Page 55 of Legacy Elite

"I'm not going to say it because I can't prove it, and if I say it you'll repeat it to Sophia, and by Thursday it'll be a fact." She stacks the papers. "What I'll say is this. I don't know that somebody hid where they came from. But if somebody wanted to, this is exactly what it would look like."

I sit there for a second with that.

"Is that suspicious?" I ask. "Like, professionally. Is that a suspicious amount of missing?"

"Interesting isn't the same as suspicious."

"Interesting like bad handwriting, or interesting like extinct wolf royalty?"

"Currently somewhere between," Freya says.

And then the date catches my eye.

"Wait," I say. "1856."

"Yes."

"The war's way before that. It's not even close."

Freya nods slowly, and I can see her waiting again, the way Wren waited, the way people apparently do when they want to know whether I'll get there myself.

"So he's not the one," I say. "Emil isn't the survivor. He's generations later."

"He is."

"So whoever actually got out of the Fourth House was still in Europe. And then their children were. Maybe their grandchildren, maybe more than that — living somewhere, having families, being wolves or not being wolves, for however long that took." I push my hair back. "And then eventually one of their descendants got on that ship."

"That's it," Freya says.

"We haven't found the family. We've found the door they possibly came through."

"That's the first useful sentence you've said all evening."

"I'm going to remember that."

"Please do."

She starts putting things back in order, which takes her another ten minutes because Freya's version of putting things in order involves labels.

And that's when I see it.

It's near the bottom of the stack the Council sent through — not a genealogy record at all, just an academy document that's been included because it's part of my file. Two pages. Standard form. Candidate identification and contact report.

There's a name at the bottom.

J. Matthias.

Dated the March before I ever heard the word Luftis.

"Huh," I say.

Freya looks over. "What?"

"He had a file on me."

"Who?"

I hold it up.