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I limped the length of the Archive beneath the pools of lamplight, surrounded by the warm, papery quiet of the stacks, and placed the slim green book on the corner of Ronan Ashgrave’s desk.

“Thank you for this,” I said.

He didn’t look up from the page he was repairing. “I don’t recall handing you anything.”

“It was on my table, squared exactly to the edge. Nobody else in this building squares things to the edge like that.”

“Then it must have been the building.”

“It smelled like a bonfire,” I said. “Everything near you smells like a bonfire.”

That made him stop.

His brush hovered above the page while his amber eyes lifted to mine. For a moment, there was something in his expression that looked dangerously close to alarm. Then it disappeared, hidden behind the same flat, courteous look he wore for everything else.

I realized what I had admitted a second too late.

Hollows did not smell rosemary from three tables away. They probably did not recognize individual people by the scent and heat of an old fire, either. Whatever was strange about Ronan Ashgrave, I had just given him a reason to wonder what was strange about me instead.

“Put it back where you found it,” he said. “The restricted section is locked. I would hate to think anyone had been careless with the key.”

So I put it back. Apparently, that was our arrangement.

He never gave me the Hollow records. He never even pretended that he might.

On the second day, though, I asked what I was actually allowed to read. He considered me in silence for a few seconds, then rose from his chair, disappeared into the stacks, and returned carrying a leather ledger thick enough to make me wonder whether it had ever been intended to move.

He set it down in front of me with enough force to make the lamp tremble.

“General assessment registers,” he said. “Every student who has stood before the Beastglass, and what it showed. They do not become Hollow records merely because the word Hollow appears in them occasionally, and nobody has ever found them interesting enough to restrict.” He tapped the cover once with one long finger. “Since you are so particular, Miss Hale, find me the first Hollow.”

It was a test. I knew it immediately because I had seen the same thing often enough in training, when someone asked a question they already knew the answer to simply to see how you approached it.

So I accepted.

It took me six days.

In the end, there were thirty-one ledgers covering almost three hundred years, written in thirty different hands. Whenever I could steal an hour between classes, meals, and the nine o’clock closing bell, I sat at the long table nearest Ronan’s desk and worked my way through them. Twice, I skipped Blood Law altogether.

I started with the most recent entries and worked backward, moving through name after name and result after result.

Pack. Pride. Flight. Den. Tide. Pack. Pack.

Then, roughly forty years ago, something changed. A new word began appearing in red ink every few years.

Hollow.

Before that, it did not appear once.

Across two hundred and sixty years of records, the Beastglass had apparently never failed to show a classification for anyone. Then, within the space of a few decades, Hollows had begun appearing with enough regularity to establish a pattern.

It made no sense. I had sat through enough statistics lectures to know that much. You did not get more than two and a half centuries with no recorded cases at all and then suddenly start finding one every few years unless something had changed.

Either the Beastglass had changed, or the records had.

So I went back to the beginning and started reading the ledgers properly instead of simply copying down the results.

Once I knew what to look for, I found it.