Page 106 of Zenith Tower

Neither of us looked at the other.

“Is he safe?” I asked.

“For now. He isn’t working alone.”

“Who is?”

The patrol reappeared.

The courier hunched over the next crate, performing strain for the steward. “Careful with that corner.”

I adjusted my grip. The steward passed close enough that the brass at his belt brushed the wood.

When his steps faded, the courier continued.

“Rev and Cosima are free. They’re moving messages through the Hall kitchens and the families who supply them. Juno is still teaching. She delays Council orders when she can do it without showing her hand.”

Rev in her kitchen, arms dusted with flour, had once seemed safely removed from the machinery that governed Zenith Hall. The Council had mistaken her work for powerlessness.

Cosima would know every provision the Council preferred its students not to read. Juno had spent years surviving within rules she despised. Together, they could make quiet obstruction look like ordinary delay.

“What are they trying to do?”

“Build a record the Council can’t erase and put it in front of enough witnesses that they can’t call it a mistake.”

“They know we’re here.”

“They know the four of you crossed the bridge. Lior knows his sister did. They don’t know who else the Tower holds.”

I thought of the descending rows of doors and the names in the records room. Residents classified as pending, unstable, withdrawn, or closed. People converted into procedural language until no one outside the mountain knew to ask whether they were alive.

“They need names,” I said.

“They need anything you can move without getting the person carrying it caught.”

The warning was fair. It was also frustrating.

“Suppose we could get names out.”

The courier’s hands paused on the rope handle. “Then don’t give them to the first person who claims to know Rev.”

I turned my head enough to study him.

He was perhaps thirty, with a pale scar crossing one eyebrow and the exhausted eyes of a man who had spent several nights expecting a knock at his door.

“You don’t trust yourself?”

“You shouldn’t.” He lifted his end of the crate. “Not yet.”

I believed him.

The shift horn sounded once above us. Half the allotted hour was gone.

We carried the crate toward the storeroom. The route took us beneath the open shaft, where cold mist settled over my hair and face. For several steps, the Tower’s water-light was replaced by ordinary gray daylight.

I had forgotten how colorless real weather could be.

“What does Lior want Astra to know?”