"The suspension order was filed against the palace collar registry," he said. "If their collars are the same registration it applies. If they were reissued—" He paused. "I don’t know if they were reissued."

She looked at Ken.

Ken was at the window but he had been listening to the whole conversation.

"I’ll find out today," he said.

"Yes," she said.

She looked at the list again.

The twenty-two unaccounted for.

"These twenty-two," she said. "What does ’unaccounted for’ mean in practice. Are they in the city. Are they in the provinces. Are they—"

"I don’t know yet," Mahir said. "I have a line on three of them. They’re in the merchant district — I have approximate locations, not confirmed addresses. The others took longer to lose, which means they went further."

"The ones in the merchant district," she said. "How are they living."

He looked at the table briefly.

"Doing what they can," he said. "Which is limited. The collar is visible. Employers know what it means." He paused. "Most people who know what it means either don’t want the association or feel—" He chose the word. "Entitled to use it." 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

She looked at him.

Entitled to use it.

She thought about the collar architecture. About what the collar signified to someone who didn’t know about the extraction pathway, who only knew the cultural meaning — a beast knight, trained from childhood, bonded to service, the collar the symbol of that bond. A person who had spent their entire life being directed. To someone without ethics and with opportunity, a person shaped by service and suddenly without a sanctioned structure for it was—

She stopped that thought.

"The three in the merchant district," she said. "I want to meet them."

Mahir looked at her.

Not surprise. Something more like — he had expected this and had been deciding whether to say it before she did.

"They don’t know who you are," he said.

"Good," she said.

"They may not want—" He paused. "They’ve been managing without institutional connection. Someone appearing and offering it—"

"I’m not going to appear and offer anything yet," she said. "I want to understand what their situation actually is before I decide what needs to be done about it. Which requires meeting them." She paused. "Not as the regent. Not as anything. Just as someone Mahir knows."

He looked at her.

"You want to see them first," he said. "Before you build the solution."

"The monitoring layer principle," she said. "I can’t build the correct solution for a situation I haven’t actually looked at."

He was quiet for a moment.

"The residential district," he said.

"Yes," she said.

He understood. She had built a solution for the tax problem months ago and had not connected it to the street because she hadn’t walked through the street. She was not going to make the same error twice with the same category of problem.

"Tomorrow morning," he said. "Early. I’ll arrange it."

"Yes," she said.

She looked at the document.

At the forty-three names.

At the three dead.

"Mahir," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"The deaths," she said. "The two within four months of the incursion. ’Incursion-related injuries’ is a description that covers a range of things."

"Yes," he said.

"Find out what it actually covers," she said.

He nodded.

She folded the document. Put it in her inner pocket with the working list and the honest lines.

The morning moved on.

’’’

At the second bell she went to the administrative wing.

Not for a meeting. She had no scheduled meeting — she was going to find the administrative director’s contact in the treasury office and talk about a queue position for the bank instrument integration.

The system went with her. Obviously.

It was in a particular mood — present but quiet, the quality it had when it was paying attention to more than one thing at once.

She walked through the administrative wing’s main corridor, heading toward the treasury annex, and turned a corner and nearly walked into a beast knight carrying a mop.

Not literally — she stopped in time, they both stopped, the standard moment of pedestrian navigation in a narrow corridor.

She looked at him.

He looked at her with the trained forward-directed gaze of someone in labor assignment — the specific direction of eyes that had been told to look at their work rather than at the people who passed them.

The collar pulsed blue at his throat.

He was young. She thought mid-twenties, maybe younger, the way that people who had been trained since childhood sometimes looked younger than they were because certain kinds of aging required experiences that training prevented.

He stepped aside.

She stepped past.

Walked three steps.

Stopped.

Turned.

"How long have you been in the palace," she said.

He looked up.

The surprise was controlled — just a fraction, just a single recalibration of his expression before the training settled it back into neutral. He had not expected to be addressed.

"Four years, honored guest," he said. The address was formal, generic, the address used for visitors whose rank was undetermined.

"And before the new administration," she said. "What were you assigned to."

A pause.

"Second corridor rotation," he said. "East wing security." Another pause. "Under the previous regent’s household."

She looked at him.

He looked back at her with the flat professional gaze that was trained — but underneath the flat, she was learning to read the underneath, the language that beast knights had for things they couldn’t say with their faces. And what was underneath this one was the specific quality of someone who was wondering why they were being asked and whether the answer was going to cost them something.

"You’re doing good work," she said.

It was not what she had planned to say. It was not strategic or operational or part of any plan she had constructed. It was just what she said.

He looked at her.

Something happened in his eyes — very small, the micro-reaction she had been learning since the collar hall, the thing that happened in the space the training couldn’t fully reach.

"Thank you, honored guest," he said.

She nodded.

Walked on.

The system on her shoulder said absolutely nothing for sixty entire seconds.

Then: ’twenty three words.’

"Not now," she said.

’You said you were good with seventeen sentences,’ it said. ’Twenty three words to a beast knight with a mop in a corridor counts as progress.’

"I told him he was doing good work," she said. "It was an inadequate response to an inadequate situation."

’Yes,’ the system said. ’But it was something.’

"Something is not enough," she said.

’No,’ the system said. ’But it’s where you start.’

She walked.

The treasury annex was ahead.

She had a queue position to move.

She had a list that was now forty items long and growing.

She had, in her inner pocket, the names of forty-three beast knights and twenty-two she couldn’t account for and three she would never be able to.

She had a brother she had never looked at closely and needed to now.

She had, somewhere in the merchant district, three people she was going to meet tomorrow morning as no one in particular.

She pushed open the treasury annex door.

Went in.

The work continued.

It always did.

That was the only thing about it she had never once found inadequate.