Rev was waiting beside the east kitchen door with both hands in her coat pockets.
She looked bored until she saw my face.
“Cosima sent me to find you,” I said.
Rev’s mouth flattened.
“That’s an unfortunate sentence.”
“She said you know doors.”
Rev’s eyebrow lifted and, as expected, she looked slightly more pleased.
“Which door are we talking about?”
“Lower archive.”
“Oh.”
That was the first worrying thing. Rev had opinionsabout everything.
“Aldric will be there before first hour.”
Rev looked toward the corridor, then back at me.
“The lower archive and Aldric in the same morning. My life was much less exciting before you arrived.”
“That sounds like blame.”
“It is. Let’s go.”
She pushed off the wall and started walking.
I followed.
The corridors were full enough to make hiding impossible and empty enough to make being seen deliberate. Students moved toward first hour with books under their arms and sleep still clinging to their faces. A second-year glanced at Rev, then at me, then found urgent business with the floor.
Rev noticed.
“Let them look,” she said.
“That your usual strategy?”
“We don’t need them to look away until we reach the door.”
She turned before the south stair, took another service corridor I had never noticed, and opened a narrow door hidden behind a rack of drying coats.
“I thought that was a wall.”
“You really need to learn to open your eyes, Astra.”
The passage behind it smelled like boiled linen. It sloped down so gradually that my knees noticed before my eyes did. Pipes ran along the ceiling. Somewhere inside the walls, water moved with slow, heavy patience.
My Mark tightened, but none of the familiar lines answered.
This pull went inward.
I tucked my hand into my sleeve.
