Page 54 of Mayhem

A knock sounded against the open office door before one of the lower-house coordinators stepped inside with a problem that had already survived two emails and apparently required my face to resolve. A protected second-year had borrowed against a family allowance, missed the repayment date, then tried to claim the debt was invalid because the person who arranged it had graduated in May. I listened long enough to confirm the facts, corrected the part that mattered, and sent the coordinator back out with authorization to collect through the current account holder. The debt belonged to the house, not whichever student had originally written it down, and I wasn’t interested in letting people discover obligations could be erased by waiting for graduation.

By the time the door shut again, the Primrose file had not improved.

I went back three years before the address and found almost nothing attached to Runo. Then I went forward and found too much that led nowhere. A driver’s license issued under one address with no matching lease. A tax filing tied to work I could not verify. A vehicle registration that disappeared from the state database but remained inside an insurance archive Ronan had access to. None of it was extraordinary by itself. Together, it looked manufactured.

The current records were cleaner. That was almost worse. Runo Matthews existed now in exactly the ways a person was supposed to exist. Property, financial activity, professional connections, enough ordinary documentation to satisfy anybody running a background check for employment or housing.

The problem was the seam between that man and the one attached to Primrose. There should have been years connecting them. Instead there was a gap somebody had filled with paperwork that survived casual scrutiny and collapsed the second I compared independent sources.

I pulled Echo’s original file back onto the second monitor.

Her history had bothered me from the beginning because it was thin in all the wrong places. Not empty, not obviously false. Just orderly enough to explain nothing. She had four fathers appearing consistently in the parts of her life that mattered, yet their work histories never explained the money, the movement, or the ease with which they seemed to relocate without leaving the kind of administrative mess most families accumulated over decades.

Runo gave me the first reason to stop treating that as eccentric family bookkeeping. I followed one of the old address references sideways instead of forward and found another surname I recognized from Echo’s emergency-contact history. The record itself was worthless but the address matched a property that had also appeared in the Primrose archive. Different man, same cluster. I checked another source before trusting it and found the same overlap buried in an old insurance filing.

Two fathers now touched Primrose. That was enough to change the question.

I stopped looking for evidence that Echo had exaggerated where she came from and started looking for evidence that somebody had deliberately made the people around her difficult to reconstruct.

The office door opened again without a knock. Malakai walked in holding a black notebook and a charging cable wrapped around his hand, dropped both on the corner of my desk, then reached past me for the bottle of water I had not opened.

“Those hers?” I asked, keeping my attention on the screen while he took half the bottle like it belonged to him.

“She left them upstairs.” Malakai checked the time on his phone before setting the bottle down. “Her seminar ends in twenty minutes.”

I looked at the notebook. It was Echo’s class notebook rather than the narrow one she kept closer to herself, the corner bent where she had apparently shoved it under something heavy. Malakai had brought it down without being asked because he already knew she would come looking for it after class.

I had watched him keep track of Ronan for years without needing to consciously decide to do it. The same kind of awareness had started forming around Echo. Malakai leaned over the monitor instead. His eyes moved across the Primrose references before settling on Runo’s name. “You got farther.”

“Enough to know the first file was useless.”

“That was obvious.”

I glanced at him, and he lifted one shoulder before looking back at the screen. I let the insult pass because he was right, and because I had no interest in turning the next five minutes into an argument over who had distrusted the background report first.

“The current identity holds,” I said. “The older one doesn’t. Too many missing transitions, too many records supported by documents that should not exist. Somebody built continuity after the fact.”

Malakai pulled the second chair closer instead of answering immediately. He read through the address chain, then the insurance filing, taking his time with the dates. “This one connects to another father.”

“I saw it.”

“And there’ll be more.”

That was likely, though I wasn’t ready to assume the entire family had been sitting in Primrose under different names just because two records overlapped. The mistake I had made with Echo before was expecting one answer to explain everything. Her life seemed to work in layers, and every time I stripped one away I found another piece that made the cleaner version less believable.

I opened the archived local reporting I had already pulled and searched Runo’s name again. Most of the results were broken references, summaries without underlying articles, or cached index entries that had lost whatever they once linked to. One result contained only six useful words buried inside a longer list of names connected to a Primrose investigation that had been closed without public explanation.

Runo Matthews was one of them. I clicked through to the source archive and got a dead page. Malakai read the line over my shoulder, then sat back. “That’s deliberate.”

“Probably.”

The word irritated me because I preferred proof, but there was too much damage in too specific a place for coincidence to keep carrying the explanation. Somebody had not merely changed addresses or used private companies to move property. Somebody had gone backward and reduced the amount of surviving history attached to these men.

The current version of Echo’s family had been constructed on top of something else. I thought about Echo sitting at the long table upstairs with her boots hooked around the chair legs while she argued over a research citation.

I thought about the way she had understood Callum Mercer’s pressure point before Ronan finished explaining the assignment, the way she had built her own favor network without ever treating it like an extraordinary accomplishment, and the complete absence of hesitation when Hunter Hansen or the Quorum had been offered to her as reasons she should be afraid.

My phone vibrated beside the keyboard. Ronan had sent a file link with no message attached, which usually meant he expected me to open it before he wasted time explaining what I could read myself.