She slept finally, toward four in the morning, and woke at seven with the particular clarity of someone who had processed something significant in sleep that they had been unable to process in waking.

The fragment of paper was on her desk. The smell of the burned room had faded from her hair. The notebook was exactly where she had placed it. These were facts, and facts were good, and she held onto them while she dressed and washed her face in cold water and told herself that she had evidence now — partial, incomplete, the beginning of a case rather than a concluded one — and that having the beginning of something was better than having nothing, which was where she had been three weeks ago.

She went to the conservatory.

Rowan was already there, as he usually was, having developed over the course of his stay the same early-morning relationship with the work that Seraphine had. He was at the secondary gear housing with a lamp and a set of small tools, doing something precise that she didn't interrupt. She went to the central bed section and began the last component of her assessment — the detailed root mapping of the light-retention specimens, the work she had been saving because it required the most careful handling and the most sustained attention.

She worked in silence. Rowan worked in silence. The conservatory did what it always did in the early morning: breathed slowly, held its accumulated warmth against the outside cold, allowed the first incoming light to begin its daily passage through the colored glass panels.

At half past eight, Rowan opened a tin of machine lubricant.

The smell of it was a compound note — mineral oil base, a solvent component, and something organic that had been added to the specific formulation he used for fine gear work. The organic component was a botanical extract. She didn't immediately identify it. She was deep in the root structure of the third specimen, her hands in the soil, her attention on the root architecture.

And then she identified it.

Lemon verbena. The same species her father had used in his laboratory for cleaning delicate glass surfaces — he had believed its specific acid composition was better for treated glass than commercial solvents, had spent a year sourcing the right extract. He had kept a small bottle of it on his work desk, and the smell of it had been part of the smell of his study, part of the compound note she associated with him at work.

The smell arrived in her and found what it was looking for, which was everything.

Not gradually. At once.

She was in his study, in the morning light. She was sixteen and sitting on the floor beside his chair while he worked. She was nineteen and standing in the hospital corridor in the grey dawn with her mother's voice saying words she had stopped hearing because hearing them required more than she had at that moment. She was twenty-two and sitting in the nursery with his notebooks and the ache of knowing that the questions in them were never going to be answered by him.

Her hands were in the soil. She did not remove them.

She had learned, in the years since his death, that the only way through these arrivals was through them — not around them, not under them, but directly through, which meant staying in the body rather than going away from it, which meant feeling the specific shapes of the feeling rather than the overwhelming mass of it, which was a skill that sounded simple and was not.

Her father's hands in soil. Her father's voice: *the rest is just paying attention.*

She breathed.

She was aware of Rowan moving nearby — not looking at her, doing his work, with the particular quality of presence that meant he had noticed and had decided that presence was what she needed rather than intervention. He had always been good at this. She had sometimes taken it for granted and she was not taking it for granted now.

After a while she lifted her hands from the soil and sat back.

"Rowan."

He looked up.

She took the paper fragment from the pocket of her work jacket — she had transferred it there this morning, keeping it with her — and held it out. He came and crouched beside her and took it carefully.

She watched him read it. She watched his face do what it always did with significant information: absorb it, process it, file it into whatever structural system he used for making sense of the world, arrive at a conclusion. The conclusion, when it arrived, showed itself in the particular stillness he used when something was serious.

"Evelise Marrow wrote this," she said.

"In the burned room," he said. It was not a question — he had heard enough in the past three weeks to connect this.

"Yes. She was documenting something. Whatever she was writing, someone tried to destroy it. This is what they missed." She looked at the three final words on the fragment. "She wasn't the only one who believed it wasn't an accident. My father left a formal objection to the research methodology, according to Cassian. Cassian has that document."

Rowan was quiet for a moment. "And your father's death."

"Also a fire," she said. "Also ruled accidental."

The conservatory received this information with its usual patient silence. Outside, through the glass panels, the Elyndor coast was going about its morning under a sky that was the same grey as every morning, enormous and indifferent and very beautiful.

"There's also the modified gear component," she said. "The one you found in the secondary housing."

Rowan reached into his tool case and held it up — the small spacer that had been added to the gear train without documentation, the wrong metal for the original system, fitted by someone who knew the mechanism well enough to add to it without leaving obvious traces.

"I've been trying to work out what it does," he said. "The gear train controls the mirror array position — how the mirrors track the light through the day. This modification would make the array hold a specific position for approximately eleven minutes rather than tracking continuously." He looked at it. "Eleven minutes and forty-some seconds, if the positioning is what I think it is."

She looked at him.

*The music. East wing. Midnight. 11 min 42 sec.*

"The mirrors are locked into a position that concentrates light on the east wing for eleven minutes and forty-two seconds at midnight," she said.

"Something like that," Rowan said. "I don't know what the midnight timing is — that would depend on the seasonal light angle, the moon phase, external factors I haven't mapped. But the gear modification is creating a deliberate pause in the array's movement. Someone wanted the mirrors to hold still at a specific angle for a specific time."

"Someone who has access to this conservatory," she said. "Who knows the system well enough to modify it without documentation. Who wants the east wing lit in a particular way at a particular time."

Rowan put the component back in his case. "Halewick," he said. It was not a question.

"He was here before the current situation. He knows the system. He has reason to want the east wing active." She looked at the component. "But to make this modification, he'd need access to the conservatory after Cassian closed the east wing. Which means either he has access we don't know about, or someone gave it to him."

They sat with this for a moment.

"Seraphine," Rowan said. He said it with the particular weight he used when he was going to say something she might not want to hear. "Whatever is in the east wing — whatever the system does when it's operating the way this modification suggests — it involves your father's work. And Evelise Marrow's death. And possibly your father's death." He looked at her steadily. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to tell Cassian about the fragment tonight," she said. "All of it. The paper, the gear modification, the connection to the midnight activation." She paused. "I want to see what he tells me first. I need to know what he knows and whether he's been choosing not to know it."

Rowan nodded. He accepted this the way he accepted most things: completely and without argument.

"I'm going to be careful," she said.

"I know you are," he said. "I'm going to be nearby in any case."

She looked at him — this person who had come from Mirrowen with his toolbox and his amber eyes and his particular gift for presence without pressure — and felt, as she often felt with Rowan, the specific gratitude of someone who had an ally who had not been asked to be one but had become one anyway.

"Thank you," she said.

"Always," he said. And went back to his gear housing.