Long Ago

Oreskios Memorial University felt unlike Klerouchos Tertiary Academy in almost every regard. While the latter lay at the steep hillside in the oldest part of the city, the former was at the opposite end of the city, down in the defunct industrial district by the River Katharsi. And while the academy was small and elitist - the sort of place where you'd casually find out the mousy girl you were in PE class with was the daughter of the man who owned your entire local shopping district - the university was massive and hyper-inclusive, having sub-institutions for pretty much every academic bracket. People came to it from all over the League, and even from Inner Sao, and there were easily hundreds of thousands of students.

It was so large it felt hard to even think of it as a single place. In many ways, my saying it was 'in' the industrial district a moment ago was misleading. It was more that it had eaten the industrial district, to the point that people already more often referred to the area by its name than anything else. It had cannibalized the plain stone factories rendered redundant by widespread adoption of replication arcana, transforming them into a vast assemblage of lecture halls, dorms, and the peripheral businesses that always spring up in the presence of students. Takeaways, echo game shops, and clothing stores abounded, and any place you stepped into, you could rest easy in the knowledge you were never more than a street away from somewhere giving out contraception.

It was in the northern part of the university, closer to the sea (though Oreskios never quite reached the coast, even if you could see it from the hills), that the monuments which gave the institution its name could be found. Older than the place itself, they towered multiple stories into the air, great sea stacks of grey-red stone ground down into even-faced monoliths in the days of the Mourning Period, spaced unevenly as a byproduct of their quasi-natural heritage. Like pillars of some long-forgotten primeval temple, the rest of the structure gone to dust.

Upon each were carved, in minuscule print, hundreds of thousands of names originating from the near west of the old world, from which the Inotian party was culturally rooted. They represented only a fraction of the billions of people killed in the collapse, when the universe itself had decided to turn the physics of the Milky Way inside out in the most spectacular act of indifferent natural violence ever visited on human civilization. There were sites like this all over the Mimikos, each only representing specific communities or groups pertaining to the founders. The sliver of the old mankind remembered by the impossibly lucky - or probably more likely, privileged - few.

The names were mostly worn away. Unless you looked very, very close, you couldn't make them out.

The site had been built at the same time as the original settlement, but the Inotians had separated it from their upland residences by several miles. They held a different philosophy on how to grieve than Saoites did, who tended to place such things in town squares and other prominent locations. How people had responded to the trauma of the collapse was perhaps the greater part of what had defined the culture of each party, often literally represented in their names. The Ysarans and Inotians had tried their best to ignore or separate themselves from it, which was perhaps the reason they had given birth to the most wealthy and dynamic nations. The Mekhians had defined themselves by learning from the past, and had thus built a far more sustainable and egalitarian, yet rigid civilization. The Rhunbardi had fallen into a defensive mentality and created the most powerful military force in the world. The Viraaki had retreated into hedonic escapism. The Saoites had embraced the grief as part of their identity, making for tighter communities of shared sorrow and endurance...

In the modern day, it felt difficult to imagine the mindsets of the original survivors. What was left of a person, bereft of everything they had once known? The very luckiest perhaps retaining one or two family members or friends, while everything else - people, possessions, places - were gone forever?

What remained valuable? Each of the eight Parties had attempted to find an answer to that question. Neferuaten's question, that had driven her to join the Order in the first place.

On that night, I was also thinking about it.

Though few people came due to there being a far nicer one on an island in the river about 15 minutes away, the area around the monuments had been made into a campus park. Benches sat in their shadows amidst the tall grass. I sat in one, drinking.

I didn't really know how to drink. It sounds a little stupid to say it like that, but it's true. Even being about 4 (or 5, depending on how you look at it) years past the legal age, I'd never really touched alcohol outside of a few dozen social events. The one time I'd really done it on my own, I'd only managed a single glass before I felt stupid and just poured some milk instead.

I didn't like the loss of control. Of agency...

However, after class that evening, something that regulated normal behavior in my brain felt like it had short circuited. Taking the tram back home suddenly felt pointless; an empty habit, like watering a dead plant. All of my hangups and reservations about anything felt like they were just theatrics I was just performing to myself. Why hold yourself from doing anything? What was so great about trying to live like a healthy human being?

So I'd grabbed some fruit liqueur from a store and gone to the library, ostensibly to look for references for my coursework, but instead had just ended up just drinking it, at first only as an experiment, then as my primary activity. Eventually, they caught me and kicked me out. Normally an event like this would send me down a spiral of self-consciousness, but instead I found that I just did not give a fuck about anything.

And so I'd ended up in the park. My head felt light, and I could barely sit up straight, not that I was trying particularly hard. I'd stopped feeling hungry a while ago, but kept drinking. I'd always thought of it as an inaccessibly adult activity, but contrary to my expectations, the more I drank, the more I felt like a child sucking on a bottle of juice. Later I'd remember the experience far less favorably and endeavor not to repeat it, but at the time it felt great. I took a sip, I laughed a little to myself thinking of some nice memory. I stared at the long grass. In the darkness, I slowly lost all sense of time...

In retrospect, people must have seen me. It wasn't a busy park, but it wasn't completely dead either. I at least had the sense to have not taken my veil off, so it was extremely doubtful anyone recognized me, but some funny stories were probably exchanged over the following days. It might've been a lot worse had it not been for what happened next.

The odds must've been minuscule - I'd call it a miracle if the whole sequence of events wasn't so banal - but at some point, Ran, who by this point lived in the dorms rather than in her own apartment like I did, spotted me, probably recognizing my clothing. I was so deep in my own head that I didn't notice her until she was right next to the bench, but she must've been shocked, as she was sprinting and, when she spoke, sounded obviously thrown off.

"Utsu, is that you?!" she called out in a hushed tone as she came close, probably out of concern for revealing my identity.

"Uh... Ran...?" I looked up at her, seeing only a blurry shape in the darkness. I didn't see her quite as regularly in those days, so I legitimately wasn't sure.

"What the hell are you doing out here at this time of night?" she asked worriedly. Her eyes went to the bottle in my hand, answering her own question. "How much have you drunk?"

I looked at the object I was holding, feeling like I could barely hold the situation between the fingers of my mind without it slipping away like an eel. The bottle, colorful and shaped with a mind for novelty, looked like some alien artifact. "I... I dunno..." I eventually managed. "I think this is the second...?"

She took it from my hands, the remaining liquid sloshing about. Her eyes went wide. "Utsu, this is fucking brandy. Are you trying to kill yourself!?"

I smiled at her and giggled strangely, not really understanding what she was saying. "What...?"

Honestly, I hadn't even really known enough about drinks back then to understand in what level of abundance it was safe to consume anything - I'd absorbed from popular culture that beer was a 'lighter' drink and spirits and wine were 'heavier', but neither of my parents really drunk much, and I'd never planned to do so myself. So it'd never felt worth bothering to absorb the knowledge.

The first bottle definitely had been something much lighter, though. Just based on the fact that I was still alive.

"Look at me," she said, the anger in her voice immediately giving way to anxiety. She took hold of my face with her hands, pointing it at her own.

I tried to focus on it, on her deep, near-black eyes past the fabric of her veil. Somehow, this brought me a little back down to earth.

"Y-You're scared? ...I'm sorry..." I said, my words slurred. "I was feeling weird, so, I... Uh, I walked around a bit... But, I'm okay..."

"Goddammit," she said, glancing around. "We need to get you out of here. The university security is gonna find you at this rate."

"They kicked me out of the library," I said, some neuron in my brain firing correctly.

"Dying gods, you were doing this in the library?" Her face contorted, but she quickly sighed, shaking her head. "Fuck it. Fuck it. Never mind that. Can you stand?"

"I dunno," I said blearily.

"Just take my shoulder, okay?" She leaned her arm around my waist, shifting her bag to the other side of her body. "We'll-- We'll take it easy."

I reached over her shoulder, and at her prompting - still not really able to understand the situation - rose to my feet. The world spun vertically, and I felt like I was going to fall into the sky. Probably the only reason I didn't puke on the spot was that I hadn't eaten anything in about a day. Still, I lost my footing for a second, and Ran had to practically catch me, lurching down to make up for our difference in height.

Eventually, though, I managed to get my bearings, at least as far as being able to put one foot in front of the other. Ran slowly led us away from the monoliths towards what must have been the park's exit, while I stared at the ground.

"They'll be some carriages out at the east exit, even at this hour," she said. "We'll get you home that way, waste of credit or not."

"Don't wanna go home," I said, smiling to myself.

"Well, too fucking bad," she said, flatly but firmly.

"What time is it...?" I asked.

"It's nearly one in the morning."

I didn't know how to process this, so I simply stared into space for a few moments. "Oh," I eventually said. "That's weird."

She stared at me for a moment as we continued to walk, then sighed again, this time more sharply. "Why the hell would you do something like this, Utsu? This isn't like you at all."

I looked back down at my feet.

"What do you mean?" I asked. My body felt tense. My fingers dug into the well-cushioned seat.

"At some point between two and three years following induction, the mind arrives at a... Well, let's call it a 'settled' state," the doctor explained, at that same wooden desk he'd been behind when we first met. He was smiling, but it was with that uncomfortable, practiced sympathy that you always see on the faces of medical professionals bearing bad news. "At this point, the sense of self, and of identity, become more or less equally static to that of the general population. Or if you'd prefer a more scientific explanation, the information originally stored on the induced pneuma has been more or less completely synchronized with the mundane brain - either replicated or, well, discarded."

I was silent, staring dead ahead, my face frozen.

"I understand this might be shocking to hear. Your sessions with our clinicians are private, even from me, but you might've been recently told you were still making progress." His eyes wandered down to the surface of the desk, even if his face didn't otherwise move. Nervousness. "In most research, assimilation has been found to occur much more gracefully when the patient does not have cause for anxiety about the issue. It's sort of like falling asleep-- The more you obsess about it, the less likely it is to happen. I won't blame you if you feel angry or frustrated, but please understand that everything we've done with you here has been to facilitate that as much as possible. Even now, I believe them to have been for the best."

"So," I said, my voice incredibly rigid. "We're... Stopping treatment?"

"Not entirely," he said. "I'm going to prescribe you a targeted neurodepressant, for if you experience any more pseudo-prosognostic attacks, or just any severe disassociation with your body in general. It can interfere with the assimilation process if used in our normal treatment plan, but it should help you to manage those symptoms going forward."

"You mean, it'll make me feel more like this is my body," I said.

He hesitated briefly. "It will help you calm down," he said, trying to smile.

The words felt like spit in my face. "You mean, you won't try to actually change things any more, though," I inferred. "That everything else will stop."

He exhaled softly, his tone gentle to the point it came across as insincere. "Yes, I think that would be the best course of action."

"But, I... I mean, Utsushikome..." I looked down at my palms.

"I want you to understand that this isn't, in any way, your fault," he said. He leaned forward a bit, trying to transition into what was probably supposed to be a more relaxed, fatherly tone. "This isn't something I'd normally say, but for patients in your position, who begin at a stage of total non-identification, it's incredibly rare to even volunteer for this treatment at all. That you even did so showed, in my opinion, tremendous selflessness. And you followed all of the exercises perfectly and diligently, not even shying away from the more medicalized components of the plan. I couldn't have asked for a more diligent patient."

I shuddered. My body felt cold and hot at the same time.

"I also don't want you to feel that this has made you a failure," he went on, continuing the speech he'd probably planned. "Despite beginning with personal traits suggestive of a durable ego, you still managed to modestly raise your dissociation levels across the board, and even bring a handful of memories and traits to almost a state of full incorporation. Even if it doesn't feel that way, you are Utsushikome of Fusai. Without a doubt."

"No," I said, feeling revolted. "That isn't true. How can you-- How can you say that? Treat her like she's just some thoughts?" I shook my head sharply. One of my braids came untied, the hair falling to cover the side of my face. "You're supposed to be a doctor. 'Always be with you' platitudes are for fucking priests."

Though he held his smile stiffly, the man fell silent for a moment. He'd obviously not had many conversations like this before, and it was not going remotely well.

I didn't process this at the time. I scratched at my scalp in neurotic anger, unable to look at him. "You told me... Told her, that this wouldn't happen."

"That's not true," he said patiently. "I said that it was possible things could go wrong."

"That's not how you phrased it at all. You acted like it was nothing to worry about. Do you think I don't remember?" I swallowed the air, feeling sick. "What am I supposed to do now?"

He took a breath. "That's up to you. Now that we've reached this point, if you feel unable or unwilling to continue with the life you have now, there are various ways we can try to help you. Alliance law means that you will always have the same fundamental identity from a legal perspective, but if you want to change your name and have a fresh start elsewhere, I can put you in touch with some special help to that effect. Or, if you feel uncomfortable with your body as it is now, there are several medical options available to pursue depending--"

"I'd never do that to her," I said, holding my arms around my chest. "It isn't right. It's all sick. It's sick."

At this point, the man looked helplessly lost in the face of my reaction, his face flustered. He pushed forward nevertheless. "...or, if you'd prefer, you can continue on with your current identity. Or anything in between. You're the one whose needs matter here. You are who you are now, and nothing you think best for yourself is inappropriate."

"What about her family?" I said, looking back up at him. "Her friends?"

"Beyond the requirements of secrecy pertaining to the broader situation, that's between you and them," he said. "Again, this situation is incredibly unusual, and not at all your fault. You're not obligated to anyone, emotionally or in terms of perceived sincerity."

I was silent, breathing heavily.

"Whatever it might feel like right now, I promise you that, even if they could know about this, your family and friends would still love and accept you. So long as you choose to be, you will always be the person they've always known." He seemed to seize on my less overtly hostile response to this idea, leaning forward a little with a quiet desperation. "In fact, if you want to walk out the door now and keep living the life you have been, to forget ever having come here in the first place, no one would think that immoral. If you're financially secure and don't want to be reminded of this, you don't even have to claim the stipend. There's a procedure in place for your documents to be completely removed from our records--"

"I won't accept this," I said quietly.

He blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"I said I won't accept it!"

Later, I'd find out there was some party which had just ended adjacent to the campus. As a result, all of the private carriages to rent were already gone. After a fairly reserved amount of cursing, Ran steeled herself and half-carried me all the way to the nearest tram station, looking hyper-vigilant for any of the sort of people you need to be when your group consists of two women in the middle of the night, one of whom is drunk out of their senses. Fortunately, we didn't run into anyone. Even the tram, when it showed up, seemed to be empty.

In the bright interior light, I finally reclaimed a little sense of place. Ran planted us down in a seat near the door, and the carriage began its long crawl uphill.

"My back hurts," Ran said tiredly, rubbing it.

"'m sorry," I said blearily.

"Yeah, well, you should be." She sighed, then blinked as she turned to look in my direction. "Gods, you look like shit, too. When was the last time you ate something?"

"Uhh." I tried to recall. "Had some pasta yesterday." I laughed weakly. "I think."

She peered at me. "Something's obviously happened, but there's not gonna be a point in trying to push you when you're like this. I'll have to bridge you tomorrow." She looked downwards, unbuckling her bag and rooting around in it. "I was out on a day trip today, so I've got a sandwich left over. You can eat it."

"I'm not hungry..." I said.

"Yes you fucking are," she said bluntly. She dumped a paper bag in my lap. "You'll eat it, even if I have to chew it up and spit it in your mouth like a mother bird."

I looked down at the object woozily. Despite my complaints, I found it did smell pretty good, and woozily, I pushed my hand inside to fish for the contents. It retrieved a half-baguette, filled with spartan, straightforward ingredients: Lettuce, caramelized onions, cheese, and a large amount of steak. It was cold, but when I bit into it, a gentle warmth spread through my body.

"Have some water, too," she said, passing me a bottle. "So you don't puke."

Before I knew it, I was wolfing both down pretty fast as my body begun to wake up to the concept of food again and realized it was starving. In different circumstances, I probably would've been fussy enough to reject the sandwich. I didn't really like lettuce, and it was almost completely unseasoned, but in the moment I barely even noticed. There was something seriously wrong with the steak, too, but it took me a little while to realize what even that was.

In the modern era, almost all beef you found was replicated from the highest quality cuts, themselves grown via Biomancy to be superior in quality to anything you'd find on a real cow - or at least the approximation of the animal produced in the Remaining World. It had perfect, extensive marbling that gave the meat a gentle, rich flavor, and a very soft texture. This was what most people thought of when they imagined eating the stuff.

What was in Ran's sandwich, however, was different. It was chewy, dense, and had a subtle, bloody flavor. It was replicated natural beef, which you had to go out of your way and sometimes spend luxury debt to even obtain.

I'd asked her once, near the end of our time in tertiary school, why she liked it better. She said that most cuisine was an attempt to turn "all food into differently flavored sticks of butter," and then refused to elaborate.

It was such a stupid thing to have an extreme opinion over. That was something I liked about her. 9 times out of 10 she acted like the most sensible, down-to-earth person in the world, but every so often, like with her romance novels, she'd turn out to be obsessed over something inexplicable and immature. It was cute.

I finished her food, and drank the water so greedily I emptied the whole bottle. She wordlessly packed away the refuse as I held my stomach, staring into space.

The train rattled onward.

"Ran..." I said after a few minutes had passed. "I'm sorry..."

She sighed. "Yeah, well. We all have meltdowns sometimes, I guess."

"No, 'snot what I mean," I said, shaking my head, my face slowly contorting into a frown. "I messed up everything. Messed up your whole life."

"You're not yourself right now, Utsu," she said tiredly.

"I dunno why you cared about her... What you felt about her... But I took her away. And I made you do so much for me. Made you go to the same university, made you look after me whenever I do something stupid." I lurched, like my chest wanted to hiccup, but my throat wasn't willing to commit to the effort. "Even though you hate me. While I haven't done-- Done anything for you."

"I don't hate you, Utsu," she said quietly, the emotion fading from her voice. "And I haven't done anything much for you, either."

"Everything feels so empty," I said. "I can't fix anything. I screwed up just once, and now it'll... It'll always be that way. That'll always be who I am. I broke the whole world." I pulled my veil away, putting my face in my hands.

"You're doing your best," she said. "That's what's important."

I wasn't really crying, but my face heaved awkwardly anyway.

"You're so kind," I said, turning to look at her.

In that moment, I really don't know what possessed me. Even though my memory was strong enough to unfortunately preserve most of what happened that night, I can't remember what was in my thoughts right there and then. What made me feel like it was a reasonable course of action in the context, and what made me want to do it at all.

I leaned in her direction, holding out my hand towards her face, and moving my head forward.

She must've known what was happening at once. Her hand shot into the air, stopping mine in its tracks. Grasping it by the wrist.

For a moment we just sat there like that, frozen in our positions. And in that awful instant, I suddenly, if briefly, felt completely sober. I stared at her, my eyes wide.

Then, slowly, she pushed me away, lowering my hand back into my lap.

"This isn't who you are, Su," she said. There was an indecipherable heaviness to the words.

I nodded mutely.

"You liked a boy back at the academy, remember? Takekochi. Or whatever."

I nodded mutely.

"I'm going to get you home," she said. "And we'll forget about this."

𒊹

Inner Sanctum First Floor | 11:57 AM | Third Day

Despite it seeming like Kamrusepa was on to something, in just the few moments that my attention had lapsed, the conversation had already moved on.

"Anna! What about those damn bracelets?" Zeno suddenly called out. "Even without the Power, shouldn't they have rung out and given us a sense of her time of death?"

"She wasn't wearing one, self-evidently," she replied.

"Well why the ­fuck did we even bother rooting around for them, then?" she protested, looking around the area. "Okay, hands up: Who else couldn't be bothered to put the life-saving device on their wrist? All morons please come forward."

"It doesn't, as a matter of fact, save your life," Kamrusepa said, her dislike of Zeno now at the point it had placed her in full contrarian mode. "It merely identifies other people of your death, which is not exactly helpful for the individual."

"Life-saving as in our lives, you little cunt," Zeno retorted.

"Uh, I actually did forget to put mine on," Ptolema said. "Everyone was still so mad about Theo back then, and I lost track of what I was doing..."

"Big surprise," Ezekiel said.

"Hey, incidentally, we should probably put one on Lilith and Mehit," Seth said, raising a finger.

"Oh, that's a good point, master Ikkuret," Linos said. "Uh, do we have more spares, Anna?"

"Yes," she said. "But I'll wait to see how your tribunal proceeds first, I think."

"Wait, er, hold on," Theodoros said, looking puzzled. "Was Yantho also not wearing his bracelet?"

"No, he was," Kam told him, giving a funny look. "Didn't you hear the dreadful screeching a moment before Zeno and Fang discovered us?"

"It was, ah... Rather loud..." Ophelia spoke quietly.

Theo scratched his head. "I must have been more tired than I thought."

"Alright, I'm not letting this pass out of the conversational frame," Zeno said, putting a hand on her hip. "Let me see all of your pretty wrists. Right now. We're going to check not only if you have them on, but if they're configured properly."

"Can't this wait?" Kam asked. "I rather us arrive at some pretense of a conclusion to this before we get sidetracked obsessing over widgets."

"We didn't press the issue before, and now look what happened," she replied with annoyance.

"Weren't you talking with Saci for like, 2 hours?" Seth asked leadingly. "You of all people should have noticed if she wasn't wearing one and done something if you thought it was a problem, right?"

"Be quiet," she told him flatly.

I wasn't really paying complete attention to the conversation. Instead, I was focused on Lilith, who - though she'd been brought into the room without everyone else - was still curled up on her own in the corner of the security center, seemingly dead to her surroundings.

Seeing her like that, a girl who couldn't be more than 14 years old at most... It felt silly to even consider the possibility that she could be an accomplice.

But if one did consider it, a lot of things made sense. It was possible for the culprit to have ambushed Mehit and Lilith without them learning their identity; them being in disguise, either as the thing we'd seen in the hall or something else altogether, seemed more likely than not just as a matter of common sense. However, even this act would betray a great deal of information about their potential identity, not least of all that they were probably a human and not some abstract monster. It would also put them in danger; Mehit had been armed, and judging by the way she'd handled the pistol, she was far from inexperienced.

You could imagine a convoluted scenario where they might have lured golems to attack them for real, but that felt contrived. The 'mastermind' scenario was predicated on creating a very specific set of circumstances: Mehit screams. We venture out to rescue her, and discover her wounded, but not fatal. We rush her back to heal her. If anything had gone wrong and she'd died outright, or else remained conscious... Things could have gone very differently. The situation would have had to be very controlled.

And when you asked who was in the best position to exercise that control, and who was now in a conveniently unresponsive state, the answer was obvious.

Based on the fact we'd seen no other sign on them in the entire building, LIlith and her mother had probably been held up in the printing room since we arrived. Mehit wouldn't have suspected an attack from her own daughter. The girl could have easily taken the pistol from her by surprise and, considering she had the same medical knowledge as the rest of us, shot her in a location that wouldn't kill her instantly, but would still be life-threatening. She could even have drugged her to ensure she passed out afterwards - with everything about the state of her body, we wouldn't have stumbled on evidence, nor likely have thought to check.

This idea also solved the question of how the culprit outside the room could communicate with whomever had actually killed Sacnicte without risking exposure. Every logic bridge summoning was recorded by the system, but even though we had a rough accounting of everyone's movements in the lead up to the murder, there would have been plenty of chances for Lilith to have discreetly dropped or passed a note.

This whole idea is crazy, the skeptical part of my brain said. You're making way too many leaps to support a little girl literally shooting her own mom.

But she wasn't just a little girl, was she...? That much had become clear earlier.

It doesn't even hold up to scrutiny on a factual level, it continued. Even if Lilith were working with the mastermind, they'd still have to have communicated this plan to her at some point after we bunkered down. All it does is kick the same problem to a different place while inserting another party and making everything more complicated.

Hm, that was true. Unless Balthazar's claims about time literally repeating were to be believed... Something I wasn't really prepared to accept as an actual basis for reasoning, visions or not... There was no way whoever was behind this could have anticipated this specific scenario. And in the unlikely circumstance that they were, why even bother with Lilith, instead of just telling their accomplice within our group directly?

...unless there was no second accomplice, and Lilith had also been the one to kill Sacnicte. But that was impossible, surely. She'd never even gone near the hallway.

I clicked my tongue. Was all of this baseless? Was I reaching, after all?

Maybe the culprit communicated to Lilith in a way that only she could understand but Mehit wouldn't, like tapping a coded message through the ceiling. If it were only the two of them, there wouldn't be scrutiny in the way that would happen for our own group.

That wasn't impossible, but it felt pretty stupid. Was I supposed to believe everyone in on this conspiracy believed a secret code, now?

It's possible the culprit did contact Lilith over logic bridge, but just expected we wouldn't check as closely since she was out of the way. We'd be looking for logic bridge usage centered around here, after all. Someone's probably checked where the messages from the culprit were coming from at the same time, but would it be possible to miss something like that...?

I shook my head. Even if this idea was stupid, I needed to clear it up.

"Well, that's some small comfort," Zeno was saying, as I tuned back into the conversation, apparently satisfied with their wrist inspections. "But yes: My opinion is that we should start taking decisive action against the most suspect."

"What sort of decisive action, pray tell?" Kamrusepa asked.

"The same as the boy," he said, gesturing to Theo. "Bind them, keep them under watch. Be prepared to stop them if they try anything."

"Ehh, not so sure I like the idea of more than a third of us being tied up if the actual culprit does show," Fang said, wobbling their hand from side to side."

"No offense intended, but prodigies or not, you're just children," Zeno said condescendingly. "In a real fight, you'd only get in our way."

"Oh, you're not counting yourself?" they asked, confused.

"Of course I'm not counting myself!"

"Um, sorry to interject," I said, "but someone checked all of the records on the security console, right?"

"I did, yes," Anna spoke up from downstairs.

"Including the records of who's been accessing logic engines all over the sanctuary?"

"Yes," she responded tacitly, then after a moment, added: "You're thinking that someone outside of our group might've been in contact with someone in the room. That's not the case. The transmission you apparently all viewed was the only one sent."

"Wait, wait, hold on a sec," Seth objected, raising an eyebrow. "We can track who uses logic bridges here? Why haven't we just checked where the asshole doing this is sending the messages from?"

"I already considered as much," Anna said. "The system reports both transmissions as having originated from the administrative core. That would either mean they were scripted in advance, or that someone literally traveled there to send them."

That didn't feel unfeasible. The core was only a few minutes walk away from where we stood now.

"And again, I also utilized both personnel tracking systems, which reported the same data as was present upon our arrival-- Save for the two we lost. Of course, it could simply be that the culprit moved swiftly."

I nodded. The system had reported Hamilcar as being within the underground and Samium as seemingly the only person in the building proper left unaccounted for, but it felt incredibly unlikely that they were both in on it. So assuming there really was an outsider accomplice and it wasn't all some elaborate illusion, one of them had to be the guilty party, going up and down the stairs at the right moments.

Well, unless there was something I was missing.

"I'd like to check the logic bridge records myself, please," I said.

"Why?" she asked bluntly, while some of the others eyed me. I noticed, curiously, that Linos glanced towards Lilith, but the detail left my mind before I could think on it.

"I want to see if there were any other attempts at communication in the past hour outside of this room, if the interface wouldn't make that incredibly obvious," I explained. "I have a theory."

She was silent for a moment, presumably thinking.

"There is no reason to stop you," she eventually said. "Deleting the records is impossible."

"What's your theory, Su?" Kam asked curiously.

"...I don't want to say it, in case it ends up being ridiculous," I said, stepping towards the logic bridge Seth and I had touched the previous day, back when Sacnicte was extorting him. "This'll just take a minute."