Drev makes breakfast like he makes everything else. Quiet, unhurried precision of someone who has decided that whatever he's doing is worth doing correctly or not at all.
I smell it before I'm fully awake. Eggs, something herbed, bread that has been toasted on an actual flame rather than left to go cold and hard the way it does in every other safehouse I've ever used. I'm still on the windowsill, blanket across my shoulders, the candle burned down to nothing beside me. Varenthis outside is grey and pale and starting, reluctantly, to become morning.
I don't remember deciding not to count anything. I just didn't.
Downstairs, Drev sets a plate in front of me without being asked and goes back to the stove. He's a small man, compact, careful, with the kind of face that is so deliberately unremarkable you start to suspect it's intentional. In a previous life he was the most sought-after poisoner in three districts. Then something happened that he has never fully explained, and now he cooks for us, and the food is extraordinary, and occasionally he identifies compounds in ledger entries that implicate centuries-old Church conspiracies.
His sin is Guilt. Dark and elaborate, mapping almost his entire torso in lines I've never let myself look at too closely. Some things are not my business even when I can see them.
"She's still here," he says. Not a question.
"She stayed."
He makes a sound that isn't quite agreement and isn't quite anything else. Puts a second plate on the table without comment. Then he sits down across from me and folds his hands and looks at me with the particular expression he reserves for things he has been thinking about all night.
"The compounds," he says.
"You found something else."
"I found something else." He unfolds his hands and places them flat on the table. It was a Drev habit, the kind of physical settling that means he's about to say something he's arranged carefully. "The formula Aldous is sourcing. I told you what it does. It suppresses directed devotion, administered in small doses over years. That's true. What I didn't tell Mira last night, because I wanted to be certain first, is that I've seen a version of it before."
I put down my fork.
"Not this formula specifically," he says. "A derivative. Cruder, less stable. Used by a physician I worked for, briefly, about twelve years ago. Before I... changed professions." The pause where the explanation would go, as usual, empty. "He was using it in a private capacity. On a specific patient. A child."
The kitchen is very quiet.
"He called it a purification treatment," Drev continues. "He said the child had an irregular spiritual constitution that required correction. I didn't know what that meant then. I assumed it was medical language for something psychological." He looks at his hands. "The child was approximately three years old. Female. The physician was careful to keep her name out of all documentation. He referred to her only by a case number."
Something cold moves through me that has nothing to do with the morning draft.
"You kept the case number," I say.
"I keep everything," Drev says. He reaches into his coat and produces a small folded paper. Sets it on the table between us. "I looked it up last night against the Argent Wing's commission records. The ones Mira pulled three weeks ago when we were first building the investigation file."
I look at the paper. I don't touch it yet.
"The child," I say. "The physician was trying to administer the sacrament compound to a child who didn't have it."
"Yes."
"Because someone had kept it from her."
"Yes."
"And when you cross-referenced the case number–"
"The commission date matches," Drev says quietly. "The child's age matches. The district matches." He looks at me steadily. "I can't prove it conclusively without a name. But the probability that this is a coincidence is very small, Cael."
I look at the folded paper on the table.
Behind me the stairs creak. Sera appears in the kitchen doorway looking like someone who also didn't sleep, which she probably didn't, which makes two of us and I'm starting to suspect Mira is the only person in this building with any sense. She takes in the table – the two plates, the paper between them, Drev's expression – and goes still in the particular way that means she's already calculating.
"What is it?" she asks.
Drev looks at me. This is his information, his choice. But also it concerns her in a way that is deeply personal and I think he knows that and is leaving the decision to me, which is either courtesy or cowardice and with Drev I've never been entirely sure of the difference.
I look at Sera.
She meets my eyes across the kitchen and waits, and doesn't push, and that restraint alone tells me something about who she is that I haven't fully put into words yet.
"Sit down," I say. "There's something you need to hear."
She sits. Drev refolds his hands. I pick up the paper.
"Twelve years ago," I say, "someone tried to give you the sacrament. Privately. Without your guardian's knowledge, judging by the secrecy of the documentation." I hold her gaze. "They failed, or they were stopped. Drev doesn't know which. But what it means is that whoever kept the sacrament from you wasn't the only person who knew you existed without it."
Sera is very still. Her eyes drop to the paper in my hand. Back to my face.
"Someone else knew," she says. "And wanted to correct it."
"Yes."
"Twelve years ago I would have been–" she calculates. "Fourteen."
"Oh."
She's quiet for a long moment. The stillness that I'm learning isn't absence but the opposite – everything happening at once, underneath, while the surface holds.
"The physician," she starts. "Is he still practicing?"
Drev shakes his head. "He died eight years ago. Natural causes, as far as I could determine."
"Who hired him?"
"Unknown. The case file is clean. Deliberately clean. Professionally so." He pauses. "The kind of clean that costs money and requires connections."
Sera looks at the paper. At the table. At something beyond both of them.
"The Architect," she says. Quietly. Certainly.
"That's my read," I say. "Someone discovered you hadn't received the sacrament and tried to quietly correct it. When that failed – that is, when you stayed unbranked – they let it lie. Either they lost track of you, or they decided you weren't worth the exposure, or–"
"Or they decided to wait," Sera finished the thought. "And watch."
The kitchen is very quiet again.
Drev gets up, refills the kettle, puts it back on the flame. The small sounds of someone giving two people a moment without making a production of it. Another Drev habit I've never thanked him for.
"We need Mira's access list," I say finally. "Today. Whatever she found last night, we need to see it." I look at Sera. "And then we need to talk about what comes next. Because whoever the Architect is, he's known about you for at least twelve years. Which means the moment our names surface in connection with this investigation–"
"He already knows," Sera says. "Or he will."
"Yes."
She picks up her fork. Takes a deliberate bite of Drev's eggs. Sets the fork down.
"Then we move first," she says. "Before he finishes deciding what to do about us."
Drev, at the stove, makes that sound again. This time it is almost certainly agreement.