Seraphine's face was answer enough.
She was looking at the building the way you looked at something you had walked past a hundred times without ever really seeing, and the realization of what you had been missing was physically uncomfortable.
Seraphine: "Since before I joined them. Longer than I have been alive."
Lyra: "And you have been inside it."
Seraphine: "Dozens of times. Records storage. Meeting rooms on the upper floors." She stopped. "I never felt anything."
Lyra: "Because the seal was closed. It would have been completely quiet. You could have walked right over it every day for thirty years."
Aelara looked at the building. Plain stone. A single door. Nothing about the outside of it that gave anything away. She thought about how many things in this city had an entire hidden floor underneath them and nobody walking past ever knew.
They went in.
