Page 40 of Orc’s Bones

ELEVEN

XYA

Lyssa was already there. She hadn’t gone home. She’d been at the reading table with three ledgers open in front of her and ink on her fingers and the expression she got when she’d arrived at a conclusion she didn’t want.

She looked up when I came through the door.

“You came out.”

“Malverek is dead. The array is down.” I set my case beside her ledgers. “The relay sent a response while we were below. Someone received the transmission and confirmed the demonstration concluded. We need the full outgoing record.”

She’d pulled it. Of course she had.

Serah was at the reading room table with her own notes open, working through the Archive’s lineage catalogue index by section — she’d been there, Lyssa told me, since the hum went quiet.

The outgoing record was written in the oldest bone-memory in the Dominion — the founding tier’s own structure, used as the transmission medium. The record went back centuries. Nobody had added to it intentionally for a very long time.

Malverek had.

Three outgoing frequencies. Three distinct targeting signatures. I read the first two without stopping.

The first was an outside practitioner — a bloodline from the eastern territories, old enough to have bone sensitivity but not strong enough to have mattered to the Warline Crypt system. Someone watching from a distance. Who had the capacity to implement the framework but no connection to the Dominion’s existing power structure.

The second was a former Bone Lord lineage worker — the resonance signature of someone whose bone-work had been shaped by years of direct contact with Warline lineage amplification. Not a current worker. A former one. Someone who’d left or been removed, and who hadn’t gone far enough.

The third made my hands stop moving.

I know this signature.

Not from the current Archive catalogue. From the exile panel records — the formal list of bone signatures of every person who had voted four years ago, recorded as a procedural requirement, their signatures in the margins of the documents that had removed me from the Archive and sent me out.

I had read those documents more than once.

I knew every signature on them.

The third recipient was one of the people who had voted to exile me.

I sat with that. Not with the personal weight of it — that would come later, in a room without work in it — but with what it meant structurally. A voting member of the panel. Someone who had been present when my research was assessed. Who had access to every argument I’d made, every framework I’d laid out, every theoretical basis I’d provided for why the sacred rules were built on incomplete understanding.

Who had voted to exile me for it.

And who had, at some point before or after that vote, given Malverek the foundational framework he’d built his work on top of.

The exile was containment. Someone on that panel had already built toward using what she’d proven, and the vote had removed her before she could document more.

My hands were flat on the reading table. Bone dust dried into the lines of my palms.

“Xya.”

Lyssa’s voice. Quiet.

“I see it.”

“You recognize the third signature.”

“Yes.”

“So do I.”