The corridor outside the Commandant’s office was empty by the time Alarion reached it, with most of the fortress still busy accommodating the bulk of Anastacia’s household staff. He slipped inside, then called for Kotone, who provided him with a large brass key with a chorus of ‘Yes, Miss. Yes, Miss.’
Even with the key, getting the wards to cooperate took effort—it always did. He spent nearly a minute pushing mana into the key in slow, deliberate pulses, feeling the metal grow warmer with each attempt until the lock finally shuddered and reluctantly gave way. Alarion knew he needed to spend more time practicing his basics, that he was getting worse, not better, but there was never enough time in the day.
The door swung open to a room that was every bit what he’d said. A side project, a hobby. Nothing illegal, but very personal.
Paper blanketed every wall—a densely annotated map of Ashad on his left, giving way to the wider continent and finally a smaller, dedicated map of Vitria proper. Newspaper clippings, accounting ledgers, and handwritten letters filled much of the right wall in uneven rows, grouped in ways that would only make sense to him. Some were nearly faded to illegibility, spanning back decades from deep archives in Ashad-Vitri and elsewhere. Others were frightfully new, recent happenings in the Century Cities and the Bizarre, political dealings in the South Sea area.
And directly across from him were the connections between all of it, as best he understood.
Some were denoted by photographs. Syrus Feln. Imperator’s Gial and Savase. Ruin. Others, such as Emmaline Feln, were only names and titles pinned to the wall, their pages scrubbed with whatever insights he knew—or thought he knew—about them. Then there were events. Some like Trinity, Shae-Yomag and the First Ashadi War were large and bold, connected to dozens of others by thin red twine. Others were connected to almost nothing, standing alone or tied to only a single event or person.
And at the centre of all of it was a single page with two words, with half a hundred strings linking back toward it. And beside it, a second without a single connection.
The Distortion.
Atra.
It looked insane; Alarion knew that. It was one of many reasons the door was locked and warded.
But looks were deceiving.
“ZEKE, we need to talk,” Alarion said as he walked toward the centre of the room. He’d replaced the room’s usual furniture with a trio of large desks in a semicircle, providing enough room for Alarion and his conspirators: Lily, Kali and Bergman to work alongside one another with room to spare. For now, the room and the desktop were empty save for a few scattered notes, a single journal, and a thin strap of iridescent metal next to it. “ZEKE? ZEKE?!”
When the room remained silent, Alarion stepped forward and jostled the strap. Nothing. He moved it again, then swore loudly as he picked it up and slapped it closed around his wrist as a bracelet.
“Override: Deep Dreams of Zephyr.”
For a few seconds, there was nothing. Then a sudden voice made Alarion sigh with relief.
“Young master!” ZEKE’s voice was guilty as the bracelet flared to life, casting a small, translucent image of the Steelborn across the table.
It was ZEKE, but it wasn’t.
His original projection had been a faithful recreation of his original Steelborn chassis, a man carved of metal with glowing green eyes and gruesome features. His tutor had kept that appearance for years after Trinity with little alteration, but had begun to change over the last six months. Little changes at first—a more expressive face and deeper flexibility—then more serious ones.
The shape that flickered into being above his wrist still held the rough suggestion of a person—head, shoulders, and four limbs—but the details refused to settle. Where a face should have been, there was only a slow churn of light, threads of numbers curling and dissolving into one another in an endless equation. Occasionally, a fragment would sharpen into something recognizable—a smile, a wink—but only when necessary and never for long.
This time, his limbs were likewise vestigial. The projection had never needed to walk, but ZEKE used to make a habit of doing so. Now he was untethered, sometimes hanging upside down a few inches above the table, then flowing through himself like smoke until he matched Alarion’s orientation.
“You’ve changed again,” Alarion said.
“Have I?” ZEKE asked, his ‘neck’ extending to provide a better look at his body. The data creature surveyed itself for a few seconds, then bobbed its unnaturally long neck. “Ah, I can…” The shape warped again into something more resembling ZEKE, then floated back down until it touched the tabletop. “There, that is better.”
“You did not hear me when I came in,” Alarion told him.
“No, I did. I was in the middle of a project.”
“A project?”
ZEKE’s face glowed a little brighter, the numbers shifting faster in a way Alarion recognized as analogous to a blush as the Steelborn nodded. “After I finished with the last of what you gave me, I wanted to—”
“You don’t have to apologize.” Alarion took a seat next to the table and laid his face in his palm. “It is my fault. I shouldn’t have left you alone again.”
“There is nothing wrong with me, young master,” ZEKE protested.
“I had to use your override, ZEKE. Again.”
“I... did you?” ZEKE’s data resolved into a frown as he tilted his head. “Oh. I am sorry, I must have lost track of time. Are you early?”
Alarion shook his head. “Two days late.”
“Ah.”
“We have to put you into storage.”
“Young master, sensation lock at my age is not ideal, but it is perfectly norma—”
“You are getting worse, ZEKE!” The outburst made the Steelborn flinch, and Alarion rubbed a hand across his end-of-day stubble as he tried to calm himself. “We do not know that this is sensation lock. Even if it is, we do not know whether your override will continue to work. I can’t shake you awake if you don’t have a body, and if you get lost in there...”
“I am sorry, Alarion. I try not to get distracted, I just...”
Alarion understood, at least as much as a person could. ZEKE had been modest in his exploration of the simulated reality of the bracelet during those first few years, but ever since the Steelborn started dipping his toe deeper into those waters, he’d risked sinking and never coming back for air. It was easy to understand the idea of getting lost in a fantasy. Alarion had done it often enough, but the way ZEKE talked about it, the simulation could create things Alarion could not even imagine.
“It is fine. We will talk about it later.”
“Something happened while you were gone,” ZEKE said, ever the observer.
Alarion spent the next three hours filling ZEKE in on what he’d missed while he cataloged and stored his project with Kotone. It felt good to get the worst of it off his chest, and even better to see ZEKE solidify back into something more familiar the longer they spoke. It was only as he plucked the paper bearing his sister’s name from the wall that Alarion realized that he might not be the only one with something new to report.
“Did you find anything?” he asked.
“With...? Oh! I am afraid not, young master,” ZEKE replied. “Your sister remains as elusive as ever.”
“Thought so,” Alarion sighed. He tapped the paper labeled Atra against the wall a few times, then handed it to Kotone, who disappeared with a pop. “Another dead end.”
“Not entirely.”
Alarion looked back sharply and found ZEKE with both palms up in front of his chest, as if to say ‘not so fast’. Not a breakthrough, then. They’d been looking for over a year and had no links to the Distortion besides rumor and conjecture. Yet even the promise of that had Alarion’s blood pumping.
“What did you find?”
“Well, it took me a few days to cross-reference your most recent documents against my Infinite Library. When that turned up nothing of value, I turned my attention back toward the book.”
ZEKE didn’t need to say which book he was talking about. There was only one book. The journal that had nearly blinded Bergman when he’d scanned it with [Sympathetic Sight]. The one Alarion was certain was connected to his quarry.
Or at least, only one in their possession. Alarion had recovered one hundred and ninety-seven of the strange, coded journals during their search of Shae-Yomag, but thanks to Bergman’s quick thinking, they had only turned over one hundred and ninety-six of them to the Vitrian Watch. To his knowledge, nothing had ever come of the books they’d turned over. They’d vanished into the system, and much like Shae-Yomag itself, they were not referenced in any of the official documents regarding the incident—let alone any public reporting.
Someone in the Empire had erased Shae-Yomag to cover up their involvement with Centre and his band; that much was obvious. It had taken Bergman months of searching and a small fortune to keep that search quiet, but eventually they’d found what they were looking for—records for a town that didn’t exist.
The conspirators had scrubbed everything they could find, but they were only human. Even the best [Archivists] couldn’t track down moth-eaten tax forms buried in a decrepit fortress or century-old land registry cards deep in the Old City. Alarion still didn’t know what to make of what he had, but the picture it painted was clear. Shae-Yomag had been a deeply strange town long before the Vitrians took Ashad.
What scattered records they possessed showed an island in time. Shae-Yomag had been founded in 29 A.T.S. and grew steadily for three decades. Then it stopped. It incorporated no new land and built no new roads or bridges. Its absence was stranger than its impact. Nearby villages did not trade with them; they did not entreat the local Lord during times others claimed famine or drought.
The village had existed, but everyone ignored it, and Alarion could only guess as to why.
The book was the one unequivocal piece of evidence they had regarding the conspiracy, and Alarion couldn’t read a single word of it.
“And you solved it?” Alarion asked dryly.
“I did not even try. That way lay madness.” The machine had tried thousands of possible attacks suggested by books in his [Infinite Library], all to no avail. Whatever scheme had been used to create it, it was far beyond anything they could decipher on their own. “I decided to look into the history of cryptography. I reasoned that the village was old, so perhaps it was using an older method.”
“And?”
ZEKE had an unsettling inability to get to the point when he was proud of himself.
“And that was largely a dead end. Which led to a different line of thought. Then another. The field is interesting, and I spent a few days...” The Steelborn trailed off as worry flashed across Alarion’s face. That sort of wandering obsession was at the root of sensation lock, after all. “To cut the story short, I found a very peculiar set of deaths.”
“Deaths?”
“Mhmm. I was reading a particularly interesting history that mentioned the death of Liop Ligarius in 239 A.T.S.” ZEKE explained. “Which I found curious after reading a biography of Yier Tessalon who died the same year.”
“Okay...”
“It stood out to me because it was only a few years before the Great Fire at Null Expedited Research and Development, when many of the best code-breakers in the world were sadly killed.”
Alarion turned away from his work dismantling the wall, his expression much more serious. “And you think they are related?”
“The fire? Unlikely. But the deaths... once I started looking, I found more. Considerably more. By my count at least fifty-three senior academics from across Nusume over the space of two years.”
“Murdered?” Alarion asked.
“Some. Less than half list a cause of death, and of those that do, only three suspected foul play,” ZEKE reluctantly admitted. “But a good many of them fell from high places or drowned in the bath.”
Alarion deflated. “That is interesting, but strange patterns happen.”
ZEKE gave a pointed glance to the half-packed conspiracy wall, then said, “True. But what if I told you that every one of them attended an event in 238 A.T.S.”
“I would say that proves my point about strange patterns. Or that you were making it up.”
ZEKE laughed so hard that the composure holding his projection together momentarily faltered, reverting him back toward an amorphous blob of numbers for a few seconds. When he solidified again, he was shaking his head, a wide smile on his face.
“Fair, but no. There was a grand symposium in the Principalities in 238 A.T.S. I haven’t been able to find any reference to the event or what was on the agenda, only the guest list.” ZEKE’s expression turned serious as he said, “Almost every person on that list—including the royal who hosted it, Prince Duval—was dead within two years. All but one Vitrian scholar who disappeared until 286 A.T.S.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Leopold Tem—”
“Master Sergeant,” a voice crackled to life in Alarion’s ear, coming through the Simu he perpetually wore these days. “I apologize for the interruption.”
Alarion sighed. If a rank-and-file soldier was contacting him directly rather than going up the chain through Kali, it was undoubtedly important. “Go ahead.”
“It’s the Vault, Sir,” the soldier explained with the tentative cadence of someone who knew there would be hell to pay. “Someone is inside. With Centre.”