Page 97 of Legacy Elite

And here's the thing that's actually making me itch, all the way along the corridor.

I'm in the room.

I asked for this. I stood in Luke's sitting room and said get me in the room like it was a fair demand, and then I said it to Falken, and he wrote it down, and now there's a meeting about the Fourth House at ten o'clock and my name is on the list of attendees.

Apparently I demanded a seat at the table just in time for the table to get frightening.

The door opens and I know before I've fully crossed the threshold.

There are four people. Falken. Jon, at the far end, with a notebook he isn't writing in. Faris. And a woman I've met twice on video calls and never in person — Hess, the Council's records specialist, sixties, cardigan, reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

And the table is covered.

Not with folders. With enlargements. Somebody's had documents blown up to A3 and mounted so nobody has to breathe on the originals, and they're laid out in a sequence, and there are little printed labels beside them.

Nobody is drinking coffee. Nobody's talking about the weather.

Faris looks up when I come in and does not look remotely smug.

That's the thing that gets my heart going. In fifteen months I have never once seen Celeste Faris in a room about me without the expression of a woman waiting to be proved right.

"Okay," I say, sitting down. "What?"

"Miss Miller—" Falken starts.

"You've all got the same face. What did you find?"

Falken glances at Hess.

"Quite a lot," Hess says.

She starts where we left off in October, which I appreciate, because I have had enough of people beginning at the beginning.

"Your father's line runs back cleanly to Emil. He arrives in 1856, aged twenty-three by his own account, and the name settles into Miller within a generation." She taps the first enlargement — the manifest, blown up until the clerk's slanting hand is the size of my palm. "Before the crossing, nothing connects to him. Two stated birthplaces, neither of which produces a record. Two different men named as his father."

"Right."

"So we stopped trying to find Emil. Emil doesn't want to be found — that's the entire point of Emil." She moves her hand along the table. "We started at the other end instead."

"Which end?"

"The end of the war," Faris says.

I look at her.

"Twelve weeks in the post-war administrative archive," Faris says. "Not the histories. The paperwork. The histories were written to be read. The paperwork was written to be filed."

And there's something in her voice I've never heard before, which I think might be the sound of Celeste Faris enjoying herself.

Hess moves to the second enlargement.

"A household inventory," she says. "Taken after the fall of the House, as part of the seizure of the estate. It lists rooms. It lists furniture. And at the back, because that's how these things were done, it lists the household."

I lean in.

Two columns of names in a copperplate hand, and beside each name, a short notation.

"Staff, mostly. Then at the top of the page, the family." Her finger moves. "Every entry is marked. Accounted for. Accounted for. Deceased, confirmed. Deceased, confirmed."