Page 81 of Legacy Elite

Then he shakes his head.

"You are getting better at this. That's a much better ask than the one you came in with," he says.

"I'm aware."

"It's also considerably harder."

"Can you do it?"

"Yes," Luke says. "I think so."

He reaches for me then. Just his hand and I step back — not far, just enough.

Not yet.

His hand stops in the air. And he doesn't push it, and he doesn't make a face about it, and he lets it drop, and I think that might be the single most surprising thing he's done all evening.

"Jessica."

I stop at the door.

"I know why you need to see it," Luke says.

I stand there for a second.

"Then help me see it."

"I will."

The archive is still open and the assistant on the desk has stopped asking me whether I need help and started just nodding at me.

I spread it all back out. The estate survey. The modern Preserve map. Renzo's coordinates. Freya's sketch, which I've been carrying around folded in my notebook for a week.

But I'm not looking at Lufgard.

Falken said no to the castle. He was extremely specific about the castle. He didn't say one single word about anything else on that estate. And there is a great deal of estate.

I go along the old boundary with my finger. There are marks all over this thing that meant something to whoever drew it: little squares, a run of hatching, a symbol at a river crossing, the word mill in handwriting so old it’s almost ilegible. Then I put the modern map next to it and start looking for what's underneath the green.

There's a structure marked here, half a mile off a fire road. There's something at this bend that the modern survey calls a ruin, unclassified.

There's a line of four little squares running east from the beech tree. Four. We found three.

I get the pencil.

The door opens, and Freya comes in with her coat still on and two coffees, and stands over my shoulder for a second looking at what I've got laid out.

"What are you doing?" she says.

I don't look up.

"Finding out what they missed."

Chapter eleven

Soren

Miller is late.