# Chapter 11: The Client

The brief had been on the table for fourteen hours when the second knock came.

This one was an actual knock — three measured raps at seventh bell Thursday morning. I knew who it was before I opened the door, because guild couriers slid papers and left, creditors pounded, and Mere didn't knock. That left one category of visitor: someone from the guild who wanted to see my face when they talked to me.

Ledger stood on my doorstep looking exactly as contained as he had behind the desk at 14 Greystone Lane. Grey hair, lean build, arms at his sides instead of crossed — making an effort to appear casual, which meant this wasn't. He wore a dark coat that looked unremarkable in the way that expensive things looked unremarkable when the wearer had taste.

"Varrant." He glanced past me into the shack with the same clinical efficiency he'd used to read my physical condition after the Barrows. I watched him catalogue the space in under two seconds: one room, one cot, house plans on the wall, table with the case brief still unfolded on it. "You've read it."

"Twice." I stepped aside. There was one chair. I didn't offer it.

He didn't need it. Ledger moved to the table the way a man moved through a room he'd already mapped — no hesitation, no false browsing. He set a leather folio beside the brief. Thicker than the courier document. Bound, not folded.

"The brief covers the basics," he said. "This is what it doesn't."

I picked up the folio. Guild seal on the clasp — internal document, not client-facing. Inside: a case history that ran three times the length of the brief. Ned Floundry's professional background. Trade inspector, licensed by the Commerce Authority, assigned to shipping and warehouse oversight in the dock quarter. Seven years in the role. Reliable, methodical, unremarkable — the kind of career that accumulated competence without attracting attention.

Until four months ago, when Ned filed a series of reports flagging vendor irregularities in Compact-contracted supply chains. The same licensed suppliers appearing across too many purchase orders. Pricing that followed patterns too consistent to be market-driven. Money moving in circles that closed too neatly.

Six weeks after the reports, the curse hit.

(*Six weeks. Reports filed. Curse arrives. The Compact classifies it unbreakable within — *)

I flipped to the timeline page. The Compact's classification had come eleven days after the curse was identified. Eleven days. Standard assessment for a complex working ran four to six weeks. They'd fast-tracked the classification.

"You noticed the timeline," Ledger said. He wasn't asking.

"Eleven days for an unbreakable classification. Either the Compact sent their best team and they were genuinely that fast, or —"

"Or the assessment was predetermined." Ledger's expression didn't change. He was watching me the way I watched magical architectures — patient, precise, never revealing the full picture of what he saw. "I'm presenting background, Varrant. Not accusations. The Guild doesn't traffic in accusations without evidence."

I set the folio down. "Why hand-deliver this? The courier had the brief."

"The brief is what the client provided. The folio is what I assembled." A pause — exactly the right length to let the distinction settle. "This case didn't come through random assignment. I requested you specifically."

That landed. Tier One operators didn't get hand-picked by guild intelligence for standard curse-breaking referrals. "Why?"

"Because three registered practitioners have looked at this working — the two who attempted intervention and one Compact assessor who signed the classification. All three are competent. I've checked their credentials. They should have seen more than they reported." He picked up the case brief, not the folio — the public document, the one the client had seen. "This one needs someone who sees things differently."

The line was professional. Measured. An assessment of capability, nothing more. But Ledger's eyes held mine for a beat too long, and I felt something I wasn't used to feeling: the discomfort of being read by someone who was better at hiding it than I was. He didn't know about Flaw Sight — couldn't know — but he knew *something*. That I processed information at angles other practitioners didn't. That my approach to the dog curse and the Barrows job had produced results the standard toolkit wouldn't have reached.

(*He cold-reads you the way you cold-read everyone else. How does that feel? Uncomfortable. File it.*)

"The fee is one hundred and fifty silvers," Ledger continued, shifting registers without a seam — interrogation to logistics. "Extended engagement rate. The guild will maintain the standard twenty percent commission rather than the extended engagement surcharge. You'll net one hundred and twenty."

I ran the math without trying to. Thirty silvers to the guild. One hundred and twenty to me. The lockbox under the floorboard held thirty-two silvers. One hundred and twenty more would put me at — the house plans on the wall were right there, and Ledger was watching my face, and I kept the math off it.

A waived surcharge was a carrot. Carrots came attached to sticks, or leashes, or both. Ledger was offering favorable terms on a case he'd hand-selected me for, which meant the guild wanted results on this one badly enough to pay for them. Which meant —

"You're invested in this case," I said. "Beyond standard guild business."

Ledger picked up the folio and tucked it under his arm. "Ned Floundry filed reports that went nowhere. Six weeks later he couldn't speak, couldn't hear, and started dying. The Compact classified it faster than any assessment I've seen in twenty years. And the two curse-breakers who tried and failed were both practitioners I'd have expected to do better." He moved toward the door. "I'm not invested, Varrant. I'm curious. There's a difference. The guild just pays better for one than the other."

He paused at the threshold. Turned back. His eyes swept me once — the same quick catalogue he'd done when he arrived, except this time I caught something in it. Not suspicion. Recognition. Something about me had changed since the Barrows debrief, and he couldn't name it, but he could see it. The bracelet sat on my wrist under the sleeve, amber-red and warm, and Ledger's gaze didn't drop to it, but I had the crawling certainty that he'd noticed the sharpness in my responses the way I'd notice a flaw in a ward's architecture — not the specific mechanism, but the fact that the mechanism existed.

"Initial consultation is at your discretion," he said. "The family is expecting contact through guild channels. Don't keep them waiting too long — the timeline isn't generous."

He left without pleasantries. The door closed, and the shack was one room again, and the folio's contents sat in my head like a splinter.

* * *

The Floundry home was in the upper guild quarter — not the hill district where the nobles kept their estates behind warding anchors, but the aspirational streets just below it where the most successful trade professionals built homes that said *we belong here and we intend to stay*. Three stories, timber and brick with decorative stonework on the facade, a study extension on the south side with proper ventilation and what looked like custom glazing in the windows. A front garden with an iron gate. Warding anchors at all four corners and above the door — licensed work, professionally installed, layered with maintenance contracts that cost more per year than my rent.

(*Eight rooms at least. Three floors. The study makes nine if it's separate from the main house. Warding anchors — five-point installation, that's three hundred silvers minimum, plus the annual upkeep contract. Total property value, with the location and the garden and the custom glazing and the decorative stonework — the noise is running the estimate before I can stop it. More than my house plans. Significantly more. My plans have five rooms and a workshop. This house has five rooms just on the upper floors. The front room alone is larger than the shack twice over. The furniture visible through the window costs more than everything I own. This is what twenty years of steady, well-paid work looks like when you build it into something permanent. This is what I'm saving for. This is what losing the breadwinner would destroy.*)

I rang the bell. A boy answered — ten, maybe eleven, with a square jaw and the careful posture of a child who'd learned recently that adults didn't always have answers. He looked at me, assessed me with the solemn precision of someone too young to be this serious, and said, "Are you another healer?"

"Not exactly."

"The last two didn't work." Stated as fact, not complaint. He'd inherited his mother's organizational clarity. "Mum's in the front room."

He led me through a hallway where a younger girl — seven or eight — sat on the stairs with a book open on her knees, not reading it. She watched me pass with wide, still eyes. The house had the particular quiet of a home where children had learned not to make noise because noise felt wrong when someone was dying upstairs.

Calla Floundry met me at the front room door. She had the organized posture of someone who'd processed grief and moved to action — spine straight, hands steady, eyes that had done their crying weeks ago and decided crying wasn't solving anything. Mid-forties. Dark hair pulled back efficiently. She wore practical clothes, not mourning dress — function over signal. But the skin under her eyes was dark with exhaustion, and her fingers, when she extended her hand, had the faint tremor of someone running on will rather than rest.

(*The alias. You were supposed to have an alias for client interactions. Ledger told you to pick one. That was — five days ago? You've been staring at house plans and analyzing bracelets and you forgot to pick a name. She's looking at you. She's extending her hand. You need a name. Now. Something. Anything. Locks. Curses are locks. You pick locks — find the flaw, work the mechanism, open what shouldn't open. Locksmith. One word. Ledger is one word. Locksmith. Fine. It'll do.*)

"Locksmith," I said, taking her hand. "Guild of Necessary Services."

The name felt odd in my mouth — new, untested, like a coat I'd grabbed off the wrong hook on my way out the door. But it fit well enough. I'd picked worse things under pressure.

"Calla Floundry." She stepped back to let me in. "Thank you for coming quickly."

The front room confirmed the noise's estimate and then some. Polished wood floors, well-maintained furniture that had been chosen for quality and kept that way — the kind of household where things were bought once and expected to last. A shelf of bound trade manuals beside a glass-fronted cabinet displaying regulatory commendations. Children's drawings pinned to the wall in a careful row beside Ned's professional certificates — the Floundry household kept its priorities visible, and the priorities were family and reputation, in that order. The air smelled of something herbal — not medicinal, domestic. Someone was still cooking meals in this house, still maintaining the routines that held everything together. But I could see the strain if I looked: a thin layer of dust on the higher shelves that wouldn't have been there three months ago. A stack of unopened correspondence on the side table. The small erosions of a household where one person was doing the work of two.

(*The fee. One hundred and fifty silvers. One hundred and twenty net. She's already paid two curse-breakers — what, forty silvers each? Sixty? Plus healers, herbalists, whatever the Compact charged for their eleven-day assessment. She's been hemorrhaging money for eight weeks on a single income that stopped the day the curse hit. This house, this life, this street — it all runs on Ned's salary and his professional standing. Without him, the children's school fees, the warding contracts, the maintenance, the social position that lets you live on this street and not three blocks lower — it all unravels. She's not just trying to save her husband. She's trying to keep the floor from falling out. One fifty silvers is another wound in a budget that's already bleeding. She's paying it because the alternative is worse.*)

Calla Floundry sat across from me at a table that had been cleared and organized for this meeting. She had documents prepared — a timeline of Ned's deterioration, contact information for the two curse-breakers, copies of their reports, the Compact's classification letter, receipts for healer visits, and a handwritten ledger of every expense related to Ned's condition. Methodical. Exhaustive. This was a woman who navigated guild channels because she understood systems, and who tracked every copper because the system was the only thing between her family and a fall they couldn't afford.

"Ned was cursed eight weeks ago," she said. "The first symptoms appeared within hours — loss of hearing, then speech. The physical deterioration began in the second week. Two licensed curse-breakers attempted intervention at weeks three and five. Both failed. The Compact's formal classification came at —"

"Eleven days." I was reading the curse-breakers' reports while she spoke. "After the initial identification."

She paused. "You know the timeline already."

"I know the timeline doesn't make sense. Standard Compact assessment runs four to six weeks for complex workings. Eleven days suggests either exceptional efficiency or a predetermined conclusion."

The silence that followed was the loaded silence of someone hearing their own suspicion spoken aloud for the first time by someone else. Calla Floundry's jaw tightened — not surprise, confirmation. She'd noticed the timeline too. She'd been too focused on saving her husband to chase it.

"The reports," I said. I had both of them open on the table now — Practitioner Vellen's assessment from week three, Practitioner Dorath's from week five. Both registered curse-breakers, both Guild of Arcane Practice members, both operating within Compact-sanctioned methodology. Their analyses were thorough. Their runic notation was clean and properly documented. Their conclusions were consistent: a degradation curse, aggressively anchored, with reinforcement structures that resisted standard dissolution approaches.

They were right. Everything in the reports was technically accurate.

And the noise, which had been running on the case since the brief hit my table, caught something it couldn't articulate.

(*Vellen used four standard dissolution approaches. Dorath used five — all in the same family. Both practitioners are competent. Their methods are sound. But they're operating within a narrow band. Same dissolution family, same anchoring analysis framework, same approach to reinforcement assessment. These are people with full toolkits using three tools out of twelve. Why would competent practitioners restrict their own methodology? Unless someone told them to. Unless the assessment parameters were defined before the assessment began. File it. You can't prove it. But the evidence is there if you know what to look at.*)

"The curse-breakers were competent," I said, because Calla was watching me read and deserved honesty. "Their analysis is sound as far as it goes. But their approach was narrower than it should have been."

"What does that mean?"

"It means they tried to break the curse using standard methods, and the standard methods failed, and they reported that accurately. But competent practitioners with a dying patient usually try *everything*, not just the approved approaches. These reports read like they were working within constraints."

Another silence. Calla's hands were flat on the table — the posture of someone who wanted to grip something and was choosing not to.

"I need to ask you questions about the weeks before the curse," I said. "Not about Ned's health. About his work. His routine. What changed."

"The curse-breakers asked about his medical history."

"I'm not a curse-breaker."

She studied me for a long moment. She must have decided I'd earned the honesty, because she straightened and began speaking with the same organized precision she'd applied to the documents. Ned had been anxious in the weeks before — coming home with questions he wouldn't fully explain. His routine shifted: later hours, meetings she wasn't included in, a tension in his shoulders that she'd learned to read over twenty years of marriage. He'd always been steady. The steadiness cracked, and she'd noticed, and he'd told her not to worry.

Then the curse hit, and she understood that *don't worry* had been *I'm in too deep and I don't know how to tell you*.

"He mentioned someone," Calla said. She'd been working up to this — I could see the preparation in the way she arranged the thought. "A few days before. He said — if anything happened to him, we should talk to someone named Devod Fields. A carriage driver, delivery routes. Their paths crossed at the shipping warehouses. He said Devod would know what he'd been looking into."

I kept my expression professional. The name landed with a weight Calla couldn't know about. Devod Fields. Fields, as in Mere Fields. Mere, who was my partner, who had an estranged father she didn't talk about, whose father was apparently a carriage driver named Devod.

"Did you contact him?" I asked.

"We didn't know what it meant. We were focused on the curse, the medical treatment, finding practitioners. The name was — we filed it away. We didn't understand it."

"I'll follow up on it."

I asked more questions. Ned's specific assignments in the months before. Which warehouses, which vendors, which inspection reports. Calla didn't have all the answers — Ned had kept the details professional — but the pattern was clear enough. A trade inspector noticed irregularities. The irregularities involved Compact-linked supply chains. The inspector asked questions. The questions stopped when the curse made him mute and deaf.

(*Mute and deaf. Not dead — silenced. The curse doesn't kill quickly. It kills slowly, visibly, as an example. Someone wanted Ned quiet, and they wanted everyone who knew Ned to see what happened when you weren't quiet enough.*)

"I need to see him," I said.

Calla nodded. She'd expected this. "He's upstairs. He's — aware. He can't speak or hear, but he knows when someone's in the room. His eyes track." A pause. "The physical deterioration is advancing. Hair loss. Skin discoloration. Weight. The healers say his organs are beginning to fail."

"I'd like to examine him today."

Something shifted in her posture — not refusal, but a pulling-back. Her jaw set the way it had when she'd described the timeline, controlled and precise. "Not right now. I need —" She stopped. Started again, choosing words like someone choosing tools. "Give me the afternoon. Come back at third bell. I'll have the room ready."

She didn't say *ready for what*. She didn't need to. The room was where her husband was dying, and a stranger was about to walk into it, and Calla Floundry was not the kind of woman who let anyone see something she hadn't prepared first. Clean linens. Dignity. The small, fierce maintenance of a household that was still *hers*, even if everything inside it was falling apart.

"Third bell," I said. "I'll be there."

She stood. Hesitated — the first hesitation I'd seen from her that wasn't about composing a sentence. Then she crossed to a side drawer in the writing desk, opened it, and retrieved a handful of paper scraps. Small, torn, different sizes — some from a notebook, some from letter stock. She held them the way you'd hold evidence you'd been collecting without knowing why.

"He tries to write," she said. "After the curse took his voice. He asked for paper — gestures, pointing. He wrote notes to the children. Instructions for me about the household accounts. Messages." She set the scraps on the table between us. "The early ones — weeks ago — we could read. These are from the last few days."

I picked up the nearest scrap. Trembling marks that might have been words once but had degraded to shapes — the effort visible in every stroke, someone fighting motor control that was slipping away. The next was similar. And the next. A man trying to write around the ruin of his own coordination, each attempt more illegible than the last.

Calla's composure, which had held through the timeline and the reports and the clinical description of her husband's failing organs, cracked here. Not dramatically — Calla Floundry didn't do dramatic. But her hand, the one that had been steady through every document, trembled when she touched the edge of the most recent scrap. This was the detail that got to her. Not the diagnosis, not the prognosis, not the failing organs. The writing. The evidence that the curse was still taking things. That her husband was still fighting, and losing, and the losses were accelerating.

"He had beautiful handwriting," she said. Quiet. Matter-of-fact. The most devastating sentence I'd heard all day.

I put the scraps in my coat pocket. "I'll need these. And anything else he's written — the earlier ones too, if you still have them."

"I have everything." Of course she did.

Her hand rested on the expense ledger — the one she'd brought to the meeting alongside the medical documents, because when you were tracking every silver leaving a household that no longer had income, the money was as much a part of the crisis as the curse. "The guild receptionist said your fee is one hundred and fifty silvers. Retainer and completion structure."

"Half on engagement, half on resolution. The guild handles the paperwork."

She nodded. A small, controlled movement that cost her more than she showed. Two curse-breakers, a Compact assessment, eight weeks of healers and herbalists and a household running on savings that had a visible bottom. One hundred and fifty more silvers. She'd pay it. She'd pay twice that if someone told her it would work, because the alternative was watching the house, the children's futures, and the life she'd built with Ned come apart one failed treatment at a time.

"Can you do what the others couldn't?"

I looked at this woman — organized, exhausted, clear-eyed, holding a household and two children together while her husband died by inches upstairs — and I gave her the only honest answer I had.

"I don't know yet. I need to see the curse before I can tell you that."

She accepted it the way she'd accepted everything else: with the grim pragmatism of someone who'd run out of comfortable answers and was ready for accurate ones. Behind her, through the hallway, I could see the boy standing at the foot of the stairs, watching us with that solemn, too-old assessment. The girl had moved — she was sitting on the bottom step now, closer, the unread book still open on her knees.

* * *

Thresholds' doorbell chimed its assessment as I pushed through the front entrance — the intent-detection enchantment reading me and apparently deciding I was worth admitting. Sniff looked up from his spot behind the counter, tail thumping twice against the floor in acknowledgment before he settled back into the particular comfort of a dog who'd found his place and saw no reason to make a fuss about it. He still smelled like old paper and binding glue. Three weeks since the binding salts had broken his fear curse, and his coat had filled in, his eyes had cleared, and his assessment of visitors had mellowed from terror to mild professional interest.

Mere was reshelving in the theory section — pre-Compact texts, based on the spine markings. She didn't look up when I came in, but her hands paused for exactly one beat before resuming.

"What happened?" she asked. Direct, no preamble. She'd heard something in my footsteps — pace, weight, the rhythm of someone carrying a problem through a door.

"New case. It's bad."

She finished the shelf before turning. Her eyes — blue, constantly scanning, cataloguing — swept me once. The assessment held, because she nodded and moved to the counter.

"The case relates to the Floundry family," I said. "Curse classified as unbreakable. Two curse-breakers failed. Man is dying — mute, deaf, organs beginning to fail. He tries to write, but whatever comes out isn't language anyone can read. The curse took his voice, took his hearing, and now it's taking the last workaround he had. It was designed to silence him after he filed reports on Compact supply chain irregularities."

Mere listened the way she always listened: completely, without interruption, processing the data stream and filing each element in its proper category. When I finished, she said, "The curse specifically targets communication and then kills. That's purposeful architecture. Not anger."

"No. Not anger."

I set the folio on the counter between us. Then I said the name.

"The family mentioned someone. A man Ned trusted. Told them to contact if anything happened. A carriage driver, delivery routes, crossed paths at the shipping warehouses." I watched her face. "Devod Fields."

The recognition was immediate. Mere's jaw tightened — a micro-tension that lasted exactly one second before her hands, which had stilled on the counter, resumed their previous position. If I hadn't been watching — if I hadn't spent weeks learning the precise inventory of her tells — I would have missed it entirely.

"That's my father," she said. Same tone she'd use for grammar analysis. Flat, factual, no social padding.

I didn't push. She'd given me the same space with the bracelet — presented the data, let me decide what came next. I owed her the same architecture.

"The case requires talking to him," I said. "Ned trusted him with information about what he was investigating. That information is probably the key to understanding who built the curse and why."

"He drives delivery routes out of Henwick's yard on the south docks. Morning shift starts at fifth bell. He lives above a tanner's shop on Millford Street." Each detail delivered with the clinical precision of a catalogue entry. "He has ideas. Most of them are wrong."

Two sentences. Devod Fields, summarized by the one person who knew him well enough to distill the data set. She didn't say *all* of them were wrong. The omission sat where it was.

"I'll contact him through guild channels, or I can go directly. Your preference."

"My preference is irrelevant to the case."

"Your preference is relevant to me."

Mere looked at me. The same look she'd given me when she'd said *you're my partner* — direct, assessing, stripped of everything except the raw data of what she observed. Then she said, "Go directly. He responds better to people than to paperwork. He'll talk too much and much of it will be useless. But the other bits —" She stopped. Filed whatever she'd been about to say. "He knew Ned. If Ned trusted him, there was a reason."

Sniff chose that moment to stand, stretch, and walk around the counter to press his head against my knee. I scratched behind his ears. The familiar weight of him — warm, present, uncomplicated — settled something in my chest that I hadn't realized needed settling.

"The curse," Mere said. "You've seen it?"

"Briefly. Initial observation only. I'm going back for a deeper look."

"What did you see?"

"I saw what the curse-breakers saw. And something underneath it that they didn't."

She nodded. That was enough. Mere didn't need elaboration to understand implication — she needed data points, and I'd given her two: the surface reading matched the reports, and the reports were incomplete.

"Be careful with the bracelet," she said as I turned to leave. "You've had it a week. You don't know its limits yet."

"I know."

"You know it intellectually. That's not the same thing."

She was right. She was usually right about the distinction between knowing something and accounting for it. I left Thresholds with Sniff's warmth fading from my hand and Mere's warning sitting in the same mental compartment as the curse-breakers' oddly narrow reports — things I needed to think about before I did something stupid.

* * *

I returned at the appointed time, 5 minutes before Calla had told me. The room was on the second floor, at the back of the house where the afternoon light came through west-facing windows. I passed two closed doors on the way — children's rooms, based on the painted wooden nameplate on one and the small handprint pressed into a clay medallion on the other. The house was large enough to give everyone their own space, and right now that space felt like distance. The children downstairs. Their father up here. A staircase and a curse between them.

Calla had prepared the sickroom the way she'd prepared the documents downstairs — organized, maintained, everything in its functional place. Clean linens. Herbal sachets on the windowsill — lavender and sweetbalm, the kinds of things that helped with nothing medical and everything human. A chair by the bed for sitting vigils, its cushion worn from use. A second chair — smaller, child-sized — pushed into the corner. Someone had been bringing the children up to sit with their father. Someone was trying to keep a family connected across the silence of a curse that had taken every means of connection.

Ned Floundry was dying, and someone was taking meticulous care of him while he did it.

He was thinner than the man in the regulatory portrait downstairs — the one hanging beside the children's drawings, showing a solid, square-jawed trade inspector in formal dress. The man in the bed had the same jaw, but the flesh had pulled away from it. His skin had yellowed — liver involvement, the healers' notes said, and they were right; I could see it in the tint around his eyes and the faint jaundice beneath his fingernails. His hair had thinned to patches. Weight loss had reshaped him from the broad-shouldered official in the portrait to something diminished and angular.

His eyes found me the moment I entered the room. Brown, clear, tracking. Ned Floundry was lucid. He was watching a stranger walk into his room, and he couldn't ask who I was, and he couldn't hear me if I told him. But he was *present*. Someone was in there, behind the silence and the failing body, aware and unable to do a single thing about it.

I pulled the chair to the bedside and sat.

The scraps of paper were everywhere. Scattered on the bedside table, on the blanket, some fallen to the floor — dozens more than the handful Calla had shown me downstairs. She'd given me the recent ones, the illegible ones, the evidence of where the degradation had arrived. But this was the full collection. The journey.

I picked up the nearest. The writing was clear, precise — the hand of a man who filled out inspection reports for a living. A single line: *They won't listen. Tell Devod. The vendors are the same across—*

The next scrap. Same hand, but shakier: *Can't hear them anymore. Can someone read this? I need—*

The next. The letters wobbled, separated, lost their alignment: *My hands. Something wrong with my hands now. Please—*

I pulled the recent scraps from my coat pocket — the ones Calla had given me — and laid them at the end of the sequence. The trembling marks that had looked like abstract damage downstairs now had context. They were the last entries in a progression that started with clear, coherent, heartbreaking precision. A man who'd lost his voice and his hearing had picked up a pen and kept fighting. And the curse had followed him there too, taking the workaround the way it had taken everything else — not all at once, but by inches, so he could feel each inch go.

The early scraps were worse than the recent ones, in their way. The recent ones were a man losing the ability to communicate. The early ones were a man who still could — still lucid, still precise, still *himself* — writing messages that nobody with the power to help him had read in time.

Something in my chest — the clinical apparatus that processed people as systems, motivations, pressure points — registered this and didn't have a category for it. The noise, which ran constant analysis on everything from ward architectures to the price of rent, went quiet. Not the Mere-quiet of alignment and recognition. A different quiet. The kind that happened when the analytical machinery encountered something it couldn't reduce to a pattern.

I set the scraps down carefully. Arranged them in order on the table. First to last.

Then I looked at the curse.

The bracelet's stone was warm against my wrist — amber-red, reservoir charged, buffer available. I let the focusing matrix engage and directed Flaw Sight at the working that was killing Ned Floundry.

Through standard Flaw Sight, I'd have seen what the curse-breakers saw: a degradation curse, aggressive, well-anchored. Strong runic structure. Reinforcement patterns that resisted dissolution. An ugly, effective piece of work that did exactly what degradation curses did — ate the victim from the inside out, targeting specific systems in sequence. Voice, hearing, motor control, organ function. A kill order written in runic notation.

Through the bracelet's focusing matrix, I saw underneath.

The surface layer was real — a genuine degradation curse, properly constructed, doing real damage. But the architecture beneath it was wrong. The reinforcement patterns that had defeated the curse-breakers weren't standard reinforcement. They were *concealment*. A second layer of working, hidden beneath the obvious one, running different logic on a different energy feed. The degradation curse was a facade — not fake, but incomplete. A wall built in front of a building, designed so that anyone who examined the wall would see a wall and stop looking.

(*The curse-breakers hit the wall. Competent practitioners, sound methodology. They saw what they were meant to see. They tried to break what they were meant to try to break, using the methods they were **allowed**. And underneath, the real architecture — *)

The focusing matrix sharpened. The second layer resolved into detail I wouldn't have caught six months ago, maybe not even two weeks ago. Below the concealment, something else. A third structure. I couldn't resolve it fully — the depth was at the edge of what the bracelet's enhancement could reach — but I could see its outline. Three layers. Not one working, not two. Three, nested inside each other like locks within locks within locks.

The Compact had classified this as unbreakable. They weren't wrong. They were *incomplete*. They'd classified what they could see — the surface degradation curse, the reinforcement that resisted standard dissolution. They hadn't seen what was underneath because the architecture was specifically designed to prevent them from seeing it. And what was underneath was sophisticated enough that my noise, which had been running analytical patterns on the case since the brief arrived, shifted from analytical to alarmed.

This curse wasn't cast in anger. It wasn't the product of a grudge or a desperate act. It was *engineered*. Designed with the same precision I'd seen in the Greymarch Barrows — the death ward built by someone who understood exactly how other practitioners would try to break it and built the architecture to defeat their approaches before they arrived.

Someone had built this curse the way you built a bridge or commissioned a ward. With specifications. With an understanding of how the Compact's assessment process worked, how registered curse-breakers operated, what tools they used and what assumptions they made. Someone who knew that the first response to an unbreakable curse would be standard dissolution, and the second response would be advanced dissolution, and neither response would think to look beneath the surface because the surface was convincing enough to be the whole story.

I pulled back from the Flaw Sight. The focusing matrix dimmed. The room returned — Ned's yellowed skin, his tracking eyes, the scraps of paper arranged on the bedside table in order of a man losing the ability to speak with his hands.

Ned watched me. He couldn't ask what I'd seen. He couldn't hear me if I told him.

I picked up one of the blank scraps from his notebook and wrote in clear, block letters: **I SEE WHAT THEY MISSED. I'M GOING TO FIGURE THIS OUT.**

I held it where he could read it. His eyes moved across the words. His jaw worked — the ghost of a response his voice couldn't deliver.

Then I set the paper on his blanket, nodded to Calla at the doorway, and walked downstairs. The boy was in the hallway, standing against the wall with the practiced stillness of a child who'd learned to be invisible when strangers came and went. He watched me pass. I didn't offer him reassurance — I don't do that, and children who've had their world broken can smell false comfort the way Sniff could smell fear. But I met his eyes, and something in my expression landed, because he nodded once and went back to the stairs where his sister was waiting.

The noise was running at a speed I hadn't felt since the death ward. Not the manic cycling of the Barrows — that had been puzzle-excitement, the thrill of a system yielding its secrets under sustained analysis. This was different. This was the recognition that someone with resources, patience, and intelligence had built a machine designed to kill a man slowly while making the killing look like something simpler than it was. And that the same machine was designed to defeat every standard approach to stopping it.

The curse wasn't unbreakable. It was *engineered to appear unbreakable*. And whoever had engineered it understood the system well enough to build their architecture inside the system's blind spots.

Three layers. Three locks. And somewhere behind them, a man with clear eyes and a jaw that used to be square, watching strangers walk through his room and unable to ask a single one of them if he was going to live.
