# Chapter 3: Scene of the Crime

The folder had kept me up past midnight. Not by design — by architecture. Ledger's documentation was dense, layered, cross-referenced in a system that rewarded sequential reading and punished skimming. Every page fed the next. Every annotation in those angular margins pointed sideways to a detail three pages back that changed the weight of whatever I was currently reading. By the time I'd mapped all twelve sites onto a rough sketch of Drenwick — victim locations in black, residue-only sites in blue, high-probability in red — the candle had burned down to a stub and my coffee had gone cold twice.

I was on the third cup when Mere came into the kitchen.

She was already dressed, hair up, the ponytail in place before sixth bell — which meant she'd been awake and working on something before I'd registered her absence from the bedroom. The folder's second copy was under her arm. I hadn't made a second copy. She'd made a second copy.

"The cognitive confusion precedes the fatigue in five of seven cases," Mere said. She put the folder on the table and sat down across from me with the settled posture of someone who had finished processing and was now delivering conclusions. "That's a sequence, not a cluster."

I looked up from my route sketch. "You've read it."

"Obviously." The word carried no particular inflection. Mere stated obvious things the way other people breathed — involuntarily and without interest in your opinion about it. "The two cases where fatigue presents first are also the two with the shortest exposure duration. Less than forty-eight hours between onset and full symptom expression. The other five show cognitive symptoms three to five days before physical decline."

She was right. I'd read the same data and filed it as a symptom list — a cluster of effects that accompanied the draining. Mere had read it as a timeline. The confusion came first because the draining pathway ran through cognitive centres before reaching physical reserves, or because the cognitive load of the extraction itself degraded higher function before the body registered the energy loss. Either way, the sequence mattered. It meant the mechanism had a direction — a route through the victim, not a blanket effect.

"That's useful," I said.

"I know." She opened the folder to a page I'd marked — the dockworker's case summary. Her finger landed on the symptom timeline. "His wife describes him asking the same question four times in an hour. Three days before the fatigue started. If you're reading residue at the sites, the cognitive pathway should be the earliest trace. Look for the oldest layer."

I hadn't extracted that instruction from the data. Different analytical method, same data set. The relationship working as though we designed it intentionally.

She turned to a blank page at the back of her copy and laid it flat between us. A route, drawn in her precise hand — three numbered stops connected by lines through Drenwick's streets.

"Arcane district first. Cleanest environment for baseline residue reading — the suppression field means less background noise. Warrens second, the dockworker. Third site flexible depending on what the first two produce." She tapped the line between stops one and two. "The east road between the arcane district and the warrens takes you past Maren's brokerage. Carter's supplier. If you leave by sixth bell you can hit all three sites and the brokerage before the light goes."

(*She planned a supplier run into the route. I told her about Carter's problem last night — mentioned it once, briefly, between the third victim summary and the residue analysis methodology — and she filed it, mapped the supplier's location from memory, and built it into the most efficient path through the investigation sites. I hadn't asked her to. I hadn't planned to do it today. She saw the optimisation and made it.*)

"I'm heading out," I said. "Your route."

Mere nodded. Not a social nod — an acknowledgement that the plan met her assessment of the data's requirements. "The dockworker's wife. Be careful with her."

"Careful how?"

"She's been watching her husband die slowly for two weeks and no one has explained why. If you show up asking questions about magical residue, she's going to hear 'I can fix this.' Don't let her hear that unless you mean it."

I hadn't planned to promise anything. But Mere's warning wasn't about plans — it was about the gap between what I intended to communicate and what a desperate person would receive. She understood that gap because she'd spent her life on the other side of it, saying things that landed differently than she'd aimed.

"Understood," I said. And meant it.

I left the house without training. Sixth bell came and went while I was walking toward the arcane district, and the absence of Leon's courtyard, the chalk target, the familiar rhythm of fire through the ring — it registered as a gap in the morning's routine. The first time I'd skipped training since we'd started. The case had priority, and Leon would understand. Leon always understood when the work took precedence, because Leon's entire philosophy of life was organised around the principle that work came first and everything else negotiated for whatever time remained.

The morning was cold. Late winter cold — not the killing cold of deep January but the persistent, mean-spirited cold of a season that knew it was losing and intended to make the departure as unpleasant as possible.

* * *

The arcane district filled the northeast quarter of Drenwick with the orderly self-importance of a neighbourhood that believed its residents were better than everyone else's and had the property values to prove it. Clean streets. Regulated signage. Ward-stones set into the pavement at regular intervals, maintaining a background suppression field that kept ambient magical residue below the threshold where it might interfere with the delicate work conducted behind every second door. The air here tasted different — thinner, scrubbed, the magical equivalent of a room that had been cleaned so thoroughly it no longer smelled like anything at all.

The site was a boarding house three streets east of the Compact's local offices. The student victim — a third-year inscription apprentice named Vellen Thrace, according to Ledger's notes — had rented a room on the second floor. The landlord, a trim woman with the suspicious efficiency of someone who managed property in the arcane district, let me in without enthusiasm when I showed the guild credential Ledger had provided.

"Compact already came through," she said, leading me upstairs. "Two weeks ago. Looked at the room, looked at the boy, wrote something down, and left. Nothing since."

"Did they tell you anything?"

"They told me the room was safe to re-let." She unlocked the door with the air of a woman who had opinions about institutions that declared things safe without explaining what had made them unsafe. "I haven't re-let it."

The room was small, functional, the standard accommodation of a student whose family could afford the arcane district's rates but not its comforts. A desk, a bed, a window facing the regulated street below. The ward-stones' suppression field extended up here — quiet background, minimal ambient noise. The room was exactly the kind of controlled environment where residue analysis was easy, which was why Mere had chosen it first.

I closed the door. Engaged Flaw Sight.

(*The lattice appeared — the standard visual overlay, the architecture of magical residue rendered as structure I could read. The room's background was clean, suppressed, the ward-stones doing their job. But layered over that cleanness, like graffiti on a whitewashed wall, the signature of the draining working. It was… wrong. Not in the way broken things are wrong — wrong the way a sentence is wrong when the grammar belongs to a language you almost recognise.*)

The signature was a lattice — but the construction methodology was unfamiliar. Standard Compact-era magical workings followed predictable architectural conventions: modular anchoring, standardised node spacing, the regulated framework that eighty years of institutional oversight had imposed on magical practice. Every licensed practitioner in Drenwick built workings that looked, at the structural level, like variations on the same blueprint. Different purposes, different complexities, but the same underlying grammar.

This wasn't that.

The anchoring was deeper-set than modern convention. The node spacing was irregular — not random, but following a rhythm I didn't recognise, like finding a piece of music written in a time signature that shouldn't work but somehow did. The connecting threads between nodes used a routing logic that modern practice had abandoned, or more likely never learned, because the standardisation that came with Compact regulation had smoothed these older approaches out of the curriculum decades ago.

It was pre-Compact construction. I'd seen pre-Compact work before — the Barrows wards, the bracelet's inscription, the scattered remnants of a less regulated era that surfaced occasionally in old buildings and forgotten vaults. But those had been protective workings, defensive structures, things built to keep other things out. This was an extraction pathway. Built to reach into a person, draw out vitality, and route it somewhere else.

The outbound pathway was the clearest trace — a structured channel running from the residue signature toward the northeast wall and beyond. The energy had been drawn from the victim and sent somewhere along that vector, through a routing pattern that was consistent, repeatable, and precisely calibrated. A tool being used as designed, not improvised into service.

I spent twenty minutes with the signature, cataloguing what Flaw Sight showed me. The quality of the construction was unsettling. Not because it was threatening — because it was competent. Whoever had built the instrument that left this signature had known exactly what they were doing within their own framework. The unfamiliar architecture wasn't crude or unstable. It was professionally done, built to specifications I couldn't read but could recognise as specifications. An engineer's work, not a theorist's and not an amateur's.

Like reading handwriting from a century ago — recognisable as writing, but the conventions were wrong.

I disengaged Flaw Sight. The lattice faded. The room was just a room again — a student's lodging, empty, the bed stripped, the desk bare. Vellen Thrace was somewhere else now, recovering or not recovering, aged beyond his years by something that shouldn't exist and that the institution responsible for preventing it had chosen to ignore.

I thanked the landlord on the way out. She watched me leave with the expression of someone who had expected the visit to produce answers and had received none.

* * *

The warrens occupied the southwest corner of Drenwick the way mould occupied a damp wall — not by design but by the accumulated pressure of people who needed to live somewhere and couldn't afford anywhere else. The streets were narrow, the buildings were tall enough to block most of the winter light, and the air carried the permanent undertone of river damp, coal smoke, and the particular human density that comes from too many families sharing too few walls. The ward-stones here were cracked or missing — the city maintained the arcane district's suppression field with meticulous care and treated the warrens' infrastructure as an accounting problem that could wait until next quarter.

The dockworker's home was on Brewer's Alley, a street named for a brewery that had closed before I was born. Ground floor of a three-storey tenement, the door recessed into a stone frame that had been patched with mismatched mortar twice in the last decade. I knocked. Waited.

The woman who answered was younger than I'd expected. Late twenties, maybe early thirties — Ledger's file had described the family as young, but the word hadn't carried the specific weight of seeing her face. She had the exhausted composure of someone who'd been holding a household together through sustained crisis, the kind of tiredness that went deeper than sleep could reach.

"Mrs. Dorren?" I said. "I'm the Locksmith. I'm with the Guild of Necessary Services. I'm investigating what happened to your husband."

She looked at me with eyes that did exactly what Mere had warned me they would — searched for a promise I hadn't made.

"Mr. Ledger mentioned someone would stop by. Please, come in," she said.

The flat was two rooms and a kitchen alcove. Clean — aggressively clean, the kind of clean that meant someone was channelling fear into the only thing they could control. A child sat on a rug near the stove, three or four years old, playing with wooden blocks in the focused, oblivious way of a child who had decided that the adult world's current emergency was not his department. A second child — younger, maybe eighteen months — was asleep in a crib wedged between the stove and the wall, the deep boneless sleep of a toddler who'd cried herself out. A pair of muddy boots by the door, too small for an adult but too large for either of the two I could see — the eldest, out somewhere. School, or a neighbour, or anywhere that wasn't this flat. From the back room came the sound of someone shifting in a bed — slow, effortful movement that should have been easy.

"Ren is in the back," Mrs. Dorren said. She didn't look toward the back room. She looked at me. "He was loading crates at the docks three weeks ago. He could carry two at a time. He was proud of that — stupid thing to be proud of, but he was." She paused. The composure held, but the worry showed. "Now he can't lift Tam."

The child on the rug — Tam — looked up at the mention of his name, assessed the situation with the uncomplicated pragmatism of a three-year-old, and returned to his blocks.

"When did it start?" I asked. Not the question I wanted to ask. The question that was useful.

"He came home confused. Three weeks ago — no, closer to four. Started asking questions he'd already asked. Forgetting where he'd put things, losing words mid-sentence. I thought it was exhaustion — the docks were running double shifts." She sat down at the kitchen table, not because she wanted to sit but because her body had made the decision without consulting her. "Then the tiredness. Not normal tiredness. He'd sleep twelve hours and wake up worse. And then —"

She stopped. Looked at her hands. Started again.

"He aged. In days. His hair went grey in patches. His face — the lines came in like someone was drawing them. The warrens healer said 'accelerated senescence.' Charged us twenty silvers and said there was nothing to be done." Her voice was steady. Steady in the way that things are steady when they've been held in place so long the holding has become structural. "He's thirty-one. He looks fifty."

(*Mere's sequence confirmed. Cognitive confusion first — three to five days before the physical symptoms, consistent with the five-case pattern. The confusion came before the exhaustion, which came before the aging. Direction: cognitive centres → physical reserves → visible deterioration. The pathway runs through the mind first. The mind is either the entry point or the first system to fail under the extraction load.*)

I asked a few more questions. Duration. Progression. Whether anything unusual had happened near the home before the onset — strange visitors, unfamiliar sounds, the kind of oblique questions that probed for magical activity without using the word. Mrs. Dorren answered precisely. She'd been paying attention because paying attention was the only tool she had left.

"Can I see him?" I asked.

She led me to the back. Ren Dorren was propped up on pillows in a bed that took up most of the small space. He was, as his wife had described, a man of thirty-one who looked fifty. The aging was wrong — not the gradual accumulation of years but a violent compression, as if time had been pulled through him too fast and left debris. His hands on the blanket were thin. His eyes, when they found me, had the clouded confusion of someone whose thoughts arrived broken.

"Who's this?" he asked his wife. His voice was the worst part — a strong man's voice coming through a weak man's throat, the mismatch of what he'd been and what he was.

"Someone from the guild," she said. "He's helping."

I hadn't said I was helping. I was investigating. But I didn't correct her, because Mere had been right — the gap between what I said and what she heard was too wide to bridge with precision, and trying would only cause damage.

I engaged Flaw Sight.

(*Same signature. Same architecture — the deep-set anchoring, the irregular node spacing, the pre-Compact routing methodology. Identical to the arcane district site in every structural detail. One source, one instrument. But the traces were heavier here. Denser. The lattice overlay was thicker, the extraction pathway wider, as though the instrument had drawn more aggressively or the operator had held the connection longer. The later drainings — this one was more recent than the student's — left messier, more saturated residue. Escalation. The perpetrator was taking more each time, or the instrument was demanding more, or both.*)

The outbound pathway pointed northeast, same as the arcane district site. Same vector. The energy drawn from Ren Dorren had been routed through the same channel, to the same destination, by the same tool. The consistency was absolute — no variation in construction, no improvisation, no adaptation between sites. A manufactured instrument being used according to its specification.

I let the Sight go. The overlay dissolved, and what was left was worse — a small, cold room where a man who should have been carrying crates at the docks was propped on pillows while his wife held the family together and his son played with blocks.

I lingered. One beat longer than the investigation required. The noise filed the data — symptom timeline, onset pattern, extraction density, outbound vector — with the clinical efficiency it applied to everything. The rest of me stood in a cold room in the warrens and looked at what had been done to a man whose only crime was living where the instrument's operator had pointed it.

"Thank you," I told Mrs. Dorren at the door. "I'll be in contact through the guild if I learn anything I can share."

"Will he get better?"

I didn't answer immediately. Not because I didn't know — because both answers were wrong. Yes was a lie I couldn't sustain. No was a weight I couldn't put on her.

"I don't know yet," I said. "I know what happened. I'm working on who did it."

It wasn't enough. It was what I had.

* * *

The east road between the warrens and the canal district ran straight enough that I could see Maren's brokerage from two streets out — a narrow-fronted shop wedged between a chandler and a rope-maker, the kind of establishment that existed on margins and survived on relationships. The sign read MAREN HARWICK — MINERAL BROKER in paint that had been refreshed recently enough to suggest she cared about appearances and old enough to suggest she didn't care extravagantly.

The shop was open. A bell chimed when I entered. The interior was exactly what a mineral brokerage looked like when it served the guild quarter — display cases of polished samples, a counter with a balance scale, shelves of labelled containers. Orderly, professional, dull.

The woman behind the counter looked up with the practised disinterest of someone who spent most of her day telling people that the prices were the prices.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Maren Harwick."

"You've found her." She was mid-forties, sharp-featured, with the particular posture of a small business owner who had learned to assess customers in the first three seconds and file them accordingly. Her assessment of me took two. "What do you need?"

"Jonael Carterson. He's a client of yours — or was. His orders stopped filling about six weeks ago."

The expression changed. The professional disinterest acquired an edge — not hostility, but the careful blankness of someone who had encountered a subject she'd decided not to discuss. "I'm not currently filling orders for that account."

"I know. I'm trying to understand why."

"That's between me and my business operations." She said it smoothly — rehearsed, or close to it. The sentence had the worn smoothness of an answer she'd given before.

I read the room. Maren wasn't frightened. She wasn't angry. She was compliant — performing a position she'd been told to hold, with the resignation of someone who'd calculated the cost of resistance and found it exceeded the cost of cooperation. Whatever had told her to stop supplying Carter, it hadn't been a threat. It had been pressure — the institutional kind, the kind that came with the implicit weight of an authority you couldn't afford to challenge.

"I'm not here to cause you trouble," I said. "I'm not Compact. I'm guild, working on a separate matter. Carter's supply situation came to my attention, and I'm trying to understand the shape of it."

She looked at me for a long moment. The calculation was visible — how much to say, how much silence cost, whether the guild credential changed the equation.

"I can't help you," she said. Not "I won't." "I can't." The distinction was deliberate.

"Understood."

I left. The bell chimed on the way out.

(*Institutional pressure. Not criminal, not personal. Maren's not afraid — she's constrained. Someone with authority that she recognises as legitimate, or at least as too costly to resist, told her to stop supplying Carter. The "can't" was precise — she's not withholding by choice, she's been told, and the telling came from a direction she can't push back against. Compact-adjacent. Maybe Compact directly. The same institutional architecture that's covering the draining case is squeezing Carter's supply chain through different channels.*)

I asked around the canal district on the way back — nothing formal, just the kind of ambient inquiry that sounded like conversation if you weren't listening carefully. A broker I'd dealt with during the Floundry case. A warehouse clerk who owed me a favour that was too small to call in but large enough to ask a question against. Nobody knew specifics. Everyone had heard rumours — something about supply adjustments, regulatory guidance, the kind of language that meant someone with institutional authority had made suggestions that weren't technically orders but carried the same weight. The coordination was real. The source was invisible, buried behind layers of bureaucratic plausibility.

Carter's problem had a shape. I couldn't see who was casting the shadow yet, but the shadow was Compact-sized.

* * *

The third site was a residue-only location — a cobbler's workshop near the canal district boundary where Ledger's network had detected arcane residue consistent with the draining signature, but no confirmed victim. The cobbler was at work when I arrived, an older man who looked up from a half-soled boot with the mild confusion of someone who couldn't imagine why a stranger was interested in his shop's magical residue.

The guild credential smoothed the conversation. I asked to examine the back wall where the detection had flagged — the cobbler shrugged and returned to his boot.

The residue was there, but faint. The signature matched — identical in every structural detail to the first two sites. But the lattice was incomplete, the extraction pathway only partially formed. An attempted draining that hadn't fully connected, or residue drift from a nearby event, or the working's operator testing range and finding the distance insufficient. The pattern wasn't clean, which was itself data. The instrument's range had limits. The operator couldn't drain from everywhere — proximity mattered, and this site had been at the edge of effective range.

I spent ten minutes with the residue, cataloguing what was there and what wasn't. Three sites. Three samples. The noise had been running them in parallel since the arcane district, and now it clicked.

(*Same source. Same tool. Same pre-Compact architecture at every site — identical construction, identical routing methodology, identical anchoring depth. One operator, one instrument, increasing usage — not multiple hands, not a copycat. The signature is the instrument's, not the operator's — whoever is wielding this thing leaves no personal magical fingerprint in the residue, which means the instrument is doing all the work and the wielder is just pointing it. The escalation is in the output: the arcane district traces were light, the warrens traces were heavy, and this site is the margin — the edge of range, the boundary of what the tool can reach. The earlier drainings took less. The later drainings took more. Either the operator is demanding more from the instrument, or the instrument is demanding more from the operator, or usage breeds dependency and the curve only goes one direction.*)

(*And the tradition. Pre-Compact. Not just old — deliberately constructed within a system that predates the Compact's standardisation by decades. Someone who understood what they were doing within a practice that no longer exists as a living discipline. Which means I can describe what it does, I can read the traces it leaves, I can map the escalation pattern — but I can't identify it. I don't have the vocabulary. I learned magic under Compact conventions. Everything I see through Flaw Sight, I interpret through Compact grammar. This instrument speaks a different language.*)

(*Leon's language.*)

I pulled back. Deliberately, consciously — the way I'd taught myself since the Floundry crash. Disengage before the spiral deepens, before the migraines hit, before Mere has to sit beside me in a dark room and pretend she isn't worried. The noise resisted. But three months of practice had given me a leash where before I'd had nothing, and I hauled on it until the lattice faded and the cobbler's shop was just a shop again.

The afternoon light was already thinning — late winter stole the daylight early and without apology. Three sites done. One signature. One instrument. One pattern.

* * *

The walk home was cold and productive. I let the noise run — not the analytical spiral, just the background sorting, the safe kind.

The pre-Compact signature was the key finding and the key limitation. Eighty years of standardisation had homogenised magical practice so thoroughly that the era before it was a foreign country — the techniques still worked, the artifacts still functioned, but the knowledge of how they'd been built and what they'd been built to do had been compressed into academic footnotes and specialist expertise that most practitioners had never needed and the Compact had no interest in preserving.

Leon had that expertise. He'd spent years in the grey-market artifact trade, recovering pre-Compact items from tombs and vaults and sealed chambers, learning the old frameworks through direct contact with surviving workings. The Vethani Crypts, the Greymarch Barrows, a dozen other sites I knew about and probably twice that many I didn't. Leon read old magic the way I read flaws — not as data points but as language, with grammar and idiom and regional accent.

Tomorrow. Not training, not sparring, not the sixth-bell routine of fire through the ring and targeting at chalk circles. The signature data from three sites was the asking price. Leon would look at it and go very quiet, and then very focused, and then he'd tell me what kind of instrument could leave that trace.

(*One last thing. The craftsmanship. At every site, in every trace, the work read as masterful — old, yes, but mastery first and age second. Whoever made this instrument wasn't experimenting or improvising. They built it within their tradition with the confidence of total fluency, and they built it to do exactly what it's doing. This isn't a repurposed artifact turned to dark purpose by a desperate mind. It was built to drain. Designed and manufactured to extract human vitality and route it to a destination I can't yet identify. Someone, decades ago, sat down and built a tool for stealing life. And they were very, very good at it.*)
