Kaito had found the one good restaurant in a declining city the way Kaito always found things. A combination of asking the right questions of the right people and following his nose for approximately forty meters once the answers ran out.

It was three streets from the lodgings. Small, run by a family that had been cooking the same menu for thirty years. They had arrived at a specific perfection within that menu that made the limitation feel like a feature.

They took a table in the corner.

Denro looked at the menu with the expression he used when he was trying to understand a system from first principles.

"What’s the dark one," he said.

"Braised mountain pork," Mara said. "The preparation is specific to the Seorak valley. The altitude affects the fat distribution."

Denro looked at her.

"I talked to the woman at the market stall when we passed it," Mara said.

"You talked to her for like thirty seconds."

"That was sufficient."

Denro looked at the menu again. "I’ll have the dark one," he said.

"Good choice," Kaito said. He had already ordered without looking at the menu, the specific ease of someone who knew what he wanted in any restaurant immediately. "The noodles are also exceptional. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise."

"Who would tell me otherwise," Denro said.

"Nobody here," Kaito said. "I’m telling you preemptively."

The food came and it was good in the specific way of food that has been made the same way for a long time by people who know exactly what they’re doing. Denro ate the dark one and looked satisfied. Mara ate without looking up from the geography notes she’d pulled from the cartography book’s appendix. Kaito ate with the focused appreciation of someone experiencing something they’d been looking forward to.

Vane ate and looked at the restaurant.

The walls had old prints on them, eastern style. The pre-consolidation ink technique used negative space differently from the current fashion. One of them was a mountain that might have been the compound’s mountain or might have been a different mountain.

He looked at it and then looked at Ashe.

She was arguing with Denro about something. Not seriously — the specific back-and-forth of someone who had been in proximity with a thirteen-year-old long enough to have found his specific frequency of wrong opinions. Denro was defending whatever position he’d taken with the committed energy of someone who knew he was losing and wasn’t going to admit it.

"The Keran valley settlement patterns don’t support that," Mara said without looking up. "The cartographic evidence is clear."

Denro looked at her. "I wasn’t asking you."

"I know," she said. "I’m telling you anyway."

Ashe looked at Mara with the expression she used when something had landed exactly right. Then she looked at Vane. Something passed between them that was not a look exactly and was not an agreement exactly. The specific shared-attention quality that had been developing since the compound, that had found a particular texture in Korreth and a different texture still in the three days of travel to Seorak.

He looked at his food.

She looked at her food.

Kaito refilled his tea and looked at the mountain print on the wall.

After dinner the city was doing what declining cities did in the evening. A quieter version of its daytime self, the streets less populated but not empty, the mana-lamps coming on at lower frequency than Korreth’s.

Vane and Ashe walked back to the lodgings from the restaurant without the others. Kaito had stopped to talk to the restaurant’s owner about a specific regional sauce that he had opinions about, and Denro had followed because Denro had decided Kaito was interesting and followed interesting things.

Mara had gone back directly. She had more geography notes. She had also read the situation and decided her presence was not required.

The street was quiet. The old buildings leaning toward each other at the upper floors. The smell of Seorak was different from Korreth — less mountain, more earth, the smell of a valley city rather than a mountain base city.

"It’s a good city," Ashe said.

"You’ve been here before."

"Once. I was seventeen. It was for the eastern council’s secondary session, the minor houses." She looked at the buildings. "I hated it then. Too old, too quiet, too much of everything that Korreth wasn’t."

She looked at the archive corner, visible from the street’s end.

"I don’t hate it now."

"What changed."

She thought about this in the way she thought about things that deserved honest answers.

"I’m different," she said. "The city’s the same."

He looked at the archive corner.

She looked at it too.

"Tomorrow morning," she said. "I’ll go at the ninth hour. Should take until noon at most."

"I’ll come."

"You’ll wait outside," she said. "It’s better if I go in alone. Easier to read as the heir making a professional call rather than the heir with a westerner in tow."

He looked at her.

"It’s not about you," she said. "It’s about what they’ll spend time thinking about instead of the negotiation." She met his eyes. "I’ll get us access. Then you can come in and see it properly."

He nodded.

She looked at the street ahead.

"What do you think is in it," she said.

"Something that connects several things I’ve been carrying since the Ashfield breach last year," he said.

She was quiet for a moment. "The frequency."

"Yes."

"And Nyx knows about it."

"Apparently."

She looked at the archive. Then at him.

"I’ve been in the eastern archive records twice in my life," she said. "Once at the compound’s library, once at the eastern council’s formal archive." She started walking again. "They both had the same quality. Old knowledge that the current system didn’t find useful and stopped maintaining."

She glanced at him.

"The things the current system stops maintaining are usually the things that make the current system uncomfortable."

He looked at her. She was looking at the street ahead with the expression she used when she’d said what she meant to say and was finished saying it.

They walked the rest of the way back in the quiet that had been developing its own specific quality since the Keran valley. The comfortable kind. The kind that didn’t need filling.

The lodgings door. The smell of cedar oil. The stairs. The small clean room and the window looking out at the street and the archive corner visible at the far end.

He stood at the window for a moment.

"Vane," Ashe said.

He turned.

She was standing in the doorway of her room, which was next to his, the door open, her blade leaning against the frame. She looked at him with the red eyes direct and no distance in them at all.

"Get some sleep," she said. "Tomorrow’s going to be a long day."

She went in.

Her door stayed open.

He stood in the hall for a moment.

He went to his room.

He didn’t sleep for a while.