The RMO examination results were posted on a board outside the southern district administrative office at seven in the morning, in the same matter-of-fact way the city posted everything—without ceremony, without announcement, simply there when you looked.
Aim looked.
His name was on the Whitecoat list.
He stared at it for a moment with the expression of a man confirming something he already knew rather than discovering something new. Then he found Isolde at the coffee cart few step away from office entrance and told her.
She looked at him over the rim of her cup.
"Whitecoat," she said.
"Whitecoat," he confirmed.
"Your theory score."
"Eighty-two."
"Your magic score."
A pause. "Sixty-four."
Isolde set her cup down with the careful precision of someone choosing not to say several things at once. "The Whitecoat threshold is seventy-five in both categories," she said. "You didn't pass the magic component."
"I'm aware."
"So your friend—"
"Did me a favor, yes."
Isolde looked at him for a long moment with the expression she reserved for situations that were ethically complicated and practically necessary. "You should have been Greycoat," she said finally. "At best."
"Probably," Aim agreed. He picked up his coffee. "But Greycoats don't get access to the internal case archive."
She didn't argue with that. There was nothing to argue with—they both knew why he was here, and the rank on his collar was a tool, not a prize. She exhaled, the sound of someone mentally filing a complaint with no motive to actually do it, and gestured toward the main entrance of the RMO southern district office.
"Welcome to another corporate hell," she said.
---
The entrance hall had high ceilings with brass fixtures and the kind of stone flooring that announced every footstep. A portrait of 'Goddess' or 'Her Majesty Flaure' occupied the wall directly opposite the main doors — official, serene, painted in the style that made her look less like a person and more like a concept. The motto of the RMO was carved into the lintel above it in formal script:
By Law. By Order. For Orenthian.
Below a portrait was an entrance to little workspace room of document work and investigation unit. The new-comer sat at a desk and start processing paperwork with the practiced efficient unlike a man who had stopped reading what he was stamping some years ago.
The floors were different to his previous workplace—practical, cluttered with the specific organized chaos of a working institution. Filing cabinets lined the corridors. Duty rosters covered boards alongside incident maps and equipment requisitions. The smell was oil, ink and old paper and something faintly chemical from the purification training rooms on the third floor. Officers moved through it in the brisk distracted manner of people who always had somewhere else to be.
Aim noted the layout with the quiet systematic attention he brought to everything—which doors required key access, which corridors connected to which, where the archive room sat relative to the duty supervisor's office. Isolde had been working here long enough that she moved through it without thinking. He was going to need to get to that point quickly.
His 'connection', Renfield, found them near the second floor staircase.
Renfield was twenty-five, royal cadet alumni, currently holding a high-ranked administrative position in the RMO's coordination office that sounded unremarkable and wasn't. He shook Aim's hand with the warmth of someone genuinely glad to see an old friend and immediately worried about what that friend was going to ask for.
"Congratulations," he said, glancing at Aim's Whitecoat insignia. "You'll do well here."
"Thank you for the recommendation," Aim said.
"Don't mention it." A pause. "Genuinely. Don't mention it to anyone."
They fell into step together along the second floor corridor, Isolde slightly behind. Through the window at the end of the hall, the southern district spread out below—stall, gas lamp posts, the distant line of the outer wall.
"I need access to the omen incident archive," Aim said, keeping his voice level and his eyes on the corridor ahead. "Previous Omen cases. Purification records. The ones that didn't make the newspapers."
Renfield's pace slowed by approximately half a step. Then resumed.
"No," he said.
"Ren—"
"I got you through the exam," Renfield said, quietly. "That's the favor. That's all of it." He glanced sideways. "You know what happens to officers who start asking about cases that were filed and closed? Not officially. Not written down anywhere. But Aim—" He stopped walking. Aim stopped with him. Renfield looked at him with the expression of a man saying something he had thought about more than once. "Asking gets officers vanished faster than any Omen or terrorist ever has. I have seen it. Twice. In three years." A pause. "Both of them were smarter than either of us."
The corridor was empty. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed.
"I'm not asking you to pull the files," Aim said. "I'm asking if they exist."
Renfield looked at him for a long moment.
"Go do your job, Aim," he said quietly. "The job they gave you. Not the one you came here to do."
He walked away. His footsteps were very careful on the stone floor, the footsteps of a man who had learned how much noise was safe to make.
Aim watched him go.
Isolde appeared at his shoulder. "Well," she said.
"Yes," Aim said.
---
They worked the rest of the day. Patrol rotation, documentation review, regulation briefing, introduction to the duty roster. It was, by any measure, an ordinary first day. The kind of normal first day at workplace.
He did his job. He talk with every person he could for connection. And he did both well.
By evening the building had thinned out—day shift ending, night shift not yet fully present, the corridors in the particular quiet between state. The archive room was on the second floor, two doors away from Renfield's office.
Isolde looked at it now. Then at him.
"You gonna lock pick it." she said.
"Yes," he replied.
She kept watch at the corridor. Aim lockpicked it in twelve seconds.
"Learn this from year two of that cadet school. My friend teached me." He winked at Isolde
Inside, the room was smaller than expected, lined floor to ceiling with labeled filing cabinets, the air heavy with the particular dryness of old paper kept in a sealed space.
He didn't have time to read. He had time to take.
He moved quickly along the cabinet labels — incident reports organized by district and date, omen case logs, equipment requisitions, personnel transfers. He selected two folders that were thin enough to be unremarkable—one annual omen incident reports of eighteen-months ago, one personnel who vanish's log and slipped them inside his coat. Nothing that would be immediately missed.
He was back in the corridor in fifty seconds.
Isolde fell into step beside him without a word. They signed out at the duty desk, exchanged the usual end-of-shift pleasantries with the officer on duty, and walked out into the evening air of the southern district like two people who had done nothing except their jobs.
The streets were quieter at this hour. The gas lamps had come on, throwing their steady orange light across the cobblestones. They walked without speaking—the silence of two people with the same thought, carrying it carefully.
---
Aim's apartment building was on the corner of the street and the second southern lane, three floors up, second door on the left. He had lived there ever since being in royal-cadet school. Isolde knew the route without thinking.
She noticed something first.
Third floor, Aim's apartment—the window that faced the street was open. Not wide. Just slightly, the way a window looks when it has been opened from inside and not fully closed again on the way out.
She stopped walking.
Aim had already stopped. He was looking at the same window with the same expression—not panic, just the very careful stillness.
"You closed it this morning?" Isolde said.
"I always close it," Aim said.
They went up.
The door was locked—properly, fully, no sign of forced entry. Aim opened it with his key. The apartment was exactly as he had left it: books in their usual disorder, maps on the wall, the small kitchen with its single unwashed cup from this morning still in the basin.
Except for the table.
On the dining table, in the center of the cleared space that Aim usually kept empty for paperwork, sat a folder.
Thick. Brown paper cover. No label. No name. Nothing written on the outside at all.
Neither of them moved for a moment.
The window shifted slightly in the night air—open just enough to let in the soft gush of wind sound from the street below.
Aim crossed the room and opened it.
The pages inside were not case files. Not incident reports. Not the kind of document the RMO produced in the normal course of its operations. They were orders—formal, stamped, written in the administrative language of an institution that had been writing orders for a very long time and had developed a style for it. At the top of each page, above the RMO letterhead, was a secondary stamp in darker ink.
Five words.
The State & The Crown.
Aim turned to the second page. The third. Each one the same—RMO operational directives, purification deployment orders, personnel assignments, resource allocations. All of them bearing the same secondary stamp at the top. All of them originating from the same place.
Not from within the RMO.
"From the Palace." Aim muttered.
He set the folder down on the table and looked at it for a moment without speaking.
Isolde stood beside him, reading over his shoulder. Her expression had gone to the very flat, very precise look she wore when a case had just revealed something that made everything she thought she knew about it wrong.
"Every order," she said quietly.
"Every one," Aim said.
Aim lightly scratch his nail on the document and folder once again
"Not type of paper used in the palace, but the stamp is exactly identical to one used in. A replica" Aim confirmed.
"Could it be Renfield?"
"He wouldn't, Sol."
Outside, Aim notice gas lamp flickered once on the street below and what look like a masked man watching them in the corner of his eye.
"Huh.." Aim muttered then scratch his eye and look again
"What, Aim?"
"Nothing. I'm just tired." It is only gas lamp for now.
It felt off.
Aim brushed it off and then exchange a nod
"What if there are another faction that want us to find answer. For some reason"
"Worst case is someone actually know our intention and will use these to make us vanish, Aim"
The question still hung in the air of this humble adobe.