simon ate.

  The bowls went mostly empty. The fire held. Nobody moved to leave.

  Thrynn set her spoon down.

  "When the charge went into the blade," she said. Not loud. Not building to anything. The tone of someone reporting from somewhere they had just been for the first time. "It felt different. From running it through my arms. It felt like it went somewhere it was supposed to go."

  Nobody filled the silence after that. It did not need filling.

  Simon looked at Leya. "I saw the second arrow."

  Leya looked up from her bowl.

  "It bent," he said. "Not the arc of a deflection. The path changed. I watched it happen." He paused. "The third one came from the wrong direction entirely."

  Leya was quiet for a moment. "The first two were calibration," she said. "The first one I described the path instead of changing it. The second I changed it but didn't hold the whole line." She said it the way she said everything: filed, precise, without apology. "I wanted to test whether what you explained about grade applied to a spatial field around a moving object. It does. With adjustment."

  "You did that in the middle of the field," Thrynn said.

  "The first two attempts were in the middle of the field," Leya said. "The third one worked."

  Thrynn looked at Simon. Simon looked at his bowl.

  Something sat between the four of them for a moment. Not named. The field. The angle. The way it had come together without anyone announcing it. Four people who had done something they had not done before and were only now beginning to understand what it had been.

  Sylt set her spoon down carefully. She set it down the way she did everything: with deliberation, with the particular attention of someone who was monitoring something and had found a result.

  "I think I overloaded my channels," she said. Not alarmed. Reporting. "The saturation near the mouth was higher than standard and I held the read open for the full engagement." She paused. One beat. "The contaminated section." She stopped. Shook her head slightly. "The rewritten section handled most of it. But I pushed it past what I have tested. I am functional. I can feel the edges of it."

  Simon looked at her. The word came out before he decided to say it.

  "Mana sickness," he said.

  Sylt went still. The specific stillness of someone who has been holding a precise experience in an imprecise vocabulary and has just heard a better one.

  "Yes," she said. She looked at him with the expression she used when something resolved. "That is a very appropriate description of what I am feeling."

  She picked up her water. She drank. She set it down and pushed back from the table.

  "I am going to sleep," she said. "The cost will be clearer in the morning." She looked at each of them once. Brief. Not goodbye. Just acknowledgment. "Goodnight."

  She left.

  The three remaining sat with the fire for a moment.

  Simon thought about channels that were records of decisions. He thought about five days of work and what five days of work had looked like today, played at full consequence, against something that had not read the briefing.

  He thought about the ward-posts. About Leya's hands on the table this morning, the tools laid out, the morning that had been displaced.

  The thread was still there. Still loaded.

  Leya looked up from her bowl.

  She did not say tomorrow.

  She did not need to.

  Simon looked at her. He picked up his spoon.

  She went back to her food.

  Outside, Edgewood moved through its evening. Someone called to someone. The fire held its shape. The people at the table held theirs.

  It was enough. Not a closing. A pause before whatever the next day would ask.

  ---

  The room was plain.

  Not small. Plain. The kind of plain that is a choice, not a circumstance. One desk. One chair behind it. Nothing unnecessary on the walls.

  One exception.

  The crest was dark lacquered wood. Not large. The carving worn smooth at the high edges where decades of air had moved across it. A crown worked into the upper register in a style that belonged to an older hand. It had been in that position long enough that the wall had arranged itself around it. Not hung. Settled.

  The man at the desk read without hurrying.

  Orvyn's report had passed through two intermediaries before it reached this desk. Each transfer had stripped a layer. What remained was precise and unembellished: the account of a coordinating officer who wrote what he saw and left Registry to determine the meaning.

  The man in Sword Hall robes had been standing for nine minutes. He was the kind of man who had been trained not to shift.

  The man at the desk set one finger on a line near the bottom of the page. He did not look up yet.

  "The Sword Hall practitioner." His voice was even. Not raised. The voice of someone who had never needed to raise it. "The routing into the blade. The delivery location. The method of approach to the target junction." He looked up. The look held. "The Proving Works has been developing this for four months."

  The man in Sword Hall robes said nothing.

  "The description in this report." He tapped the line once. Precise. "And the Works' last progress filing." He let the silence carry the implication. He did not need to voice it. "They are not approximate."

  He waited.

  "How did she get hold of it?"

  "I'm not sure," the man said.

  Two seconds.

  Three.

  "Find out."

  The man in Sword Hall robes inclined his head once. He turned. He left without sound.

  The man at the desk remained where he was. He read the section a third time. Then he set the report face-down on the desk and did not pick it up again.

  Outside, the city moved through its evening. It did not know it had been looked at.