(Rhea POV)

The scout found it at dawn.

A metal capsule, no larger than a thumb, buried under a flat stone at the eastern perimeter. The stone was unremarkable — one of a thousand scattered along the tree line. But this one had a shallow notch carved into its underside. A mark that meant nothing unless you knew what it meant.

The scout brought it to Torren. Torren brought it to me. I brought it to Kieran.

He took the capsule and turned it in his fingers. Something shifted behind his eyes — recognition, and beneath that, something sharper. He unscrewed the cap. Inside, a piece of paper folded tight enough to fit a coin purse. He unfolded it, read the first line, and stopped.

"It's from Nolan."

* * *

We went to the command room. Door closed. Torren standing guard outside — not because I told him to, but because Torren understood that some conversations required a perimeter.

Kieran spread the paper on the table. The handwriting was small and even, compressed into a code that looked like shorthand grocery lists. Kieran read it the way you read something dangerous — one word at a time, translating as he went.

"He set this up before I left," Kieran said, without looking up. "The dead drop system. Six locations along the eastern perimeter, each marked with a different notch pattern. We rotate through them on a schedule only he and I know. He drops. Our patrols find. No courier. No direct contact."

"How long has he been sending?"

"This is the third drop since the siege. The first two were status reports — Council force movements, nothing urgent." He tapped the paper. "This is different."

He translated as he went, speaking the decoded content in the flat, measured voice of a man reading intelligence that he wished said something else.

"Council has dispatched search teams to three locations connected to Vera's family line. An estate in the northern provinces. A vault beneath a church that the Ashford family patronized for two centuries. And a hunting lodge in the eastern mountains that was registered to Vera's mother."

"What are they looking for?"

"He calls it the Ashford Archives. A collection of documents that the Ashford family maintained across fifteen generations. Council believes the archives contain the most complete surviving record of Firstborn history — bloodline tracking, capability assessments, the original texts that Council destroyed everywhere else."

I thought about Vera. Freed by Aldric in exchange for information about Lily. Walking alone. With knowledge that Council wanted badly enough to send three separate search teams.

"If Aldric is looking for the archives," I said, "it means he doesn't have them."

Kieran looked up. "Which means—"

"Vera has them. Or knows where they are. And whatever's in them, Aldric considers it important enough to divert resources from the embargo to find."

Kieran nodded. Slowly. The expression of a man fitting a piece into a puzzle that was getting larger with every conversation. "Nolan says the search teams are Aldric's personal units. Not regular Council military. The kind he uses when he doesn't want the full Inner Council to know what he's doing."

That detail mattered. Aldric wasn't operating with Council's full endorsement. He was running a parallel operation — using his own people, his own authority, to find something that he didn't want his colleagues to see first.

I watched Kieran's hands on the paper. They were steady. His voice was steady. But I knew him well enough now to see the thing he wasn't saying — the cost of reading a message from a man who was risking his life because Kieran had asked him to stay inside.

"Is he safe?" I asked.

"He's inside Council's military command. Attending Aldric's briefings. Encoding intelligence in a shorthand we made up when we were twenty." Kieran folded the decoded section carefully. "Safe isn't the right word. He's functional. He hasn't been caught. That's not the same thing."

"You asked him to do this."

"I asked him to stay. He chose what that meant." A pause. "Every drop he leaves is another chance to get caught. And what Council does to wolves who betray from the inside is worse than what they do to enemies outside."

I didn't ask what that meant. The answer was in the way Kieran's voice flattened when he said it — the voice of a man who'd seen those consequences firsthand and was trying not to imagine them applied to the closest thing he had to a brother.