Page 11 of Orc’s Bones

Her expression said he had tried and she had declined and she was not going to confirm either of those things.

Fair.

“Serah Vell.” Unprompted, choosing to control the introduction rather than let it be taken from her. “Outside researcher. Six weeks in the Dominion. I’m not here to watch you. I was here first.”

“I know.” I turned back to the catalogue case. “Stay out of the way and don’t touch anything I’m working on.”

She didn’t leave. She also didn’t interfere. She moved to the far end of the row and settled against the shelving with her satchel and her own notes, and the attention she brought to not looking at me registered everything I did.

I’d been that person once. In this exact building.

I didn’t think about it and kept working.

The first trace residue turned up in the fourth sealed case from the end of the restricted row.

I almost missed it. The case looked clean — the bone trace sample inside correctly housed, the catalogue documentation in order, the seal intact. But the signal around the case was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the contents. A second layer on top of the primary signature, faint and directed, running the same direction as everything else.

Someone had opened this case, handled the contents, and resealed it. Not recently — it had had time to settle and absorb. Weeks ago, at minimum. Faint enough that you’d miss it if you weren’t reading at the layer depth where this one lived.

I was reading at that depth.

I opened the case.

The bone trace inside was a fragment from the Verath lineage — a minor but structurally critical bloodline, their anchor bone represented in the Warline Crypts at the third tier. The fragment was catalogue-grade, properly preserved, visually identical to what it should be.

The primary signature came back correctly — the Verath lineage, old and dense and characteristic. Underneath it, the same replication sigil I’d found in the Crypt’s wall marking. Not active. Dormant. But present, threaded through the bone trace at a level that would require Archive-grade instruments to detect without direct contact and direct knowledge of what you were looking for.

They were in here too. Not only the Crypts. The Archive itself has been accessed and worked. They’ve been reading the records and leaving their mark behind in the bone trace samples.

I set the fragment down and checked the next case.

And the one after that.

By the time I’d worked through the restricted row, I had seven cases with the secondary resonance layer. Seven bone trace samples — handled, worked, returned to sealed cases without a trace. The selection matched the build order I’d mapped upstairs — whoever had been here had used the Archive’s most detailed documentation to inform the Crypt thefts, then handled the relevant trace samples to calibrate the replication sigil against the bloodlines they were targeting.

This wasn’t opportunistic. This was months of preparation inside the Dominion’s most secured records space, by someone who had access to both the restricted documentation and the bone-lock at the stacks entrance.

Someone who understood the sigil at a level that let them work the bone trace samples without disturbing the seals.

The wall marking. The precision of it.

My own research, sitting in the Archive’s restricted chamber under my exile documentation — flagged, sealed, buried with the administrative record of the vote that had sent me out.

Someone had read it.

Not just the framework. Worked through the implementation problems I’d documented as unsolved and found the solutions. Tested those solutions in the Archive’s bone trace samples before taking them to the Crypt levels. The Archive had been the laboratory. The Crypts had been the proof of concept.

At the far end of the restricted row, in the last sealed case — the one housing a trace fragment from the Varyn bloodline, Thruk’s own lineage — I stopped.

The case was intact. Sealed. Unremarkable to a visual examination.

The secondary layer here was thicker than in the others. Not because more work had been done to this case — because this was the case that mattered most, the one the rest of the build had been working toward. The Varyn bloodline trace sat inside and the replication sigil residue around it was dense with calibration data: the frequency of Thruk’s lineage, everything a full replication array would need to place his bloodline’s authority at its center.

The relic. They’re working toward the relic. The Varyn lineage anchor in the deepest Crypt level — that’s what all of this has been building toward.

I dropped my hand and stood in the silence of the lower stacks for a moment.

From the end of the row, Serah Vell said nothing. She wasn’t pretending to read her notes anymore — she was watching me with the focused attention of someone who had understood that the work happening in front of her was not academic and was deciding what to do with that understanding.