Page 62 of Property of Scar

Ready, but not committed.

Smart.

The main floor is wrecked but not ransacked in the way thieves work. That kind of damage has its own logic with shelves turned out for valuables, crates pried open and abandoned, an obvious hunger behind the mess. This is different. Every crate has been opened, yes, but the contents aren’t scattered carelessly. They’re sorted, examined, and replaced or set aside with a precision that reads like a method, like someone working through a list. The artifact cases have been moved, lids lifted, and inventory photographed by the scuff patterns in the dust. Someone was looking for something specific and searched this entire floor before either finding it or giving up.

I crouch beside a crate near the east wall, press two fingers to a boot print in the grime, feel the depth and the weight distribution. “More than one. Moving in formation.”

Cali is three paces ahead, reading the same evidence from the angle of a toppled shelving unit. “Coordinated… they came in knowing the layout.”

That lands the way it’s meant to. Only a handful of people know this floor plan, and none of them would send rogues.

We move deeper.

The narrow corridor at the back of the main floor leads to the old cold storage bay, and the smell thickens around us as we approach, the blood stronger now, and something underneath it that makes my jaw tighten. Chemicals, organic material, the low, persistent hum of equipment that shouldn’t be running in a building that draws no registered power.

Cali pushes the door, and we both go still in the frame.

The cold storage bay has been converted into something that turns my breath into something cold and heavy. Metal workbenches line the walls, every surface crowded with racks of glass vials, the contents dark and varied, some deep red, some almost black, some a rust-amber I recognize immediately as berserker blood from the bitterness it carries even from here. Ritual equipment clusters at the center table, sigil-marked bowls, iron instruments, burned-down candles in colors that correspond to blood magic I haven’t seen practiced in generations. And against the far wall, a row of cages, four of them, three empty and one with the lock recently forced from the inside, the metal bent outward with the kind of force that belongs to something desperate and goddamn enormous.

The cages are too small for anything comfortable, but just large enough to contain.

Cali moves through the scene with the same sharp focus she brings to everything else. Her eyes work constantly, taking it all in piece by piece before anybody gets the chance to disturb it. Every detail, angle, and clue somebody else would have walked straight past.

She’s done this too many times not to know better.

Cali crouches at the central workbench, turning a vial slowly in the light, watching the way the liquid inside catches, separates, then settles. She sets it back exactly where it was, fingers careful and precise.

Her attention shifts.

Not random.

Directed.

Something half hidden at the edge of the table catches her eye, tucked between two equipment cases as though it belongs there but doesn’t want to be seen.

She stills for a fraction of a second, then reaches. Her fingers slide into the narrow gap, brushing against worn leather before she closes her grip and draws it out.

A small journal.

Unmarked on the outside.

Used.

The edges are softened from handling, and the spine is creased, suggesting it’s been opened often and not stored. She turns it once in her hand, like she’s deciding whether she wants to know what’s inside.

Then she opens it.

The cover gives easily, and her eyes drop to the first page, then she reads.

But something in her face goes still.

Still, in a way that feels like everything just locked into place at once.

“Scar.” The way she says my name in that register is enough. I cross to her in the time it takes for the syllable to land fully. She turns the page toward me, and I read the handwriting, meticulous, antiquated, in a script I haven’t seen since the seventeenth century, and the name at the top of the first entry is Mordain’s.

The temperature in the room seems to drop another ten degrees, while every muscle in my body pulls tight.

Not from the cold.