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"Good. Lead the way."

"Since when does he come to us?" Alex's voice landed in my head before I'd finished processing the coat and the case.

"Never," I sent back. "Not once."

"That's not ominous at all."

"Quiet." I caught Halver's eye across the room, felt the faint press of his own mind brushing the edge of the link, listening without adding to it.

Whatever this was, it was serious. The High General didn't knock on doors.

The map room sat at the end of the ground floor opposite Jade's room, a narrow space Corian had claimed within the first month of the house being ours. A long table filled most of the floor, an old survey map of Aracardis pinned flat across its surface, corners pinned down. The General set his case on the table and crossed to the window before he opened it, checking the yard below in one sweep, then pulled the curtain half shut. Not fully. Enough to blur the view of anyone glancing up from the yard.

Alex noticed it too. I watched the humor drain out of his face.

"Sir?"

"Sit," Janus said. "This won't take long to explain. It will take longer to decide."

We sat. Jade took the chair opposite the door out of habit, angled so she could see both the window and the hall. Halver stood behind her, arms folded, close enough that she'd have felt him there without needing to check. It was an interesting new dynamic.

Janus opened the case and drew out a thin stack of papers, setting them on the table without spreading them, one hand flat on top as though the words underneath needed holding down.

"There's a settlement north of the Terra Garrison B," he said. "Small. A few hundred people, mostly miners and haulers. It sits opposite one of the Vaso Ruins, it supplies labor and materials to the Garrison."

Corian leaned forward.

"Greymantle." Not a question. He already knew the name. His family ran the guilds that supplied the contracts, had done for ten generations.

"That's the one." Janus's mouth thinned. "Over the last month, Greymantle has reported four separate tunnel collapses in the mines near the settlement. Two miners are dead. A third has been missing since the last collapse, six days ago, and hasn't been found."

Nobody spoke. Jade's hands had gone still on the table. Alex stopped fidgeting and leant forward.

"The regional Warden investigated and closed the matter administratively a week ago," Janus said. "His finding is Skitters. They're known for undermining support structures when they nest in large numbers. The collapses fit the profile closely enough that nobody above him has questioned the ruling."

"But you're questioning it," Corian said.

"I wouldn't be standing in your room at dawn if I weren't."

He spread the papers across the table. A hand-drawn diagram of the tunnel system, sections marked in red where the collapses had occurred. A denser page, columns of dates and measurements that read like a formal incident. A third page that had clearly been folded and unfolded enough times to soften along every crease, the ink smeared at the bottom where a thumb had rested too long.

"Skitters tunnel outward from a nest in expanding rings," Jade said, studying the diagram before anyone else spoke. She'd gone still.

"The collapse pattern should look concentric. Rings around a central point, wider each time as the colony grows."

Janus's eyes moved to her. "It doesn't."

"No." She traced one finger along the marked sections without touching the paper.

"These are spread across three separate levels, not radiating from one nest. Two of them aren't even near each other. If Skitters caused this, you'd need at least two unrelated colonies that happened to start burrowing the same month, in tunnels that have supposedly been clear of them for years."

Nobody else in the room said anything about the fact that a Council Master had just taken a recruit's read of a diagram over a Warden's official ruling. I noticed. I doubted Jade had.

"Three years," Janus said. "According to the settlement's Menagerie liaison, no Skitter activity has been logged in that tunnel system since the last infestation was cleared. That note is in the Warden's own file. He signed off on the Skitters ruling anyway."

The room went quiet in a different way this time, people doing math they didn't like the answer to.

Alex's fork, still in his hand from breakfast for reasons none of us had questioned, finally found its way to the table.