Page 12 of Orc’s Bones

I turned.

Shoulders set, satchel strap gripped. Her eyes — alert, too alert for someone who’d been sheltering in a research permit — moved from my face to the case I’d just read and back.

“How much do you understand about bone resonance?”

She looked away for a moment — someone deciding whether to answer honestly or strategically. She went honest. “More than I’m supposed to at this stage. Less than I need to do what I came here to do.”

“What did you come here to do?”

“Study.” She looked away briefly. “Learn from people who know how it works. Not from papers.”

I looked at her for a moment. Potential that didn’t survive graduate programs if it got too careful too early.

“Go home.” I turned back to the sealed case. “Come back tomorrow morning when the reading room opens. Don’t come into the lower stacks alone again at this hour.”

Her mouth pressed flat. Not compliance — she was absorbing the instruction and deciding whether it was an order or a suggestion. “Is it dangerous? The stacks?”

“Not right now.” I turned back to the sealed case. “That may change.”

I heard her satchel shift as she moved. Her footsteps on the stone floor, measured and deliberate. At the end of the row she stopped — the silence of it reached me before she spoke.

“The cases at the end of the row.” Her voice was quiet, careful. “The interference pattern around the last three seals. It’s different from the rest of the stacks.”

I turned.

She was already gone.

I went back to the last three cases.

She was right.

The interference pattern around them was different — not in signature, but in layering. The cases in the middle of the restricted row had two clean, distinct layers: the primary archive signature and the secondary replication residue. These three had three layers. Primary archive. Secondary replication residue. And a third layer on top of both, thin as a membrane, that I hadn’t registered on my first pass because I’d been tracking the secondary layer and the third was close enough in frequency to the archive’s own ambient signal that it read as background.

It wasn’t background.

I pressed both palms to the case seal and read carefully.

The third layer was active.

Not dormant residue. Not a trace of past handling. A live sigil structure — thin enough to be nearly undetectable, but running, drawing on the bone trace inside the case as a source. It had been placed sometime in the last twenty-four hours. It was active.

It’s reading me.

The recognition hit before the thought finished forming. The third layer wasn’t only active — it was responsive. The sigil structure had shifted the moment my palms made contact with the seal, a slight recalibration that was not the archive responding to my structural signature. That was the sigil responding. Reading me back. Cataloguing the same thing I was cataloguing it.

I took my hands away.

The sigil held the shift for three seconds after contact broke — a settling, a return. Like a mind taking the time to note what it had found.

My heartbeat was steady. I was making a conscious choice to keep it steady.

Two things this meant. The first: whoever had placed this sigil had been in the Archive within the last day, which meant they were active, close, working on a timeline faster than I’d estimated from the outer wall interference. The second: they now had my structural signature. The sigil had read me the way I’d read it, and that information had gone somewhere.

I couldn’t know where. I couldn’t follow it. The sigil had sent its data through the bone network rather than through any physical trail I could track.

What I could do was understand what it meant.

They knew I was here. Not as a general fact — they’d known I was called back when the summons went out. This was sharper. They knew I was in the Archive, reading the restricted stacks, tracing the build order. They knew I’d found the residue.