Thirty seconds.
She did not panic. She had never found panic useful, not in twenty years of rooms exactly like this one. But she felt the shape of what was coming pressing in from all sides and she worked fast, moving through the documents in front of her the way you moved through a space you had memorized in the dark, finding the pieces by feel, sorting what still held from what had just become uncertain.
Ferath.
She turned the name over in her head while her hands kept moving. Lower archives, Ninth House, the years of the binding review. He would have handled the original intake paperwork. The initial filing before the records moved into the main system. Which meant if someone had touched those documents before they were officially logged, before there was any trail of who had seen what, that someone would have gone through him. Or around him. Or used him without his knowing.
