Page 23 of Zenith Tower

“Then you come back.”

“And if I find something?”

Caspian leaned over the rough map. “You remember it. You do not carry anything out unless leaving it would be worse.”

“You sound like you’ve done this before.”

“My father kept records he didn’t want his sons to read.”

We waited until the evening infirmary round. Caspian approached the corridor attendant with Kieran’s copy order in hand and asked for a receipt bearing the panel’s seal. He kept his voice courteous and his questions exact. By the time the attendant opened her ledger to prove the first receipt was sufficient, she had stopped watching the corridor behind him.

Hale and I passed the junction without hurrying.

We reached the stair marked RECORDS and descended into colder air. At the bottom, the passage divided. One branch continued toward voices and the scrape of chairs. The other ended at a plain door.

A shallow service alcove had been cut beside the stair. Hale stepped into its shadow, where he could see both passages without standing in either.

“If I call your name, leave whatever you’re holding.”

I nodded.

I opened the door.

There was no lock.

The corridor restrictions had apparently been considered enough.

The records room was smaller than I expected. Shelves rose to the ceiling on both sides of a narrow central aisle. Folders filled them from end to end, some new and square, others bowed with age. The room smelled of old paper, cold stone, and the mineral damp that reached everything in the Tower.

A receiving table stood beside the door, crowded with recent submissions waiting to be filed. I worked through the stack until I found Kieran’s copied pages beneath several sealed folders.

Caspian’s signature ran across the bottom of the final sheet, with Hale’s directly beneath it. A new cover page had been added in a hand I did not recognize.

Marsh, Kieran. Active decline. Independent comparison pending.

Beneath that, besideassociated classification, someone had written:

Untethered.

A second line named the comparison file.

Corwin, Sadie.

Kieran was not Untethered. I was.

I returned the pages to their place in the stack and moved to the shelves.

The first rows were arranged by active review number. Older cases were filed by surname. I found the C section and scanned the faded tabs.

CORWIN.

Sadie Corwin. Cosima had spoken the name once at the Hall, then refused to say more.

I reached for the folder.

A door opened somewhere in the passage.

I froze with my fingers on the tab.