Page 159 of Legacy Elite

I've got to tell Freya and Sophia, they are going to lose their minds.

Chapter twenty-three

Jessica

Freya begged to come, even though she has to wait outside. She's brought a bag full of notebooks, pens, sticky notes, highlighters, and enough snacks for a siege.

"You know I don't actually get to bring you into the archive."

"I know. I'll be outside, reading, with a drink ready for when you come out."

"Freya."

"Just being in the Council library will be amazing."

There's a driver, and Cassel in front — she runs my detail now that Corvin's still on crutches — and a second car ahead of us with two more people in it. Everything about the last three days has been somebody signing something.

The route was approved Monday. The departure time changed twice and I only found out this morning. Outside about six people at the academy, nobody knows where I am today. Cassel briefed me twice: I do what she says, immediately, no discussion. If we stop somewhere unplanned I stay in the car. If she says get out, I get out and go where she points and I don't look back to see whether she's following.

I agreed to all of it. Cheerfully, even.

Because in under an hour I'm going to sit at a table and read something my family wrote. Somebody's actual handwriting. A person who put a pen down two hundred years ago and never once imagined today would happen.

"Where do you want to start?" Freya asks.

"I don't know."

"You've had three weeks."

"I've made a list nine times and I keep tearing it up." I watch the fields go past. "The girl, obviously. Whatever's there about her. But that's the end of it. I keep thinking I should start earlier, before any of it, when they were just a family that was fine."

Freya considers this.

"Household accounts," she says.

"Sorry?"

"If you want to know what they were actually like. Nobody glamorizes in an accounts book." She shrugs. "You learn more about people from what they bought than from what they wrote about themselves."

The archive sits an hour outside a town I've never heard of, up a long private road with beech trees down one side.

We clear the first checkpoint at twenty past eight — a barrier, a hut, and a man who takes four minutes over Cassel's paperwork, then mine, then Freya's. Then another mile and a half to the inner gate, where you leave the vehicles.

We're maybe a third of a mile short of it when the car in front slows.

"What's this?" Cassel says.

There's a van across the road. Not blocking it — sitting at an angle just past a bend, hazards going, back doors open, two men in safety vests doing something to the shoulder. A folding sign on the pavement says the road's closed for work and points traffic left, onto the service track that runs around the back of the perimeter.

The lead car has stopped. Somebody's got a window down.

"Fine," I say. "So we go around."

"Mm," Cassel says, and picks up the radio.

"Control, this is Cassel. We're on the approach road with a works vehicle and a closure. Do you have anything on that?"

Nothing.