Page 43 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

"Then we go to the archives," I say. "Tonight."

The western archivesits beneath a shuttered coin exchange three blocks from the river, hidden under a business that has not sold anything to the living in thirty years.

Rain slicks the pavement when we arrive. Gid takes the street first, then the doorway, then the roofline across from us. Elias stays beside me with the archive reference open on his phone, the screen dimmed until the light barely touches his face.

"No guards?" Gid asks.

"Old places like this don't use guards," Elias says. "They use reputation."

"Reputation doesn't stop thieves."

"No. It only stops the polite ones."

I place my hand against the brass plate. The metal warms under my palm, and something inside the building answers with a deep mechanical click. The door opens inward.

Dust waits for us. Not office dust. Not the harmless gray skin of abandoned rooms. This is bitter with paper and sealed wood, the kind of air that has been left alone too long. The corridor slopes down, narrow and tiled, each step taking us farther from the city above.

Elias moves ahead with a small light. "No network signal."

"Good," I say.

The vault door at the bottom carries no keypad, no biometric reader, nothing modern enough to be convenient. Only a wheel set into black iron and three seals stamped into the frame. Ashford. Vandosse. Crowe.

Gid looks at the third seal. "You knew this existed?"

"I knew the archive existed," I say. "I didn't know it still held council dockets."

I turn the wheel. Iron complains softly, then gives. The archive is smaller than I expect and more carefully kept. Shelves rise from floor to ceiling, each row stacked with sealed packets, books, bone-colored boxes tied with cord. Thousands of decisions no one wanted placed inside machines. Thousands of truths judged too dangerous for memory and too useful for destruction.

"There," Elias says.

The shelf is labeled by hand. The ink has browned with age.Mortal Exposure Events. Human Contacts. Containment Actions.

Mickey Carter should be a packet among the others. His place is empty. The dust makes that clear. A rectangle of clean wood cuts through the shelf where something rested for years and was lifted recently enough that the air has not yet dirtied the absence.

Gid crouches, touches two fingers to the shelf, then smells them. "Someone beat us here."

"How long?"

"Hours. Maybe less."

The bond tugs again, sharp so I have to hold my hand around the shelf. Jasmine is out there, hunted by men who may know more about her father than she does. Elias opens the ledger beneath the shelf. His finger moves down the entries until it stops.

"Mickey Carter. Packet removed under emergency authority."

"By whom?"

"The name has been scratched out."

"Can you recover it?"

"No." He bends closer. "But the witness mark survived."

He turns the ledger toward me.

A circle. A thorned bird. A partial Dain stamp pressed so hard into the paper it bruised the page underneath. This is proof that Cyrus is trying to hide something. He's frightened of something and I realize I have a way to end this war if I can find the truth.

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