Berden arrived early.
He brought a small wooden box and placed it on the table before sitting.
Aoi looked at it.
“What is that?”
“Things I kept.”
“Why didn’t you bring them before?”
He rubbed his hands together.
“I didn’t know whether you’d want anything I had touched.”
The room became quiet.
Aoi looked down at the copied order.
“Open it.”
Inside lay a broken lamp shutter, a strip of blue cloth, and a little brass fastening bent out of shape.
Nothing spectacular.
Objects a person might throw away while tidying.
Aoi touched the cloth.
I saw her recognize it.
She did not explain.
Berden left his hands on his knees.
Pell sat by the window with paper ready. Halwen had gone to check the upstairs patients but left the door open.
I waited.
Aoi asked the first question.
“Read the assignment.”
Berden did.
“Temporary signal custodian. Sedge Toll station. Independent retention pending relief.”
“What did that mean?”
“Hold the station alone until another party arrived.”
“How long?”
“Until the next evening.”
“How much food?”
“Three days.”
“Why three?”
“Standard field issue.”
“What equipment?”
He listed it.
A signal lamp. Treated shutters. Oil. A field case. Bedding. A small stove.
Pell wrote.
The brass fastening belonged to the lamp’s carrying frame. Berden had replaced it before departure and kept the broken part in his tool roll.
The shutter had cracked during the journey.
The cloth had been wrapped around the lamp to stop it rattling.
Aoi kept touching it with one finger.
“Was he afraid?”
Berden looked at her.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“That he didn’t understand why they needed him there.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That the officers understood the signal line better than we did.”
Aoi’s mouth tightened.
“Did you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Then?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me.
I knew what she wanted.
I looked at Berden.
“May I use Insight on that answer?”
He nodded.
The skill opened reluctantly, or perhaps I was reluctant to open it.
His surface information appeared.
Then I focused.
No discord.
Mana slipped away.
“He is not knowingly lying now,” I said.
Aoi stared at me.
“That is all I can establish. I cannot see what he thought then.”
She nodded once.
I dismissed the reading.
Pell waited before writing that distinction down.
I was grateful to him.
The route had changed after Kaito refused the deployment.
That part Berden remembered clearly.
The original destination was a manned post farther south. The transport clerk had prepared the first order, then returned with a replacement bearing an office countersign.
Corvane’s office.
Not Corvane’s hand.
Aoi noticed me examining the difference.
“Say it.”
“It connects the amendment to his office. It does not yet prove he personally chose the station.”
“You think he didn’t.”
“No.”
“Then why--”
“Because if we accuse him of writing it and he proves a secretary wrote it, he will try to make the correction stand in for an answer.”
Aoi looked at the seal again.
Then pushed the paper toward Pell.
“Write what it proves.”
He did.
I let my shoulders ease.
Only a little.
The next question was worse.
“Did Kaito ask you not to leave?”
Berden’s eyes closed.
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“Left.”
“Why?”
His hands tightened.
He could have offered the order.
The threat of discipline.
The ordinary confidence that somebody else had checked.
Instead he said, “Because leaving was what I knew how to do.”
Aoi stared at him.
I heard movement outside the door. Someone carrying a bucket stopped, realized there was no reason to stop, and continued.
Berden opened his eyes.
“I found out about the relief afterward. There was no crew booked through Stonecross. No lamp wagon. No replacement oil.”
“How?”
“I asked at the transfer house.”
“Who answered?”
“The woman keeping the return register. Senn.”
Pell looked up to confirm the spelling.
Berden supplied it.
“She checked?”
“Yes.”
“In front of you?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“I returned to the officer who gave me the route. Told him the relief hadn’t been entered.”
“What did he say?”
“That it was arranged separately.”
“Was it?”
“I asked to go back.”
Aoi waited.
“They confined me until morning.”
“Did you go back after that?”
“No.”
She looked away.
Berden kept speaking.
“Two days later, I was assigned here. I copied the amendment before I left. Cut the reference from a spoiled register sheet.”
He pointed to the narrow strip.
“That was foolish.”
“Keeping it?” I asked.
“Leaving the rest. I was frightened.”
Aoi lifted the strip.
Two entries shared the same reference.
The first named Kaito’s transfer.
The second read:
**Retention expenditure reconciled.**
Beneath it:
**Charge entered elsewhere.**
“What does that mean?” she asked.
Pell leaned closer.
“An expense moved to another account.”
“What expense?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“Food? Equipment?”
“Possibly. Transport. Pay. Anything included under the same authorization.”
I looked at the reference.
“Can we find the other account?”
“If the books survive.”
“Where?”
Pell studied the heading.
“Stonecross appears to be the district reconciliation point. Their copy should say which office accepted the charge.”
At last, a direction that did not depend upon interpreting a facial expression.
Aoi laid the strip down carefully.
“We go there.”
“When you can travel,” Halwen said from the doorway.
No one had heard her return.
Aoi looked up.
“I know.”
Halwen’s expression suggested this was historically uncertain.
Berden pushed the little box toward Aoi.
She did not take it immediately.
Then she lifted the blue cloth.
It was stained with oil along one edge.
“He used this on his wrist,” she said.
Her voice had changed.
“At training. He said the straps rubbed.”
Berden nodded.
“He wrapped it around the lamp.”
Aoi folded it once.
Then again.
The shape would not come out neatly. One corner was torn.
She kept trying.
I looked at Pell.
He lowered his pen.
After a while, Aoi said, “I want to see the station.”
“We start at Stonecross,” I answered. “Find the register. Establish whether anyone passed through after Berden.”
“Then the station.”
“Yes.”
Berden stood.
“I’ll take you.”
She looked at him for a long time.
“I haven’t decided whether I want that.”
He accepted it.
At the door, he stopped.
“One more thing.”
Aoi waited.
“He took a book.”
“What book?”
“Blank one. Said if they were going to leave him alone somewhere, he’d at least write down what they’d done.”
Aoi’s hand closed around the cloth.
Berden left.
Pell gathered the copies.
I sat beside the table until Aoi put the cloth back into the box.
Then she asked me to fetch her boots.
I said no.
She threw the pillow at me.
It missed.
Neither of us mentioned that.