His brows lift. Good. Let him remember I’m not a child waiting for someone to hand me a spear and a prayer.
“If anyone expects me to walk toward a zemlja trail, I want every scrap of information the City has buried under caution. Not summaries. Not what someone thinks I need. Everything.”
Silence presses in around me. My heart kicks hard once. Too much. Maybe that was too much. Then Rosalind smiles. Not much. Enough to annoy me.
“I would give her everything,” she says.
“Of course you would,” Syin says. “You aren’t the one risking the City’s records.”
“I am risking my people,” Rosalind says.
“So are we,” Virn says.
His voice is quiet, but it cuts between them cleanly. Rosalind inclines her head. Not surrender. Acknowledgment.
Adran studies me. I hold still under it, though silver keeps creeping at the edges of my sight. I am not falling in this room. I am not giving them that too.
“You’ll have the records,” Adran says.
Marut turns on him. “All of them?”
“All relevant ones.”
“That’s not the same,” I say.
“No,” Adran says, eyes still on me. “It’s not.”
I don’t like the way he says it. I like it less that I understand it. Secrets nested inside secrets. Doors behind doors. Knowledge measured like water. Again. Always again.
“Adran,” I say.
The chamber stills. Probably because people like me don’t say his name like that. Flat. Hungry. And most of all, finished.
“If you’re sending me out half-blind because some record is too dangerous for a route-runner to see, don’t bother sending me.”
Marut makes a sharp sound. “You forget yourself.”
No. That’s the problem. For once, I’m not. I look at Adran and keep my voice steady.
“I can die from the zemlja with all the information, or I can die from your secrets without it. Only one of those is useful.”
No one speaks. My pulse beats so hard I feel it in my wrists. Kavor is watching me. I can feel his gaze like pressure before a tremor, but I refuse to look.
Adran’s expression changes. Something old moves behind his eyes. It’s not anger, and it’s not approval either. Memory, maybe.
Another council. Another impossible choice. Another woman across a table demanding he tell the truth before sending peopleinto danger. His gaze flicks briefly to Rosalind. There it is again. History.
“Give her the eastern archive,” Adran says.
Marut goes pale. “The eastern archive includes restricted sinkline reports.”
“She asked for everything.”
“She doesn’t have clearance.”
I almost laugh. Clearance.
What an old ship word. A word from Before. From corridors with sealed doors and lights that answered to touch. From a world where knowledge lived behind permissions instead of hunger.
