The central conference hall on the second floor of the Registry Wing seated forty people. At maximum capacity it smelled of old paper and of too many lamps burning in a room whose high ceilings were very good at carrying heat away from the people who needed it.

Today it held twenty-three, which was not maximum capacity but was enough that Naia had positioned herself at the front of the room before anyone arrived. She had learned, over the course of her career, that the person standing at the front of a room possessed a structural advantage that had nothing to do with what they said and everything to do with where the audience's eyes were already pointed.

She had slept four hours. She had finished the supplementary report on Friday, as promised, and had spent the weekend rebuilding the presentation around it, and on Monday morning she stood in front of the lectern with the revised charts arranged in the order she would need them and her left hand resting, as it often did before a performance, against the edge of the wood. The bandage was a white band at the corner of her vision. She did not look at it.

Lena had been there at eight, adjusting the lamps and moving the water jug a hand's breadth to the left, and had remained long enough to say, with studied casualness, that the Commander had been seen walking through the east corridor at dawn with a stack of ledgers under his arm.

"Ledgers," Naia had said.

"Branch office logs. A clerk told me. The Mirehn ones, I believe." Lena had straightened a chair that did not need straightening. "He asked for them himself. Before you had asked him to."

"It is within his remit to request records."

"Of course it is." Lena had paused at the door. "I only mention it because in three years I have never known a soldier to read footnotes."

"He has not read any footnotes. He has read the logs."

"Naia. The Mirehn anomaly is a footnote."

Naia had not answered that. She had told Lena to take a seat at the back and to refrain from commentary, and Lena had agreed with a gravity that could not have been less sincere.

The scholars filed in. Then the junior court officials, in their pale blue sashes, taking the front right rows with the practiced posture of people who had been told that attention was a thing one could be seen to give. Then the senior desk heads, who sat in the middle with their arms folded, and the regional liaison from the southern office, who had come up from Varath by the night coach and still looked faintly seasick.

Toward the back, where the sightlines were neutral and the expressions of the occupants were harder to read from the lectern, Lady Verun took a seat.

Naia had seen Lady Verun at court functions. She was a compact woman in her late fifties with grey at her temples and the particular stillness of someone who had learned, over a long career on the Imperial Advisory Council, that information gathered quietly was worth more than information gathered loudly. She wore no Registry mark that anyone could see. Whether that was personal choice or the work of the Fading or something else entirely, Naia did not know, and she had not asked. Lady Verun did not invite the kind of questions that were asked without an invitation.

Commander Kairu arrived last, which was the only thing that surprised her.

He did not come to the front. He took the chair against the east wall, the one farthest from the lectern, which she recognized at once as another kind of positioning: the best vantage, the widest field of view, the least exposure. He opened a notebook on his knee. He did not look at her.

She was aware, with a precision she found irritating, of exactly where he was in the room.

She began.

The presentation was the one she had been refining for six weeks, updated with the corrected northern figures, the lag variable, the revised timeline built from the clerk logs, and the preliminary mechanism section she had drafted under his instruction and for which she had not yet decided whether to forgive him. She had delivered presentations like it in enough rooms to have developed a version of herself that could carry the words while another part of her attention stayed open to the audience: the expressions, the small shifts in posture, the specific quality of listening that different people brought to different slides.

The senior scholars engaged the way senior scholars engaged, with attention that was real but conditional, applied to the parts that overlapped their own expertise and withdrawn from the parts that did not. She registered this without judgment. Expertise was necessarily narrow. You could not be an authority on everything, and the attempt was how people became authoritative on nothing.

The junior officials maintained the face of attentiveness that court training produced, which resembled attention the way a well-made painting resembled the thing it depicted. Close enough to function at a distance. Not the same.

Lady Verun wrote in her notebook. Not continuously. Selectively. In a way that suggested the things she set down were not transcriptions of what was being said but entries in some second document, composed in response to the first.

Naia reached the slide on the revised acceleration curve and watched the room change. It was a very small change. A man in the middle row leaned forward. A woman beside him stopped fanning herself with her folder. The curve, rebuilt with the clerk logs, rose more steeply than anything she had shown before, and there was no way to read it as anything other than what it was: a crisis that had started earlier than anyone had been told.

She did not editorialize. She said the numbers and let them stand.

The question period ran long and sideways, which was usual. The questions were not, for the most part, questions. They were positions stated in the grammar of questions, objections in interrogative dress, concerns that resolved on examination into worries not about the data but about its implications for existing institutional arrangements. A senior scholar from the eastern desk asked whether it was prudent to alarm the court on the basis of a revised methodology. A court official asked whether the term acceleration might be softened. A man whose name she could not recall asked, with great courtesy, whether the Scholar had considered that the Fading might simply be a natural cycle, and whether it might not be wiser to wait.

She answered every one with the same patient precision. These questions deserved a thorough reply as much as the sincere ones did, and the patience was itself a form of argument. It said: I am not frightened by this. It said: I have read the data, and the data does not require me to be.

"A natural cycle," she said, to the last of them, "would show a recovery phase in the historical record. I have searched four centuries of Registry documentation for one. I have not found it. If you can show me an example, I will revise the report this afternoon."

He could not. He sat down.

It was Lady Verun who asked the last question of the afternoon, and she did so without rising, in a voice so level that the room turned toward it before it had finished.

"Scholar Solven. If the Fading is not a natural cycle, then it has a cause. If it has a cause, someone must answer for it. Whom would you have the court hold responsible?"

It was a question built to be dangerous whichever way it was answered. If Naia named a person or an office, she would be accusing without evidence. If she named no one, she would be telling the court that the greatest crisis in four centuries was no one's fault, which no court in history had ever found acceptable.

"I would have the court hold no one responsible yet, my lady," she said. "I would have it hold itself responsible for finding out. Blame is a conclusion. We have not reached the end of the evidence, and a conclusion reached early is the most expensive error a court can make."

Lady Verun regarded her for a moment with eyes the color of pewter.

"A careful answer," she said.

"It is an honest one."

"Those are not always the same." She picked up her pen. "I am glad that in this instance they appear to be."

It was not warmth. It was an acknowledgment, as exact and as unsentimental as a receipt, and Naia understood that she had been tested and had passed and that passing had made her more visible rather than less.

The room began to thin, as rooms did when presentations ended and people remembered where else they were expected. The junior officials went first, in a body, with the air of men escaping a sermon. Then the less senior scholars. Then the ones who wanted to appear engaged without being caught in a conversation they had not planned for.

She was closing her last folder when she became aware that someone was still in the room.

Not Lena, who had slipped in from the hallway halfway through and taken up a position near the back that was neither inside nor outside, and who had now withdrawn with a little wave that Naia pretended not to see. Not Lady Verun, who had shut her notebook and moved toward the door with the smoothness of a woman who had decided what she needed and was finished with the event.

Commander Kairu had not moved from his chair.

She looked at him. He looked at her. The notebook was still open on his knee.

"The correlation matrix on the eleventh slide," he said. His voice carried easily across the emptied room. "The one that maps Bond loss against distance from the Tower's branch offices."

"What about it?"

"The relationship inverts in the Mirehn district. Bond loss accelerates farthest from the branch office everywhere else. In Mirehn it is slowest nearest the office and fastest at the periphery. You have footnoted it as an anomaly requiring further investigation." He rose and came down the aisle between the empty rows. "I would like to understand the mechanism."

She had footnoted it as an anomaly requiring further investigation because it was one. She had not emphasized it in the main presentation because it confounded her primary thesis, and because responsible presentation meant not burying an audience in every complicating factor before they had absorbed the central argument.

She had not expected anyone to read the footnotes.

She sat down. After a moment, he took the chair across the lectern table from her, and they were back in the configuration of the conference room, files between them, nothing resolved and everything in motion.

"The Mirehn branch is the only one in Auren that has used the revised survey protocol for four years," she said. "The one that asks respondents to actively confirm their Bond rather than passively report its status. I have been treating it as a collection artifact. But the magnitude of the effect suggests it may be measuring something real."

"What would it mean if it were?"

"It would mean that the act of confirming a Bond, the deliberate acknowledgment of it, is in some way protective." She heard how it sounded and made herself go on. "And the inverse, which is that passive acceptance, or active denial, accelerates the loss."

He was quiet. Outside, the sounds of the Wing were returning to their daytime frequency as the dispersal settled into ordinary activity.

"That is not in your report," he said.

"It is in the footnote."

"As an anomaly. Not as a possible mechanism for your central thesis."

"Because it needs further investigation before it can carry that weight. The footnote is accurate to the current state of the evidence."

"It is also the most important thing you have found."

She looked at him. He looked back, steady and unembarrassed. It was the fifth time since Wednesday that she had been obliged to concede he was right, and she was beginning to resent the accumulation.

"There is a theoretical framework," she said, carefully, because she was now past the edge of what she was professionally comfortable presenting as established, "in which the Registry is not merely a recording system. In which it is something closer to a living system. One that responds to the Bonds it tracks rather than simply documenting them. The Mirehn data would be consistent with that."

"You have mentioned it before. You said you did not believe it."

"I said the data was interesting. It remains interesting. My belief is a separate variable."

"Why do you not believe it?"

The question was simple and direct, and she had no answer ready, which was unusual enough to require acknowledgment. She did what she did with everything: she applied pressure to it, looking for the structure of the thing under the first available description.

She had first met the idea in a minor commentary, in her second year as a student, in a footnote of a footnote, where an obscure scholar of a long-dead generation had described the Registry as a rememberer rather than a recorder and had been rebuked for it by the next commentator in a single dry line. She had copied the sentence into a private notebook and had told herself she was collecting heresies for the sake of completeness. She had never stopped adding to the notebook. It was not something she mentioned.

"I am not certain that I do not," she said finally. "I am certain that I have not proven it."

"Those are very different things."

"Yes."

"Have you proposed the framework to anyone?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Insufficient evidence for a formal proposal."

"Or because you are not certain how it would be received."

It landed with the accuracy of a man who had been listening to more than her words, and she felt, for an instant, the unnerving experience of being read more clearly than she had intended. She met it with the same steadiness she met everything with, because the alternative was to show that it had landed, and showing would tell him more than she had decided to give.

"Both can be true," she said.

"Yes. They can."

A shadow fell across the floor by the door. She looked up and saw Lady Verun standing just outside the frame, notebook in hand, with the expression of a woman who had been there for some time and saw no reason to say so. When she realized Naia had seen her, she made no adjustment to her face or her posture. She simply closed the notebook and walked away down the corridor, her footsteps unhurried, receding.

Naia looked at the empty doorway. Then at the man across the table, who had followed her gaze and returned to the conversation without remark. Either he had not minded being overheard or he was very good at appearing not to.

"The census tables were useful," she said. "The Mirehn data needs its own analysis."

"I can pull the branch office operational logs for the last four years. If the survey protocol change correlates with the onset of the acceleration, it gives you a starting point."

"That would be useful."

"I will have them by Wednesday."

"You said that about the clerk logs and delivered them on Tuesday."

"I wanted a margin."

"You are a very careful man, Commander."

"I am an accountable one." He glanced at his notebook, and then, with deliberation, closed it. "There is a difference."

They stood, both of them, and gathered their materials. She was aware that they had stayed an hour past the official end of the presentation, that the corridor outside was nearly empty, and that the lamps in the hall had burned down a half-inch in their sconces while she was not paying attention.

At the door, he paused with one hand on the frame.

"The living system," he said. "If your data eventually supports it, it would change what an intervention looks like."

"Yes."

"Then it is worth understanding why the Mirehn data behaves as it does, wherever it leads."

"I know that."

"I know you know it." He held the door for her. "I am saying it aloud in case it helps to hear it said."

She went through into the corridor, and he followed, and the door closed behind them on a room that still held the warmth of too many lamps and the particular hush of a conversation that had moved the shape of something without either of them having named what was being moved.

She walked to the stairs. He turned the other way, toward the east passage and the military wing, and she did not look back. She was most of the way up the second flight before she let herself notice that the tension in her shoulders, which had been there since the morning, was gone.

In her office, she laid the Mirehn footnote on the desk and read it again. It was one sentence long. She had written it five weeks ago with a small private sense of having tucked a thing out of sight.

She took her pen and struck through the word anomaly, and then, after a moment, wrote a new heading above it. Requires priority investigation.

She did not know yet whether it was a mistake.

She did know that it was the first time anyone had asked why she did not believe the thing she had spent six weeks of nights circling, and that it had been a stranger from the Guard who asked, in an empty hall, with the lamps going low, as though the answer mattered to him.

She sat for a long while with the sentence in front of her, and at the end of it, what she mostly felt was awake.