Page 33 of Alien Devil’s Crown

Vashri, Soren. Guard Second Class, Sovereign’s Household.

The file was four millimeters thick and weighed more than the building.

His enlistment record gave his real age. By then he had stopped needing to lie for dock work. For four years, at least on these pages, my brother had been allowed to be exactly who he was.

His service photo. Seventeen in it, the collar too new, the face under the regulation bearing still entirely the boy who split dock rations on a hull ledge.

His marksmanship scores, better than he’d ever admitted to me. A reprimand from his first year, insubordination, refusing an order to clear a corridor of petitioners in the rain. The reviewing officer had reduced it to a note: correct instincts, wrong tone.

I heard Soren laughing about it across six years, heard exactly the tone, because he’d told me the story on his first leave and gotten the ending wrong on purpose.

In his version he’d charmed the officer. In the file, the officer’s actual closing line: Guard Vashri is advised that the Household protects the Sovereign’s people as well as his person, that he is correct these are the same duty, and that he will nonetheless learn to say so through channels.

He never learned to say anything through channels. He wrote me every month for four years, around the censors, and had left most of his own life out of the letters. He wanted to know about mine.

Commendations. Three. One for pulling a kitchen worker out of a lift accident. One for a security correction that made some minister’s assassination inconvenient. And one, the oldest, for marksmanship instruction, because of course they’d made the dock rat who lied about his age teach the nobles’ sons to shoot.

Every page showed me some part of his adult life I had never known. I had only minutes to read, and it was still more than the Conclave had ever intended me to have.

The last page was a print of the archivist’s final entry, sent from the Household records office while it was under attack. He had watched the east-access security feed until Soren fell. The receipt stamp put his words inside the vault moments before the records office lost power and the feed died:

Guard Vashri held the east access against the Regent’s men for nineteen minutes, alone, wounded, until relieved by no one. Posthumous commendation for valor, highest degree, entered by this office in the certainty it will be expunged. Some record should exist. He was the best of us.

My hands were shaking. They had stayed steady in front of every enemy for years, and now they shook around Soren’s file. I let them. The room blurred and I let that happen too.

“Lika.” Rylos, beside me. He’d crossed the vault without my hearing it. He read the page over my shoulder, leaving it in my hands. “The commendation.”

“Highest degree.” My voice worked. Barely.

“Someone wrote it down before the archive sealed. He knew it would be erased and he wrote it anyway, so that some record should exist.” I closed the file, and my thumb stayed on the cover.

“Nineteen minutes, Rylos. The duty log said nineteen minutes and I thought I’d made my peace with the number, and then someone who watched him do it calls him the best of us, and I...”

I stopped. He waited. He would have waited an hour.

“I’m taking the whole case,” I said. “All of them. Every name they erased. That’s not a request.”

“It was never going to be.” He lifted the case himself, not delegating it, and carried the administrative gray box of erased names to the door and set it with our equipment, first thing staged to leave. Ahead of the currency. Ahead of the cores.

He did it without ceremony and returned to the rig without comment. For the first time in six years, I was not the only person carrying Soren’s name.

“Transfer’s running,” he said, back at the counter, and his voice gave me the mercy of the work.

Bronwen sang softly to a crate of prototypes. I fed another core into the cradle with steady hands.

I let myself believe, for six breaths, that we might get out clean.

Then every light in the vault went red, and alarms screamed through the Spire.

RYLOS

The alarm didn’t sound like discovery. I’ve heard discovery; it’s a shout. This was procedure, a flat repeating tone. That made it worse. No guard had spotted us and no trap had sprung; an automated system had found something wrong and started escalating it.

The vault’s own lights had gone red with the tower-wide alarm, and in the wash of it my people moved without one wasted word. Lika secured the current core in the transfer cradle and started staging the loose ones.

Zarek shifted from loader to doorman between one breath and the next. Bronwen stopped singing. That told me enough.

“Mezzanine holding,” Sabine. “Lobby’s confused, not mobilized. Yet.”