The side archive was not, technically, accessible to anyone without a Civil Ledgers clearance stamp.

This was documented in three separate Records administration memos, the most recent of which had been issued fourteen months ago and which Seren had read, filed, and — in the privacy of her own assessment — noted as one of those policies that existed primarily to create a paper trail of compliance rather than to actually control access. The lock on the side archive door was a standard Records-issue barrel mechanism, the kind installed throughout the building in a bulk purchase twenty years ago, before whoever had made the purchasing decision had apparently considered that all the locks in a building with the same master key created a single point of failure rather than layered security.

She knew this because she had a copy of the master key. She had a copy of the master key because eighteen months ago a flooding incident in the lower corridor had required emergency access to three locked storage areas, and the duty supervisor had handed her the master to deal with it because all the staff with official clearance had gone home at bell-close, and afterward no one had asked for the key back, and she had not volunteered to return it.

The point was: the side archive was accessible. It was merely not officially accessible. These were different things.

What she had not expected, arriving at the side archive door at the second morning bell, was to find the door already open.

Not forced. Not damaged. Just open — the latch turned from the inside, the door resting at the slight angle that a door rested at when it had been opened by someone who knew the mechanism.

Seren stood in the corridor and looked at the open door for a moment.

Then she went in.

He was standing at the back of the room, at the shelving section that held the cross-referenced mortality records from the previous decade, reading a bound ledger he had taken down from the third shelf. He was not wearing Records colors. He was wearing the kind of dark, non-descript clothing that was optimal for moving through spaces without being noticed, which in Lower Rings was a practical skill rather than a suspicious one. His hair was shorter than it had been. His shoulders were broader. He was reading with the focused, unselfconscious attention of someone who was not expecting to be interrupted.

Four years.

Seren stood in the doorway and looked at Alden Wren, and the first thing she thought — not the second thing, the first thing, before anything else — was: of course you came in through the side door.

He looked up.

The silence lasted approximately four seconds, which was long enough to hold several years of things neither of them had said.

“You still haven’t learned to use the front door,” she said.

His expression did not change significantly. It rarely had. “You still believe the front door opens for people like us.”

“I believe the front door is the door that exists for the purpose of entering the building.”

“And yet here we both are, in the side archive.” He looked back at the ledger. “I’m not here to cause problems for your filing system.”

“You’re in a restricted archive without authorization. That is, by definition, a problem for the filing system.”

“I’ll be gone before anyone who cares comes down.”

“What are you looking for?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he closed the ledger and turned to face her properly, and she had the experience she had been bracing for since she walked in, which was the experience of his face at this distance being the same face she had known for most of her life and also, somehow, not the same face at all. Time did things to people. She knew this abstractly. Experiencing it was different.

“A man named Corvin Ash,” he said. “Unmarked. Worked the Eastfield shafts until eight months ago, then dropped off the labor registry. No discharge record, no relocation notice. He had a room in the Lower Fifth district. His landlord says he left in the night with his things. No forwarding.”

“People leave,” Seren said. “Lower Fifth to somewhere else, sometimes. It happens.”

“His sister hired me to find him. She says he wouldn’t leave without telling her. She says he was asking questions about something before he disappeared. She doesn’t know what, but he was nervous. More nervous than usual.” Alden’s eyes were steady on her. “The body that came into Mortuary Intake three nights ago. The Marked man. Corvin knew him.”

Seren was still.

“How do you know that?”

“Because Corvin’s sister saw them together twice in the month before Corvin disappeared. Different parts of the city. The kind of meetings you have when you don’t want anyone to know you’re meeting.” He paused. “I have good reason to think Corvin is dead. I’m trying to find out why before whoever killed him decides his sister is also a loose end.”

The side archive was quiet around them. From somewhere above, the faint sounds of the building coming to its morning life.

Seren looked at him for a moment. Then she went to the far end of the room, to the section of shelving he had not reached yet, and pulled down the ledger he would have gotten to eventually. She brought it to the reading table and opened it to the mortality records from the Lower Fifth district over the previous eight months.

“Corvin Ash is not in here,” she said. “I know this section. I processed this section. There’s no Corvin Ash.”

“I know. That’s one of the things that doesn’t add up.”

“If he’s dead and he’s not in the mortality records, either his body was never recovered, or his record was removed, or he was processed under a different name.” She looked at the ledger. “Or he was processed in a batch intake that I haven’t cross-referenced yet.” She paused. “The Ashfield collapse batch.”

Alden was watching her.

“I know that body,” she said. “The Marked man. I was the one who found the — I processed his intake. I know what was on him.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise, exactly. More like the adjustment of an expectation that had been close but not quite right. “How much do you know?”

“Enough to want to know more.” She closed the ledger. “You need access to Underways information. I need access to mortality records from the High Ring transition zone that aren’t in my clearance range. Individually, neither of us gets very far.”

The silence this time was shorter.

“You’re suggesting we work together,” he said.

“I’m saying we both want information the other one has. That’s not a suggestion, that’s an observation.”

Alden looked at her for a long moment. She had forgotten — or perhaps she had not forgotten but had stored the memory somewhere she did not access often — the particular quality of his attention. He did not look at things the way most people looked at things. He looked at them the way someone looked at a lock they were trying to understand.

“Orwin comes down at the fourth bell,” she said. “You have time to finish that ledger before then. I’ll be at the lower corridor access point tonight at the second watch. You know which one.”

She moved the ledger back toward him and left the archive, because if she stayed any longer she was going to have to have a conversation she was not ready for, and the work needed doing, and the work was something she knew how to do.

At her desk, she opened the next intake set and began to process it. Her hands moved steadily. Her face was still.

Spark, she thought, was a word people used for something that had never gone out.