# Chapter 14: The Villain Becomes a Victim

I left Devod sleeping and Mere working.

She'd been at his bedside since the previous afternoon — fourteen hours, give or take — and I'd learned by the third hour that offering to help was the wrong verb. Mere didn't need help. She needed compounds, clean water, and the absence of people asking if she needed help. I'd provided the first two and mastered the third by sitting in the corner and maintaining the bracelet's charging thread at seventy percent, which was exactly as useful as it sounded.

Devod had opened his eyes once, around the fourth bell. Not conscious — the lids drifted up, unfocused, seeing nothing in particular, then closed again. Mere's hands had paused for exactly one second. Then she'd checked his pulse, adjusted the binding salt compound at his left wrist, and gone back to work.

One second. That was Mere's version of crying with relief.

I told her I was going to the warrens. She didn't ask why.

"I'll be back before dark."

"Bring food," she said. "Something that isn't apples."

The walk from Millford Street to Greywell Lane took twenty minutes in daylight. A different route than the one I'd taken to the tenement three nights ago with Leon, tracking Drannick's referral to Carson's chapel-workshop — that had been a case walk, cataloguing territory, reading the warrens' architecture of poverty and resilience. This morning I was just walking. The winter sun was thin and low, cutting between buildings at angles that made the narrow streets look wider than they were. The warrens in daylight had a different texture — less menacing, more tired. Laundry on lines. A woman beating a rug over a railing. Two kids chasing a cat that didn't want to be caught.

Carson's chapel-workshop looked the same as it had the first time, which was to say it looked like a building that had been constructed to survive a direct hit from a siege engine and then someone had hung a sign on it. The heavy timber door was propped open with what appeared to be an anvil. Inside, the smell of sawdust and hot metal competed with something that might have been incense or might have been a soldering mishap.

Carson was at his workbench, hands deep in something mechanical. He looked up when I walked in, and the laid-back warmth that was his default expression flickered when he read my face.

"Locksmith." He set down a wrench that most people would have needed two hands to lift. "You look like a man carrying someone else's weight."

"Devod Fields was drained two nights ago. The crystal — the one Kae uses. Devod's alive, but it was close."

Carson's hands went still on the bench. Not the way Devod's went still — that was a tell, an involuntary signal preceding difficult truth. Carson's stillness was the silence of a large man processing something that didn't fit inside his philosophy without breaking it.

"The delivery man," he said. "Mere's father."

"You know him?"

"Know of him. Runs the route past the old tannery." Carson's gaze dropped to the bench, then came back up. "Kae did this?"

I didn't soften it. "Kae did this. And the case has changed."

I told him what I needed. Not all of it — Carson wasn't guild, and the operational details of the case were Ledger's territory — but enough. Kae's story. The parts we didn't have. The woman who'd sheltered him, the one who'd asked me if I was a healer. And anyone who knew what happened to Elara.

Carson listened — unhurried, attentive, with the patience of a man who'd built his entire social architecture on the principle that people talk when they're ready and not before. When I finished, his jaw worked once, silently, and he turned away to hang the wrench on its peg. Precisely. Lining up the handle with the mark on the wall.

"I knew Kae was hurting," he said, to the wall. "I didn't know he was hurting people."

(*Two kinds of guilt. Carson's and Leon's. Different shapes, same weight — decent men discovering that their benign actions fed into someone else's malice. Carson's advice, given in good faith, heard as permission. Leon's sale, made out of necessity, forged into a weapon. Neither of them swung the blade. Both of them sharpened a different edge.*)

"The woman who sheltered him," I said. "You know her?"

"Brida." Carson turned back. "Brida Voss. Hendrick's cousin — the supplier you helped me clear. She's been in the warrens since she was born. Good woman. Hard life." He paused. "She's in my parish, if you can call a fish fry a parish. She won't talk to a guild man alone. She knows me."

"I was hoping you'd say that."

"I'm saying more than that. I'm coming with you." He reached for a coat — not a jacket, a coat, because everything Carson owned was built to survive conditions that didn't exist in Drenwick. "There's something else. A man I know — runs errands near the canal district, does odd jobs. About two months back, someone paid him to not see something. Near Brida's building. He didn't tell me what he didn't see, because that's how paid silence works. But I've known him long enough to know it ate at him."

"A witness."

"A man who was paid to look the other way. There's a difference, and the difference matters to him." Carson pulled the coat on and it made him look like a small building that had decided to go for a walk. "He won't talk to you. He might talk to me, given time. But finding him is easier than finding truth — Leon could do it in an afternoon."

I pulled the soundstone from inside my collar. "Leon. I need you to find someone." I gave him the name Carson provided, the general area, the parameters. Leon's voice came back clipped and operational — guilt channeled into competence, exactly where it belonged.

"Give me until evening."

Carson watched me tuck the stone back. "That's a useful thing."

"Borrowed."

"Everything useful is." He closed the workshop door behind us — closed, not locked, because Carson trusted the warrens and the warrens trusted Carson, and both of those things were true for reasons that had nothing to do with locks. "She's about ten minutes south. Near the old tannery."

We walked. The warrens shifted around us as we moved deeper — the commercial strip near Greywell Lane giving way to residential density, buildings pressed closer together, the streets narrowing until sunlight only reached the ground at noon. I'd been here at night, tracking Kae. Plaster patched over plaster. Window boxes with winter herbs, brown and stubborn. A dog sleeping in a doorway, one ear up.

Carson walked like he did everything — unhurried, present, nodding to people who recognised him. Three separate greetings in four blocks. A woman pressed a wrapped package into his hands without breaking stride — "For Kae, when you see him." Carson tucked it into his coat without comment.

"She asked you about Kae," I said. Not a question.

"Everyone asks me about Kae," Carson said. "The difference is what they're asking."

* * *

The tenement looked different in daylight.

Three nights ago, I'd approached this building at the tenth bell with Leon covering the front entrance and a soundstone warm against my collarbone. The warrens at night had given it a particular quality: a dark shape in a dark street, shuttered and sleeping, a building that holds its secrets because no one bothers to ask. In the thin morning light it was just a building. Brick and timber, two storeys, plaster skin cracked and repaired so many times the wall looked like a geological survey. The washing line was still strung between the window and the building opposite. No laundry on it today.

The fire damage was visible from the street.

Scorch marks around the ground-floor window — the one I'd climbed through. The shutters had been replaced, but the new wood was raw and unweathered against the old frame, and the plaster above the window was blackened in a pattern I recognised because I'd made it. Phase Two of a fight I'd started and nearly lost, heat blasts expanding outward, fire strobing through broken shutters while the room came apart around us.

I'd done that. And now I was here to ask questions.

Carson knocked. Not his usual easy rhythm — softer, measured, a knock that understood the person inside had reasons to be wary.

Movement behind the door. A pause — someone looking through a gap or a peephole, deciding. Then the latch turned.

Brida Voss opened the door the width of her body. Early thirties, wiry frame, the same quick-assessment eyes I remembered from the washing line seven days ago. Tired brown eyes that had gotten tireder since I'd seen them last. She looked at Carson first, and something in her shoulders loosened half an inch. Then she looked at me, and it tightened back up.

"Carson." A statement, not a greeting. Then, to me: "You."

"Brida." Carson's voice had dropped into something gentler than his usual rumble. "This is the man I mentioned. The one from the guild."

"I know who he is." Her eyes hadn't left mine. "He burned my wall."

There it was. No accusation in it — not exactly. More like a fact she'd been carrying, the way you carry a stone in your pocket because putting it down means deciding it doesn't matter.

"I did," I said. "I was fighting someone in your room, and I used fire, and your wall got the worst of it."

She studied me for a long moment. Reading faces, not credentials — the warrens way of deciding who to trust. Whatever she found, it was enough to open the door wider. Not an invitation. An allowance.

"He's not here," she said. "Hasn't been since that night. Took his things. Left the mess."

The room was smaller in daylight, and cleaner than it had any right to be. Three nights ago this space had been a wreck — cot ablaze, chair shattered, table smashed sideways, clothes spilled across the floor, smoke pooling against the ceiling. Brida had put it back together. The cot had a new blanket, thin but clean, stretched tight over the mattress. The chair was gone — replaced by a stool that didn't match anything else in the room. The dresser still stood against the wall, but the top drawer was open and empty, her things moved to a basket by the door. The table had been righted, one leg shimmed with a folded piece of leather where I'd knocked it into the dresser hard enough to crack the joint.

The scorch marks she couldn't fix. They told the story across the wall above the cot — radiating heat damage at waist height, a cleaner line where the fire whip had cut across, and a blackened section near the ceiling where the smoke had pooled. Whitewash had been applied over the worst of it, thin and uneven because whitewash costs money and she'd already spent money on a blanket and a stool. The window frame had been replaced — new wood, Carson's work by the look of it, the joints overbuilt by a factor of three.

"I fixed the window," Carson said, reading my glance. "The frame was gone."

"Because his friend put fire through it," Brida said, looking at me. "And the chair. And the blankets. And most of a wall." She gestured at the whitewashed scorch marks. "Three days to get the smell out. The woman upstairs thought the building was coming down."

"I'm sorry about the room," I said. Because I was, and because there wasn't a version of that fight that didn't end in fire.

"The room I can fix." She looked at the empty cot. "The room isn't what I'm angry about."

Something shifted in her expression. More complicated than warmth. The recognition that the man who'd burned her wall had also been hurt in the burning.

She stepped back from the doorway. The same measured allowance as before. "Sit, then. If you're going to ask questions, I'd rather not do it in the hallway."

Carson settled himself into the only chair like a man who'd sat in it before. It creaked under his weight but held — his own construction, probably. Brida stood by the small table, arms crossed, facing us both. I leaned against the wall near the door — she'd offered sitting, not comfort, and the distinction mattered.

"Brida." Carson leaned forward, elbows on knees. "The man is in trouble. The real kind. The kind where people who want to help him are running out of time. Phelan—" he gestured toward me with one enormous hand, "—is trying to understand what happened to him. Not to hurt him. To help."

"Everyone says that."

"I know. But I'm the one saying it now."

She looked at Carson for a long time. Then she sat on the edge of the stripped cot and put her hands in her lap, and the posture reminded me of Devod in the moment before he'd told Mere the ultimatum truth — a person arranging themselves around a story they'd been carrying too long.

"He was born crooked," she said. "His spine. Twisted from birth — the bones grew wrong, pressed together where they shouldn't. Every time he moved, something shifted against something else inside him. Walking hurt. Sitting hurt. Lying down hurt less, but not nothing." She pressed her hands flat against her thighs, as if demonstrating stillness. "His mother said the midwife took one look at his back and told her he'd never straighten. The bones were set wrong and they'd only get worse as he grew."

She paused. Let the weight of it settle.

"You could see it, if you knew to look. The way he held himself — always careful, always braced. Like every step was a negotiation with his own body about how much it was going to cost him. Some days the bones sat kinder and he could move almost like anyone else. Other days something would shift and he'd be on the ground, couldn't breathe, couldn't think, just pain from his hip to his neck like someone had driven a hot iron down his back." She shook her head. "His family tried for a while — they weren't bad people, not exactly. Just poor, and tired, and a child who screams every night and can't tell you why it's worse tonight than last night… They took him to a bonesetter once. The bonesetter looked at his back and said the same thing the midwife said. Nothing to set. Nothing to straighten. The bones grew that way." She trailed off. "They stopped trying. He was on the streets before he was ten."

Carson asked the follow-up questions. Gently, with the particular skill of a man who'd spent years listening to people in the warrens tell him things they wouldn't tell anyone else. Inviting, never probing. He'd ask one thing, then wait, and the silence would fill itself because Brida had been carrying this alone and carrying alone has a weight that conversation lifts.

I watched the technique. Told myself it was professional utility.

"Elara found him," Brida said. "When he was — I don't know, fifteen? Sixteen? She was a healer. She didn't have a shop and a sign. She lived in the warrens because the warrens needed her and the Compact didn't want to know about her." Her hands tightened in her lap. "She took him in. Fed him, housed him, taught him letters. Taught him how to cook, how to mend clothes — practical things, the kind nobody teaches you on the streets. And she managed the pain."

"How?" Carson asked.

"Healing. Every day, sometimes twice. She'd put her hands on his back and work the magic into the bones — easing things apart where they pressed, calming whatever was angry inside him. Not a cure. She told him that, told him the spine would never straighten, that she couldn't change what he was born with. But she could ease it. Half the pain, maybe more than half. He could sleep through the night when Elara was tending him. He could walk without bracing for every step. He could—" Brida's voice thinned. "He could stand up straight. Not because the bones were fixed. Because she held them quiet long enough for him to remember what it felt like to move without paying for it."

"She gave him the pendant," Brida said. "The snake. Carved it herself — she was good with her hands, Elara. Told him snakes shed their skin." She looked down at her own hands. "Said he could too, if he wanted."

The pendant. I knew what she was going to say before she said it, because the noise had been assembling the image since she'd started talking — a small carved snake on a frayed cord, worn smooth from handling, swinging at Kae's throat in the orange light of a room I was setting on fire.

(*Something kept, not worn. I'd seen it in the firefight — a detail my noise had catalogued and filed without context, the way it catalogues everything, building a library of observations that only become meaningful when the right shelf gets opened. Now the shelf opened. Elara carved a snake and gave it to a boy in pain and told him transformation was possible. Kae wore it against his skin every day, not as jewellery but as evidence — proof that someone had once believed he could change. He was wearing it when he attacked me. He was wearing it when he drained Devod. The symbol of hope around the throat of the weapon that hope had become.*)

"Elara asked me to look after him," Brida continued. "If anything happened to her. She said it like people say things they don't expect to need — a just-in-case, filed away. I said yes because you say yes to Elara. She was that kind of person."

"When did something happen to her?" I asked.

Brida's jaw tightened. "Two months ago. Maybe a bit more. She just — wasn't there anymore. One day she was in her room on the third floor, and the next day the room was empty and nobody knew anything. Or nobody would say anything. I went to the Compact, because that's what you're supposed to do." She looked at me with the flat expression of someone who'd been disappointed by institutions so many times it had stopped being disappointment and become geography. "They took my name. Told me they'd look into it. Never heard back."

Two months. Consistent with Ledger's timeline — Elara went dark shortly before the draining started. The Compact took Brida's report and filed it in the same administrative silence that had swallowed the compliance officer's draining investigation.

"After Elara disappeared," Brida said, "the pain came back. All of it. He was — you could see it eating him alive. Couldn't sleep, couldn't sit still, couldn't stop moving because stopping meant feeling. Then he got that crystal."

She said it the way she'd say *then the roof leaked* — another catastrophe in a life structured around them.

"Better, at first. The crystal stopped the pain completely — not like Elara, who eased it. Stopped it. He was himself again, the real him, the one who smiled and told bad jokes and helped me carry the washing." Her voice went quiet. "But then it wasn't enough. It was enough for shorter and shorter, and when it wasn't enough the pain was worse than before. Worse than it had ever been. And he started going out at night."

"Did you know what he was doing?"

"I knew it was bad." She met my eyes. "I didn't know how bad. I didn't want to know how bad. I just kept the door unlocked and food on the table and told myself I was keeping a promise."

Carson reached across and put his hand — that enormous, gorilla-sized hand — over both of hers. She didn't pull away.

"When I asked you—" she looked at me. "When I asked if you were a healer. I wasn't protecting him. I mean, I was. But I was looking for someone who could do what Elara did. Someone who could make the pain bearable without—" She gestured vaguely at the scorched wall. "Without all of this."

(*The mirror. Two versions of the same architecture — isolation built from the outside in. Kae's was constructed for him: a body that hurt, a family that quit, a world that looked the other way. Mine was self-built: a mind that processed people as systems, a preference for solitude that I'd refined into a lifestyle, a series of deliberate choices to keep the world at arm's length. Same shape. Different cause. What happens when no one intervenes looks the same regardless of whether the walls were built by circumstance or by choice. The only difference between Kae and me was that someone intervened for me. Mere. Leon. Carter. Devod. People who showed up whether I wanted them to or not, who refused to let my isolation be the final word. Kae had Elara, and Elara was taken away, and nobody else came. I wasn't going to name this parallel. I wasn't going to sit with it. I was going to file it under professional context and move on, because the alternative was standing in the gap between "this person is killing people" and "this person was built to kill people," and that gap is where empathy lives, and I didn't want to be there.*)

(*I was already there.*)

We left ten minutes later. Brida watched from the doorway as Carson and I walked north toward the canal district. She didn't wave. She didn't close the door. She just stood there, holding the frame, watching the guild man who'd burned her wall walk away with the Reverend who'd fixed her window.

I had the personal story. The pain, the streets, Elara, the pendant, the crystal, the descent. Everything that made Kae a person instead of a case file.

Now I needed the institutional proof.

* * *

Ledger was waiting at a Compact administrative annex two streets east of the guild quarter — a squat stone building with narrow windows and the particular architectural charm of a filing cabinet. He'd arranged access through channels I didn't ask about, because asking Ledger about his channels was like asking a locksmith about his picks: you either trusted the work or you didn't.

"The records are organised by district, then by registration type, then by date," Ledger said as we entered. He said it the way most people say *the door is on the left* — automatically, from memory. "Healer registrations will be in the third section, warrens district, informal classification. Cross-referenced with compliance reports in the fifth section."

I looked at him. "You've done this before."

"The guild maintains familiarity with Compact administrative systems." His voice was perfectly level. Perfectly institutional. Perfectly the voice of someone who navigated these filing systems the way I navigated ward lattices — not with study, but with the trained instinct of long practice.

Too specific. Too fluid. A desk analyst researches filing conventions before a visit. Ledger was walking through the stacks like a man in his own house — knowing which boards creak, which drawers stick, which shortcuts save thirty seconds. I filed it without exploring it, but the pile of things I'd noticed about Ledger that didn't fit the desk-analyst model was getting tall enough to cast a shadow.

The annex was dim, cold, and smelled like old paper and dust. Rows of wooden shelves divided the space into narrow corridors, each section marked with brass plates that had been polished exactly once and then forgotten.

We worked. Two kinds of analysis converging on the same target — Ledger reading the system that held the data, me reading the patterns in the data itself. He pulled folders and registers; I mapped the connections between them. The bureaucratic trail of a woman who'd existed in the Compact's records as a line item and in the warrens as a lifeline.

Elara's healer registration was in the third section, where Ledger said it would be. Informal classification — the Compact's polite way of saying *unregistered but acknowledged.* Filed four years ago. Warrens district. Specialisation listed as "general wellness and pain management." A note in the margin, different handwriting, newer ink: *Flagged for review — no action taken.* Dated eight months before the draining started.

Flagged. No action taken. The Compact's way of knowing something existed and choosing not to know it.

"Payment orders," Ledger said. He'd moved two sections ahead while I was reading Elara's file. "Disbursement records from the Thorngate discretionary fund."

The same fund that had financed the crystal purchase. Cass's financial fingerprint, confirmed in Ledger's office three days ago when the trail finally led from Galden's brokerage through institutional channels to a desk in Thorngate. I joined Ledger at the shelf. The register was heavy — leather-bound, dense with entries, a ledger designed to make money untraceable.

Ledger found the relevant period with three page-flips. Too fast. I filed that too.

The entries were coded — reference numbers instead of names, classification codes instead of descriptions. Ledger translated as he read, his finger tracing lines with the practised ease of someone who'd memorised the encoding.

"Disbursement to field operatives. Two payments, sequential, dated—" He checked. "Six days before Elara's last registered activity."

"How much?"

"Twelve silvers each. Standard rate for contracted work."

Twelve silvers. The cost of a person's life, tallied and disbursed through proper channels, approved by someone who signed their initials in the correct box. Not a murder. A line item.

I kept reading. Ledger kept translating. The pattern built itself the way patterns do when you know what you're looking for — not all at once, but in accumulating weight, each piece making the previous pieces heavier.

A reassignment order: the Compact compliance officer responsible for the warrens district transferred to records management in Thorngate. Dated one week after Elara's last registered activity. The same officer who'd later filed the draining report that was acknowledged and ignored. Someone had moved the person who would have noticed Elara's absence to a desk where noticing things was discouraged.

A second disbursement: smaller, different code. Ledger paused on it. Cross-referenced with a separate register. His expression didn't change, but his hand stopped moving on the page — the same involuntary tell that Mere's hands had shown when the binding salts darkened too fast.

"This one," he said. "The payment code corresponds to a location-specific contract. Canal district, southern warrens boundary."

Carson's street contact. The man who'd been paid to not see something near Brida's building.

The amount was four silvers. Less than what a dockworker earned in a week. The price of looking away while someone disappeared.

(*Institutional evil has a particular texture. It's not dramatic. It's not passionate. It doesn't rage or gloat or explain itself. It files paperwork. It processes disbursements. It reassigns personnel and adjusts oversight boundaries and creates administrative blind spots with the same bureaucratic precision that it uses to order ink and replace broken chairs. Cass calculated the cost of removing Elara — twelve silvers for the operatives, four for the witness, a reassignment form for the compliance officer, and a filing adjustment to ensure no one looked too closely at the gap. He added it up, found the total acceptable, signed the appropriate documents, and a woman who'd spent years easing a boy's pain ceased to exist. Not with violence. With accounting.*)

"The disbursement to the operatives and the witness payment bracket the same period," I said. "Six days before Elara's last activity, and two days after. The reassignment follows a week later. That's not coincidence. That's a sequence."

"Yes," Ledger said. Nothing else. The word carried enough.

"Cass didn't just remove Kae's pain relief. He removed a guild informant." I looked at Ledger. "Elara was feeding you intelligence on Cass's operations from Thorngate. You told me she went dark. She didn't go dark. She was killed. And Cass killed her for two reasons — to protect his operations from your network, and to guarantee Kae had no alternative to the crystal. One act. Two objectives."

Ledger's hands were flat on the register. He didn't look up. He didn't need to — I was watching his face the way I watched magical workings, and what I saw was the architecture of composure holding by force of will. Micro-expressions that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn't been cold-reading him since the first meeting in his office: a tightening at the corners of his eyes, a half-second where his jaw set and then deliberately released, the particular stillness of a man who was very carefully not letting something show.

He'd known.

Not all of it — not the specific disbursement codes, not the line items, not the four-silver price of a witness's silence. But the shape of it. Elara was his informant. He'd brought her in, or she'd come to him, and he'd been running her as an intelligence asset against Cass's Thorngate operations. And when she went dark, he hadn't just lost an informant. He'd lost someone he felt responsible for.

The worn folder. The one that predated the draining case by months, with edges softened by handling and pages dense with tight handwriting. The folder he'd carried into every meeting since the first briefing, the one that held Kae's name and Elara's ghost before the draining case gave them relevance. That folder wasn't an intelligence file. It was grief wearing a classification number.

(*Everything about Ledger since the fourth day clicking into a single picture. The folder that was too old for the case. The personal weight underneath the institutional framing. The acknowledgment — "Yes" — when I'd said he was holding back, offered like a down payment on future trust. The way he'd said "she went dark" with the precise emotional control of someone who'd rehearsed the sentence. The resources mobilised for Devod — safe house, medical contact, no Compact entanglements — too fast, too comprehensive, a rescue plan already built and never gotten to use. He'd been living with this since before I was assigned the case. Maybe since before the draining started. Watching Kae destroy himself with the weapon that was built from Elara's absence, and holding the knowledge of who was responsible, and waiting — because Ledger always waited — for the proof that would make it actionable. And now he was standing next to me in a cold filing annex, watching me reach the conclusion he'd been living with for months, and the composure was holding, but the door behind it had cracked open far enough for me to see what was on the other side.*)

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that the disbursement records hadn't already said. Ledger had lost someone. The evidence in front of us proved who was responsible. The institutional machinery that should have protected Elara had been used to erase her.

We stood in the narrow corridor between shelves, two men reading a dead woman's administrative footprint, and the filing annex was very quiet.

"I brought her in," Ledger said. His voice was level. Perfect. The steadiest voice in the room. "She was already working the warrens when I found her. Healing people the Compact wouldn't acknowledge, in a district the Compact pretended didn't exist. She had access, she had relationships, and she had a reason to cooperate — the Compact's regulatory neglect was killing her patients. I offered her a channel. She took it."

He closed the register. Carefully. Aligned the edges with the shelf.

"She was good at it. Careful. Patient. The intelligence she provided on Cass's Thorngate operations was the foundation for everything I brought to you in that first briefing. When she stopped reporting, I—" He paused. Reset. The Ledger version of the reset, which was nearly invisible unless you were watching for it. "I investigated through available channels. The Compact's non-response to my inquiries was, in itself, an answer."

"How long have you known?"

"Since before the draining started." He looked at me. Brown eyes, controlled, the grief visible now in the way it hadn't been before — not because it was new, but because he'd stopped holding the door shut. "The case gave me a framework to pursue it. Your skills gave me a means. I didn't assign you the draining case to investigate a pattern of assaults, Phelan. I assigned you because the trail would eventually lead here, and you're the only person I trusted to follow it all the way."

I filed that. The trust. The manipulation. The fact that both were true simultaneously and neither cancelled the other out. Ledger had used me — pointed me at a case knowing where it would go, knowing I'd find the crystal, find Kae, find Cass, and eventually find Elara. And he'd trusted me to do it well, which was the most honest form of manipulation I'd ever encountered.

"We have enough," I said.

"Three independent sources," Ledger agreed. "Brida's testimony. The administrative record. And if Leon finds Carson's contact — the street witness."

"Leon will find him."

Ledger nodded. The composure was back — not the same composure, not the locked-down institutional mask, but something more settled. Like a man who'd been holding a weight in one hand for months and had finally set it down on a table where both of us could see it.

We left the annex. The late afternoon light was grey and thin, and the guild quarter was doing its evening transition — shops closing, lamplighters starting their rounds, the bustle of a city moving from one mode to another. Ledger walked beside me in silence for half a block before turning toward the guild hall without a word.

I headed south. Toward Millford Street. Toward Devod.

* * *

The soundstone pulsed against my collarbone as I crossed the canal bridge.

"Found him." Leon's voice, slightly breathless. "Carson's contact. Took some convincing, but Carson's name opened the door." A pause. "He was paid. Four silvers. He looked the other way while two men went into Brida's building — not Brida's floor, the third floor. Elara's floor. He didn't see what happened. He saw them leave. He saw them carrying something."

Four silvers. The same amount in the disbursement ledger. Three sources, one conclusion.

"Come to Millford Street," I said. "We'll debrief there."

"On my way."

I tucked the stone back and walked. The warrens gave way to the canal district gave way to the mixed commercial streets south of the guild quarter, and somewhere in the twenty-minute walk from the annex to Devod's room, the case rearranged itself inside my head.

Kae wasn't a monster. He was a weapon someone else had built.

The raw material was a boy born with pain he'd never asked for, raised by people too poor and too tired to help, abandoned to streets that didn't care. Elara had found him, and for a few years he'd been something like a person — sleeping through nights, learning letters, wearing a carved snake on a cord because someone told him he could change. Then Cass had signed the paperwork, and the one person who'd shown Kae kindness ceased to exist.

Cass hadn't just created an addict. He'd engineered a weapon by destroying the only person who could have prevented it. Removed the alternative, supplied the dependency, pointed the result at targets. And when the weapon malfunctioned — when Kae's spiralling addiction drove him off-mission — Cass hadn't panicked. He'd redirected. Fed Kae target information. Weaponised the chaos.

The anger I'd been carrying since Devod's room — cold, patient, efficient — shifted. In direction, not intensity. It had been pointing at Kae. Now it pointed at Cass.

Not "find and stop Kae." Find and save Kae. Because Kae was what happened when no one helped, and I was standing in the gap I'd promised myself I wouldn't stand in, and it turned out the gap was where the answer lived.

Devod's room was dim when I arrived. Mere was at the bedside, exactly where I'd left her, though she'd moved her herbal supplies to a more organised configuration on the small table — mortar, binding salts, three stoppered bottles, a folded cloth. Working infrastructure for the long term.

"He opened his eyes again," she said, without looking up. "Twice. The second time he tracked movement — followed my hand across his field of vision. Not conscious. But present."

Progress. Small, specific, measurable. Mere's kind of hope.

I set food on the dresser — bread, cheese, smoked fish from a canal-district vendor. Not apples. She glanced at it, noted the compliance, and went back to work.

"I know what happened to Kae," I said.

I told her. Not everything — the disbursement codes and filing conventions could wait — but the shape. The pain. Elara. The pendant. What Cass did, and why. The gap between "this person is killing people" and "this person was built to kill people."

Mere listened — completely, without interruption, sorting each piece into a framework that was already forming. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then:

"The herbal treatment I've been researching for Devod's recovery." She looked up. "The same principles would apply to chronic pain management. Not a cure. A bridge."

I hadn't said anything about saving Kae. Hadn't framed it as a question. But Mere had heard the shift in my voice — the difference between a man describing a target and a man describing a person — and she'd already started solving the problem I hadn't figured out how to ask.

I sat down in the corner chair. Pulled the bracelet's charging thread steady. Seventy percent, holding. The room settled into its evening quiet — Mere working, Devod breathing, the sound of the tanner moving around downstairs.

I knew who. I knew why. I knew the mission had changed.

What I didn't have yet was a plan. How to reach a man protected by the community that loved him, contain him long enough to break the crystal's hold, and have something ready on the other side so the pain didn't kill what the crystal hadn't.

That was tomorrow's problem.

Tonight, I sat in the chair and watched Mere work and listened to Devod breathe, and the anger pointed at Thorngate, and the quiet was a different kind of quiet than it had been twenty-four hours ago.

Not the quiet of waiting. The quiet of knowing.
