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"That's not an oversight. That's someone signing something they didn't read."

"Or someone signing something they did," Halver said, low, from behind Jade's chair.

Jade's finger had stopped moving over the diagram. She didn't say anything, but I watched her as she understood the implications.

"There's more," Janus said, and drew out the last page. "One of the two dead miners was examined by the settlement's healer before the body went into the ground. Blunt trauma consistent with a collapse, mostly. But she documented two additional wounds, along the ribs and across one forearm, that she couldn't reconcile with falling rock. Straight edges. Consistent depth along the whole length of each cut." He set the page down.

"She wrote it plainly enough in her notes. Those look like blade wounds, not collapse injuries. That report went to the Warden's office with everything else. It was filed unread. I know that because the seal was never broken until it reached my desk."

"How did it reach your desk," Corian asked, "if the Warden closed the case?"

"Because Greymantle's overseer didn't accept the ruling." Something in Janus's voice shifted, not quite approval, closer to respect worn thin by frustration. "A woman named Renata Voss. She's run that settlement eleven years, buried two miners now under an explanation she doesn't believe, and instead of taking her complaint back to the same Warden who signed it, she wrote directly to the Citadel. Directly to me."

"Is that normal?" Alex asked.

"No. A settlement overseer petitioning the High General's office over the head of her own regional Warden or the Terra Guild House is the kind of thing that gets noticed."

That was the piece that sat wrong, the thing I'd felt building since he pulled the curtain half shut. I glanced at the window, at the careful gap he had left in the fabric, and knew exactly what kind of caution I was looking at. Not procedure. My father did this. Kept a room quiet, kept a list short, until whatever sat inside it stopped being small enough to bury.

"You didn't send this through the Battalion boards," I said.

Janus's eyes found mine and held a beat longer than the question needed. "No."

"Why us."

"Because if the Warden closed this to bury an honest mistake, a squad from his own garrison walking back into those tunnels puts him in an impossible position, and gives him every reason to make sure whatever they find matches what he already signed." Janus's hand flattened again on the papers, though there was nothing left to hold down. He didn't continue right away.

"And because if it isn't a mistake, I want people looking at it who have no reason to protect him, no chain of command running through his office, and no obligation to report to anyone but me."

"You think it's deliberate," Corian said.

"I think two men are dead, a third is missing, and the paperwork explaining it doesn't survive being read twice." Janus's gaze swept the table, settling on Corian last. "I think Greymantle sits on Crown land feeding a Crown garrison, and if something's happening there that a Warden would rather bury than explain, I want to know what it is before it becomes a problem I can no longer handle quietly. Corruption, negligence, or nothing worse than a healer who read a wound wrong..." He stopped there, the sentence going unfinished.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Outside, someone in the yard, probably one of Argentite's, laughed at something too far off to make out, ordinary and unconcerned, a sound that belonged to a morning that hadn't just tilted sideways.

Corian looked down at the diagram, the mismatched collapse points, the report with its careful observation about bruising. When he looked up, I already knew what he'd say before he said it. I didn't need my ability for that, not with him.

"We'll take it."

Janus's shoulders dropped, just slightly, the closest thing to relief I'd seen on him since he knocked.

"Thank you." Two words I'd never once heard him spend on any of us before.

"How fast do you need us there?"

"As fast as it takes without drawing attention. No portal requisition. Portal logs are reviewed monthly, and I'd rather this trip not appear on anyone's review." Janus began gathering the papers back into the case.

"Through Gledhi to an old watch station, then a boat across, you're on foot till the settlement, you're looking at seven to ten days, give or take weather. Long enough that nobody watching the roads mistakes it for anything but a routine posting rotation."

"Departure?"

"Tomorrow morning, if you can manage it. I’ll have a contracted boat waiting."

Corian's eyes moved once around the table, a question aimed at each of us that none of us needed to answer out loud. Alex nodded without hesitation, some of the humor already creeping back into his face now that there was a plan attached to the problem. Halver's nod came slower, he was probably already three steps into a route he hadn't seen yet. Jade's was smallest of all, barely a movement, but her eyes had sharpened the way they had at the Water Rift, the moment she first felt something worth chasing. Two dead men and a missing third, and it was the closest thing to eagerness I'd seen on her in weeks. My own nod, when it came, was an easy decision.

"Tomorrow," Corian said. "We'll be ready."

The house held its ordinary sounds for the rest of the day, everyone moving through familiar routines with new weight sitting on their shoulders. It wasn't until after dinner, once the plates were cleared and the light had gone amber through the kitchen windows, that the packing actually started, and somewhere in the middle of it the gravity of the whole thing slipped loose from all of us at once.