Page 28 of Orc’s Bones

He understood what the exile cost. He built the wrong thing from it. Both true.

I pushed through the Archive entrance door.

The meeting had taken longer than I had to spare. It had given me more than I’d gone in expecting. That was the only accounting that mattered right now.

Outside, the lower district air hit me — cold and heavy with the ghost of the grave fields nearby, that diffuse pressure of mass burial pressing up from the ground even up here, even above the bridge level. I stood in it for a moment.

I needed to tell Thruk what I’d done. He was going to come at me with the full weight of what he was, and I was going to stand in it and not move, because I’d gone into that Archive without telling him and what I’d found was worth it and that was the truth I was going to walk into the Cathedral and say to his face.

I’m actually looking forward to it.

I was working out what that meant — and already late, well past the fifteen minutes, though what I’d gotten was worth it — when I heard footsteps.

Serah Vell was at the gate.

Not inside — outside, at the point where the Archive entrance met the lower district corridor. Her back was against the wall, her notes open in her hands, and the look on her face when she saw me was the look she got when she’d been waiting in a situation she didn’t understand and had run out of patience for not understanding it.

She’d been here since I went in.

“Something moved through the Archive’s bone memory while you were in there.” The usual calibration was gone — no checking whether speaking aloud was permissible. “Not the lower stacks. The reading room level. A resonance pass, very fast, through the structural layer of the reading room walls.”

She hadn’t been following me into the lower stacks. She’d been stationed at the entrance, reading the Archive’s bone structure the way I’d been reading the Dominion’s walls for the past two days.

And she’d caught what I hadn’t.

“What direction was the pass moving?”

“Upward from the basement. Into the reading room ceiling. Then east.” She turned the page to show me her notation — dense, rapid, accurate. “The pattern wasn’t ambient. It had a structure.”

I took the page. Read it.

The frequency markers were accurate and the structure she’d identified was real. A signal pass through the Archive’s upper-level bone structure — not the lower stacks, not the sealed cases, but the reading room’s own walls, bone-reinforced at the founding level, which hadn’t been in any of my previous analysis because they weren’t part of the catalogue or the restricted section.

She caught a signal pass I hadn’t known to look for.

I said it aloud before I’d decided to, because Serah’s chin went up with the look of someone who’d done well and wasn’t sure yet whether well was right.

“Is it a problem?”

“Show me exactly where you were standing.”

She moved to the position — two meters from the entrance gate, the left side, one hand pressed against the wall. I pressed mine beside hers. Old and dense and clean in the founding layer. But at the surface, faint as the reading room could carry, a residual path — the track of the signal pass she’d caught, already beginning to fade.

And at the end of the path, encoded in the residual trace: a structure that was not a signal or a data pass.

A message.

Three words, written into the Archive’s founding wall in Malverek’s sigil architecture.

Addressed to me by name.

I held my palm against the wall. Read it twice. The encoding was careful — not rushed, the work of someone who had chosen what three words would do the most work. The words themselves were not a threat.

They were an offer.

I took my hand away.

Serah was watching me. “What does it say?”