The Archive's public reading room was, by the standards Renji had developed over nine years of entering rooms that contained the evidence of what organizations actually were as opposed to what they claimed to be, a room that had things to hide.
This was not necessarily sinister. Most archives with long histories had things to hide, usually because what they contained had been organized by many different people with many different organizing principles over many generations, which produced a kind of institutional sediment that could conceal almost anything simply through sheer accumulation. The question was whether what the Archive concealed was the ordinary concealment of complexity or the more deliberate kind.
He had been in the public reading room for three days. He had read, in that time, the six copies of the Verdant Prophecy that were available in the unrestricted section: two in Elyndor's primary language, one in what Miron had told him was a precursor dialect, two in different archaic script systems that required Lysera's assistance to identify, and one in a language he did not recognize at all, which Lysera had identified as a language from a region beyond Elyndor's borders and which she had then translated for him, section by section, with the careful precision she brought to all translations.
He had taken notes. He had many notes.
On the morning of the fourth day he placed two of the copies side by side on the reading table, adjusted the lamp to get the best light on both, and said: I need you to confirm something for me.
Lysera looked up from her own work at the far end of the table, where she had been cataloguing a set of records that appeared to have nothing to do with him. She had, he noticed, been spending increasing amounts of time in the reading room, for reasons that were either administrative or something else.
She set down her pen and came to look.
He pointed to the relevant passage in the first copy. This says, and he translated carefully from what Miron had taught him about the script: the hero will pursue the Black Dragon until it is driven from the sacred lands.
She read it. She said: That is a reasonable rendering of that passage, yes.
He pointed to the same passage in the second copy. And this one?
She read it. She was quiet for a moment. Then: The hero will slay the Black Dragon.
He said: Those are different actions.
She said: Yes.
One copy says drive out. The other says kill.
Yes.
He said: These are not variant translations of the same underlying text. These are different underlying texts.
She was looking at the two passages with the quality of a person who has been looking at something for a long time without being able to look at it directly, and is now, for the first time, being asked to look at it directly, and is finding that the direct view is not different from what she had suspected but is more present.
Theoretically, she said, a translation could render the same text in ways that produced both meanings, depending on the era's conventions and the translator's interpretation of —
He said: The script system in the older copy, the one with drive out, predates the script system in the newer copy by at least two hundred years. Script systems and their conventions are not interchangeable. A text in the older script was written in the older script's conventions. A translation of that text into the newer script would use the newer script's conventions. But these are not translations of each other. These are two independent versions of the same claimed text, written in different scripts that developed in different periods, and they say different things.
He said: I would like to see all the copies. Including the restricted ones.
She said: That requires the High Oracle's authorization.
He said: I understand. I'm making the request formally so there's a record that I made it.
She looked at him.
He said: Can you get me the dating records for these two copies? The provenance documentation?
She said: Yes. I have them memorized. The first copy, the one with drive out, is dated to seven hundred and thirty years before present. The second, the one with slay, is dated to three hundred and eight years before present.
He said: A gap of four hundred and twenty-two years.
Yes.
He said: During which the meaning changed.
She said: During which the wording changed. The meaning is a matter of interpretation.
He said: The meaning of drive out is different from the meaning of slay. One of them says do not kill it. The other says kill it. These are not interpretations of the same meaning. They are two different meanings.
She did not respond for a moment.
Then she said, very quietly, in the tone of a person who is choosing to say something carefully: I know.
They stood beside each other at the reading table, looking at the two passages, in the sourceless warm light of the Archive.
He said: What is the Black Dragon?
She said: A creature of great destructive power. The primary threat to Elyndor in the Prophecy.
He said: Has anyone seen it?
The Nightroot Guard reports sightings periodically, she said. Tracks. Evidence of its presence at the borders of Veylwood.
He said: Has anyone seen it directly?
A pause. He noted the length of the pause.
The last confirmed direct sighting was, she said, four hundred and seventy years ago.
He said: A gap.
She said: Many creatures are rarely sighted.
He said: Creatures that are rarely sighted don't usually have copies of prophecies that describe their killing and copies of prophecies that describe their banishment, with the gap between the two versions falling in the same period as the lack of direct sightings.
She was quiet.
He said: I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to understand that I'm asking as a genuine question, not as a rhetorical device.
She said: Ask.
He said: Do you think the Black Dragon exists?
She looked at the two copies of the Prophecy. She looked at the passage that said drive out and the passage that said slay and the four hundred and twenty-two years between them.
She said: I think something exists. I am not certain what it is.
He said: That's a careful answer.
She said: I give careful answers.
He said: I know. I appreciate it. It tells me more than an incautious answer would.
She looked at him then, the specific quality of her attention he was coming to know, the quality of someone filing something for later. Then she went back to her end of the table and picked up her pen.
He wrote in his notes: two distinct source texts, not variant translations. One pre-dates the other by four hundred and twenty-two years. The earlier text says do not kill. The later text says kill. The transition coincides with the period of the seal discrepancy and the sword mechanism description change. Something was revised, three hundred years ago, that changed the fundamental nature of what the Prophecy asks the hero to do. I need to find out what the original said.
He spent the afternoon working through more of the correspondence records, the ones that pre-dated the gap in the provenance record, looking for anything that explained what had been happening in the three years before the oldest Prophecy copy had been removed from its location for eleven months.
He found three letters.
They were not labeled as significant. They were filed under routine administrative correspondence, the category of records that institutions maintained because records of decisions needed to exist somewhere, but which they did not typically make easy to find. He found them because he read everything in the relevant time period, which most people would not have done because most people would have looked for the significant documents and ignored the routine ones.
The first letter was from an Archive keeper to the High Oracle of that time. Its subject was an inquiry about the protocol for handling documents that had been identified as having textual inconsistencies with other documents in the same collection. The tone was careful and formally respectful, the tone of someone asking a question they know is not welcome.
The second letter was the High Oracle's response. Its tone was also careful, in a different way: the care of someone who has considered a question and decided to answer it in a way that closes the question rather than engages with it. The protocol, it said, was to refer any such inconsistencies to the Council for review, which would determine whether the inconsistency reflected an error in the document or an error in the comparison. It did not say what would happen if the Council determined it was an error in the document.
The third letter was from the Archive keeper, three months later. It was brief. It said: I have reviewed the matter as requested. I am satisfied that the inconsistency reflects an error in the comparison rather than in the document. The matter is closed.
He read this third letter four times.
The phrase I am satisfied was doing a great deal of work. It was not: upon review, I found that. It was not: the evidence indicates. It was: I am satisfied. Satisfied was a word that described an internal state, not an external finding. It was a word you used when you had decided something, not when you had established something.
The Archive keeper had been told to review the matter. The Archive keeper had reviewed the matter. The Archive keeper had then reported being satisfied with a specific conclusion. The conclusion was the one the Council would have preferred.
This could mean the Archive keeper had reviewed the matter honestly and reached that conclusion. It could mean the Archive keeper had reviewed the matter and been persuaded by the Council. It could mean the Archive keeper had understood what conclusion was expected and had provided it.
He wrote: cannot determine intent from this letter alone. But the phrase I am satisfied rather than the evidence shows suggests that whatever the keeper found, the conclusion reported did not follow straightforwardly from the finding. Cross-reference with: the removal of the oldest copy from its location, eleven months, beginning six months after this letter exchange.
He looked at the timeline he had assembled.
Three months before the gap in the oldest copy's record: the Council's letter responding to the inquiry about inconsistencies, including the instruction to refer such matters to the Council.
Six months before the gap: the Archive keeper's letter reporting satisfaction.
The gap itself: eleven months.
After the gap: the oldest copy returned, described as restored, with no restoration record.
He wrote: the sequence is consistent with the following interpretation, which I am not asserting as established fact but offering as a hypothesis to be tested: someone identified the inconsistency. The Council was informed. The Council instructed the Archive keeper to refer the matter to them. The Council conducted its own review. The Archive keeper reported, or was required to report, that the inconsistency was an error in the comparison. The oldest copy was then removed from its location and held for eleven months, during which it was modified to remove the inconsistency. It was returned with a false restoration note. The modification changed the text to align with the newer copies rather than the other way around.
He put down his pen.
He said, to the room, which was empty: this is the fourth time.
He was not talking about Elyndor.
He found three more discrepancies in the following two days, each one small, each one pointing in the same direction as the others.
The fourth was not small.
It was in the binding records, the administrative documentation of the enchantments that protected Veylwood: when they had been renewed, by what ceremony, with what materials. These records were technical, dense, and in the oldest script system, which meant he needed Lysera's assistance to read them. She read them beside him, quietly, and he wrote down what she translated, and at the end of the second day of reading them he put his pen down and looked at the table for a moment.
She said: What did you find?
He said: The binding enchantments were last fully renewed three hundred and twelve years ago.
She said: Yes. The Blue Moon ceremony renews them.
He said: The records describe what the ceremony uses as the basis for the renewal. The text of the Prophecy, yes. But also a secondary document, described as the original covenant text, which is held in a secure location and read aloud as part of the ceremony's inner rite. Not the public ceremony. The private one.
She was very still.
He said: The public ceremony is not the mechanism. The public ceremony is the performance. The mechanism is the inner rite, with the covenant text.
She said: I did not know there was an inner rite.
He said: It's not documented in the public records. It's in the binding records, which are the administrative documentation of what the enchantments actually need, not what the ceremony publicly claims to provide.
She said: The covenant text.
He said: Which is the original. Before it became the Prophecy. It's still in use. The enchantments are running on the original. The copies, the modified ones, are for the public ceremony. But the magic uses the original.
She sat down.
He said: Your mother was right about the binding.
The pattern was complete enough now that he could describe it without hedging. Not conclusive, not provable beyond doubt with what he currently had, but complete enough to be stated clearly as a hypothesis that the evidence supported.
Someone had modified the Verdant Prophecy. The modification had been done carefully, over time, using multiple mechanisms: textual changes in the oldest copies, supportive modification of the surrounding documentation, the removal and replacement of materials that would have provided comparison points. The modification had changed the Prophecy's character in a specific way: from a document that described protecting something to a document that described destroying something.
The someone had the authority to direct the Archive, to instruct its keepers, to manage what was accessible and what was not. The someone had held this authority continuously for the period during which all the modifications had occurred.
He wrote: Caerion. He wrote this without pleasure or satisfaction, because it was not a pleasurable or satisfying conclusion. It was just the conclusion the evidence supported, and the evidence was what it was.
Then he wrote, because he was precise about these things: this is a preliminary conclusion based on circumstantial evidence and pattern analysis. It requires direct evidence to establish. The direct evidence is in the restricted archive and in the locked cabinet and in whatever the original document says. Until that evidence is available, this is a hypothesis, not a finding.
He was very careful about the distinction between hypotheses and findings.
He had been careful about this distinction for nine years.
He was not going to stop being careful now, when it mattered more than it ever had.
He wrote, at the very end of that day's notes: the rounding error in the quarterly report was, in hindsight, a clean and simple thing. A number had been rounded. The number was wrong. The wrongness could be demonstrated. Here the wrongness was larger and older and more consequential, but the demonstration would follow the same logic. Evidence. Cross-reference. Documentation. The chain of custody of a lie.
He was good at that.
He would be good at it here.
He put the pen down and sat in the quiet of the room and let himself be, for a moment, exactly where he was: in a place he had not known existed eight days ago, working on a problem that was larger and older and more consequential than any he had encountered before, with a set of tools that were exactly the same as the ones he had always had.
The tools worked.
The rest was just scale.
He thought about scale and what it changed and what it didn't. Scale changed the number of people affected. It changed the period over which the harm had run. It changed the complexity of the remediation, the number of systems that had been built around the falsification and would need to be rebuilt around the truth.
It did not change the mechanism. The mechanism was the same as it always was: someone had recorded something false as true, and maintained it as true, and built something on top of the maintenance, and eventually someone had looked at the records carefully enough to find the discrepancy between what was recorded and what was real.
That was him. That was what he did.
He had been doing this for nine years and he had never found a discrepancy that, on investigation, turned out to not be a discrepancy. They were all real. The numbers were always either right or wrong. He had never once found a case where they turned out to be ambiguously somewhere in between.
These numbers were wrong.
He intended to prove it. He put the pen down. He went to sleep. He was going to be useful again tomorrow. The mechanism was always the same, regardless of the scale. Someone had made something false and called it true. Someone else had to look carefully enough to find the difference. That was the whole of it. He had been doing this for nine years. He was very good at it now. He had found four separate things today that all pointed in the same direction. In his experience, four separate discrepancies pointing in the same direction were not coincidence. They were a pattern. Patterns had sources. He was going to find the source.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The Archive's public reading room was, by the standards Renji had developed over nine years of entering rooms that contained the evidence of what organizations actually were as opposed to what they claimed to be, a room that had things to hide.
This was not necessarily sinister. Most archives with long histories had things to hide, usually because what they contained had been organized by many different people with many different organizing principles over many generations, which produced a kind of institutional sediment that could conceal almost anything simply through sheer accumulation. The question was whether what the Archive concealed was the ordinary concealment of complexity or the more deliberate kind.
He had been in the public reading room for three days. He had read, in that time, the six copies of the Verdant Prophecy that were available in the unrestricted section: two in Elyndor's primary language, one in what Miron had told him was a precursor dialect, two in different archaic script systems that required Lysera's assistance to identify, and one in a language he did not recognize at all, which Lysera had identified as a language from a region beyond Elyndor's borders and which she had then translated for him, section by section, with the careful precision she brought to all translations.
He had taken notes. He had many notes.
On the morning of the fourth day he placed two of the copies side by side on the reading table, adjusted the lamp to get the best light on both, and said: I need you to confirm something for me.
Lysera looked up from her own work at the far end of the table, where she had been cataloguing a set of records that appeared to have nothing to do with him. She had, he noticed, been spending increasing amounts of time in the reading room, for reasons that were either administrative or something else.
She set down her pen and came to look.
He pointed to the relevant passage in the first copy. This says, and he translated carefully from what Miron had taught him about the script: the hero will pursue the Black Dragon until it is driven from the sacred lands.
She read it. She said: That is a reasonable rendering of that passage, yes.
He pointed to the same passage in the second copy. And this one?
She read it. She was quiet for a moment. Then: The hero will slay the Black Dragon.
He said: Those are different actions.
She said: Yes.
One copy says drive out. The other says kill.
Yes.
He said: These are not variant translations of the same underlying text. These are different underlying texts.
She was looking at the two passages with the quality of a person who has been looking at something for a long time without being able to look at it directly, and is now, for the first time, being asked to look at it directly, and is finding that the direct view is not different from what she had suspected but is more present.
Theoretically, she said, a translation could render the same text in ways that produced both meanings, depending on the era's conventions and the translator's interpretation of —
He said: The script system in the older copy, the one with drive out, predates the script system in the newer copy by at least two hundred years. Script systems and their conventions are not interchangeable. A text in the older script was written in the older script's conventions. A translation of that text into the newer script would use the newer script's conventions. But these are not translations of each other. These are two independent versions of the same claimed text, written in different scripts that developed in different periods, and they say different things.
He said: I would like to see all the copies. Including the restricted ones.
She said: That requires the High Oracle's authorization.
He said: I understand. I'm making the request formally so there's a record that I made it.
She looked at him.
He said: Can you get me the dating records for these two copies? The provenance documentation?
She said: Yes. I have them memorized. The first copy, the one with drive out, is dated to seven hundred and thirty years before present. The second, the one with slay, is dated to three hundred and eight years before present.
He said: A gap of four hundred and twenty-two years.
Yes.
He said: During which the meaning changed.
She said: During which the wording changed. The meaning is a matter of interpretation.
He said: The meaning of drive out is different from the meaning of slay. One of them says do not kill it. The other says kill it. These are not interpretations of the same meaning. They are two different meanings.
She did not respond for a moment.
Then she said, very quietly, in the tone of a person who is choosing to say something carefully: I know.
They stood beside each other at the reading table, looking at the two passages, in the sourceless warm light of the Archive.
He said: What is the Black Dragon?
She said: A creature of great destructive power. The primary threat to Elyndor in the Prophecy.
He said: Has anyone seen it?
The Nightroot Guard reports sightings periodically, she said. Tracks. Evidence of its presence at the borders of Veylwood.
He said: Has anyone seen it directly?
A pause. He noted the length of the pause.
The last confirmed direct sighting was, she said, four hundred and seventy years ago.
He said: A gap.
She said: Many creatures are rarely sighted.
He said: Creatures that are rarely sighted don't usually have copies of prophecies that describe their killing and copies of prophecies that describe their banishment, with the gap between the two versions falling in the same period as the lack of direct sightings.
She was quiet.
He said: I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to understand that I'm asking as a genuine question, not as a rhetorical device.
She said: Ask.
He said: Do you think the Black Dragon exists?
She looked at the two copies of the Prophecy. She looked at the passage that said drive out and the passage that said slay and the four hundred and twenty-two years between them.
She said: I think something exists. I am not certain what it is.
He said: That's a careful answer.
She said: I give careful answers.
He said: I know. I appreciate it. It tells me more than an incautious answer would.
She looked at him then, the specific quality of her attention he was coming to know, the quality of someone filing something for later. Then she went back to her end of the table and picked up her pen.
He wrote in his notes: two distinct source texts, not variant translations. One pre-dates the other by four hundred and twenty-two years. The earlier text says do not kill. The later text says kill. The transition coincides with the period of the seal discrepancy and the sword mechanism description change. Something was revised, three hundred years ago, that changed the fundamental nature of what the Prophecy asks the hero to do. I need to find out what the original said.
He spent the afternoon working through more of the correspondence records, the ones that pre-dated the gap in the provenance record, looking for anything that explained what had been happening in the three years before the oldest Prophecy copy had been removed from its location for eleven months.
He found three letters.
They were not labeled as significant. They were filed under routine administrative correspondence, the category of records that institutions maintained because records of decisions needed to exist somewhere, but which they did not typically make easy to find. He found them because he read everything in the relevant time period, which most people would not have done because most people would have looked for the significant documents and ignored the routine ones.
The first letter was from an Archive keeper to the High Oracle of that time. Its subject was an inquiry about the protocol for handling documents that had been identified as having textual inconsistencies with other documents in the same collection. The tone was careful and formally respectful, the tone of someone asking a question they know is not welcome.
The second letter was the High Oracle's response. Its tone was also careful, in a different way: the care of someone who has considered a question and decided to answer it in a way that closes the question rather than engages with it. The protocol, it said, was to refer any such inconsistencies to the Council for review, which would determine whether the inconsistency reflected an error in the document or an error in the comparison. It did not say what would happen if the Council determined it was an error in the document.
The third letter was from the Archive keeper, three months later. It was brief. It said: I have reviewed the matter as requested. I am satisfied that the inconsistency reflects an error in the comparison rather than in the document. The matter is closed.
He read this third letter four times.
The phrase I am satisfied was doing a great deal of work. It was not: upon review, I found that. It was not: the evidence indicates. It was: I am satisfied. Satisfied was a word that described an internal state, not an external finding. It was a word you used when you had decided something, not when you had established something.
The Archive keeper had been told to review the matter. The Archive keeper had reviewed the matter. The Archive keeper had then reported being satisfied with a specific conclusion. The conclusion was the one the Council would have preferred.
This could mean the Archive keeper had reviewed the matter honestly and reached that conclusion. It could mean the Archive keeper had reviewed the matter and been persuaded by the Council. It could mean the Archive keeper had understood what conclusion was expected and had provided it.
He wrote: cannot determine intent from this letter alone. But the phrase I am satisfied rather than the evidence shows suggests that whatever the keeper found, the conclusion reported did not follow straightforwardly from the finding. Cross-reference with: the removal of the oldest copy from its location, eleven months, beginning six months after this letter exchange.
He looked at the timeline he had assembled.
Three months before the gap in the oldest copy's record: the Council's letter responding to the inquiry about inconsistencies, including the instruction to refer such matters to the Council.
Six months before the gap: the Archive keeper's letter reporting satisfaction.
The gap itself: eleven months.
After the gap: the oldest copy returned, described as restored, with no restoration record.
He wrote: the sequence is consistent with the following interpretation, which I am not asserting as established fact but offering as a hypothesis to be tested: someone identified the inconsistency. The Council was informed. The Council instructed the Archive keeper to refer the matter to them. The Council conducted its own review. The Archive keeper reported, or was required to report, that the inconsistency was an error in the comparison. The oldest copy was then removed from its location and held for eleven months, during which it was modified to remove the inconsistency. It was returned with a false restoration note. The modification changed the text to align with the newer copies rather than the other way around.
He put down his pen.
He said, to the room, which was empty: this is the fourth time.
He was not talking about Elyndor.
He found three more discrepancies in the following two days, each one small, each one pointing in the same direction as the others.
The fourth was not small.
It was in the binding records, the administrative documentation of the enchantments that protected Veylwood: when they had been renewed, by what ceremony, with what materials. These records were technical, dense, and in the oldest script system, which meant he needed Lysera's assistance to read them. She read them beside him, quietly, and he wrote down what she translated, and at the end of the second day of reading them he put his pen down and looked at the table for a moment.
She said: What did you find?
He said: The binding enchantments were last fully renewed three hundred and twelve years ago.
She said: Yes. The Blue Moon ceremony renews them.
He said: The records describe what the ceremony uses as the basis for the renewal. The text of the Prophecy, yes. But also a secondary document, described as the original covenant text, which is held in a secure location and read aloud as part of the ceremony's inner rite. Not the public ceremony. The private one.
She was very still.
He said: The public ceremony is not the mechanism. The public ceremony is the performance. The mechanism is the inner rite, with the covenant text.
She said: I did not know there was an inner rite.
He said: It's not documented in the public records. It's in the binding records, which are the administrative documentation of what the enchantments actually need, not what the ceremony publicly claims to provide.
She said: The covenant text.
He said: Which is the original. Before it became the Prophecy. It's still in use. The enchantments are running on the original. The copies, the modified ones, are for the public ceremony. But the magic uses the original.
She sat down.
He said: Your mother was right about the binding.
The pattern was complete enough now that he could describe it without hedging. Not conclusive, not provable beyond doubt with what he currently had, but complete enough to be stated clearly as a hypothesis that the evidence supported.
Someone had modified the Verdant Prophecy. The modification had been done carefully, over time, using multiple mechanisms: textual changes in the oldest copies, supportive modification of the surrounding documentation, the removal and replacement of materials that would have provided comparison points. The modification had changed the Prophecy's character in a specific way: from a document that described protecting something to a document that described destroying something.
The someone had the authority to direct the Archive, to instruct its keepers, to manage what was accessible and what was not. The someone had held this authority continuously for the period during which all the modifications had occurred.
He wrote: Caerion. He wrote this without pleasure or satisfaction, because it was not a pleasurable or satisfying conclusion. It was just the conclusion the evidence supported, and the evidence was what it was.
Then he wrote, because he was precise about these things: this is a preliminary conclusion based on circumstantial evidence and pattern analysis. It requires direct evidence to establish. The direct evidence is in the restricted archive and in the locked cabinet and in whatever the original document says. Until that evidence is available, this is a hypothesis, not a finding.
He was very careful about the distinction between hypotheses and findings.
He had been careful about this distinction for nine years.
He was not going to stop being careful now, when it mattered more than it ever had.
He wrote, at the very end of that day's notes: the rounding error in the quarterly report was, in hindsight, a clean and simple thing. A number had been rounded. The number was wrong. The wrongness could be demonstrated. Here the wrongness was larger and older and more consequential, but the demonstration would follow the same logic. Evidence. Cross-reference. Documentation. The chain of custody of a lie.
He was good at that.
He would be good at it here.
He put the pen down and sat in the quiet of the room and let himself be, for a moment, exactly where he was: in a place he had not known existed eight days ago, working on a problem that was larger and older and more consequential than any he had encountered before, with a set of tools that were exactly the same as the ones he had always had.
The tools worked.
The rest was just scale.
He thought about scale and what it changed and what it didn't. Scale changed the number of people affected. It changed the period over which the harm had run. It changed the complexity of the remediation, the number of systems that had been built around the falsification and would need to be rebuilt around the truth.
It did not change the mechanism. The mechanism was the same as it always was: someone had recorded something false as true, and maintained it as true, and built something on top of the maintenance, and eventually someone had looked at the records carefully enough to find the discrepancy between what was recorded and what was real.
That was him. That was what he did.
He had been doing this for nine years and he had never found a discrepancy that, on investigation, turned out to not be a discrepancy. They were all real. The numbers were always either right or wrong. He had never once found a case where they turned out to be ambiguously somewhere in between.
These numbers were wrong.
He intended to prove it. He put the pen down. He went to sleep. He was going to be useful again tomorrow. The mechanism was always the same, regardless of the scale. Someone had made something false and called it true. Someone else had to look carefully enough to find the difference. That was the whole of it. He had been doing this for nine years. He was very good at it now. He had found four separate things today that all pointed in the same direction. In his experience, four separate discrepancies pointing in the same direction were not coincidence. They were a pattern. Patterns had sources. He was going to find the source.
You've reached the end of this chapter