I turn before the exchange can become anything else.
The ridge path takes me out of their direct sights. Once the stone shields me from the road, I cut left instead of up, through a split in the hillside hidden behind winter scrub.
The former courier relay station sits beneath the ruin, half buried and still functioning where it matters. From above, it looks dead. Below ground, it keeps secrets.
Osrel chose the place the way cautious men choose places: ugly, forgettable, hard to approach in numbers, easy to burn if cornered. Records can be kept here without looking like they are. Men who hold certain documents often outlive men who surrender them.
I know this about Osrel because I know what he fears, what he owes me, and which of those two things will make him open a sealed case faster.
He opens the hatch before I reach it, which means he has a vantage point, which would concern me more if I hadn't known him fifteen years. He is a slight dark elf, gray-haired, with the stillness of someone who spent years making themselves easy to overlook.
"You're wanted." Flat. Procedural.
"I'm aware. The records."
He leads me down. The lower room holds shelves of military courier cases — gray-sealed administrative type, used to move wartime documents between command posts. One shelf carries a set I recognize by markings. The Blackwater administrative series. Some cases have been opened. Some resealed with mismatched wax.
I pull the first case and work through it quickly. Evacuation logs — routing documents that state when orders left command,which gates they were directed to, when each position confirmed receipt. The timestamps don't align with what I know about the fire's timeline, but the courier marks on the secondary packet are rebel format. I can read the format. I can't read the specific marks the way someone who used them can. I take what matters. Osrel watches from the doorway like a man calculating whether the transaction has finished.
"The crossed-out name on the authorization chain," I start. "Who altered it."
"I don't know who. I know when — after the original sealing." That's enough. I leave him to his survival instincts. He'll go southwest. He always does when frightened.
Theren and I rejoin the group. She reads my face when I return and doesn't ask, but I'm sure she knows I have something. An hour of broken ground before we find a place — a collapsed waystation with three walls still standing and overhead stone to make a fire invisible from above. One of the escorts gets it going. Theren takes first watch. The others sleep in shifts.
I spread the documents on the flattest section of stone near the fire and work through the authorization chain. The evacuation order left command correctly. But the routing record — rebel writing I can't decode — shows the path the message actually traveled. Not the path it should have.
"You can't read it."
Corrine is across the fire, watching me work with the expression of someone who has identified a problem and is deciding whether to name it.
"I know the format."
"It isn't the marks." She crawls over and crouches beside me, not touching it yet. "The diagonal with the cross — that's a pull mark. Someone with access to the official courier line used rebel-format notation to move the order off the record."
"Someone who knew both systems."
"Someone who worked across both." She takes the routing record and turns it toward the firelight. "The evacuation order was redirected to a senior command holding position, not a gate position. It never reached levels lower than that." She stops. Reads it again. "The pull mark predates the first strike by at least three hours."
Before the fire started, someone with access to both command structure and rebel courier notation removed the one order that could have emptied the fortress. I sit with that long enough to understand its weight.
"They planned for it," the words feel unbelievable on my tongue. "Not just exploited it afterward. The fire, the body count — it was created."
Corrine doesn't answer. She sets the record back and stares at it like something that has rearranged itself into an answer you weren't ready for. We work through the rest in near-silence. Between the two of us the document says what it refused to say to either of us alone. It takes the better part of an hour. By the end, Theren has rotated watch and one of the escorts has fallen asleep against the far wall.
At some point Corrine reaches for the authorization chain, misreads a water stain as an additional signature, and announces with complete seriousness that my own command clerk appears to have cosigned the order to betray me.
"That's a water stain."
She looks closer. Then she laughs — short, dry, completely real. Three seconds. Then she catches it and looks back at the paper. I do too, and her laugh still occupying the space around us after it's gone. The woman crouched here is not the monster I thought she was. She's something considerably more inconvenient.
The altered chain sits between us. One crossed-out name. One diverted order. A massacre built before the first flame was struck, and her, used as the instrument of it.
I want the name underneath that crossed-out ink with the same urgency I once reserved for finding her. The difference is the urgency has turned around — it's no longer pointed at her. It's pointed at whoever held the pen, and she is the only person in Protheka who will look at it from the same angle I do.
11
CORRINE
