Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 11 of 40

Chapter 11: The Seal She Takes

Fen caught the insignia when Sera tossed it, and Kael was already speaking before it landed.

'Open the archive,' he said. 'Both doors. The founding register comes out of the sealed case and goes on the table in front of her.'

The guard at the inner gate looked at the insignia in Fen's fist, then at Kael, then at Sera standing behind him with Dov at her shoulder, and did the arithmetic a man does when his rank is smaller than the room.

'Alpha, the suspension is logged. Elder Cass holds the key until the council rules.'

'The suspension is on Lirien,' Kael said. 'Not on the archive. Open it.'

Sera watched the amber light gather at the guard's temple before he moved. Under his spoken words, the second voice ran clear and small: she's the one they struck off the record, and she's walking in here like the door was hers.

Good. Let him think it.

The founding register was heavier than it looked. Fen set it on the reading table and stepped back, and the old leather sighed open to a page where the ink had gone brown at the edges and the entries ran in a hand older than Kael's grandfather.

Dov leaned in without being asked. 'Founding-line notation. Twenty-three years back, the last entry.'

Sera did not look at the page yet. She looked at the cabinet behind the table, the one with the brass hasp and the small black tag that said EVIDENCE, and she kept her face on the register while she counted the steps to it.

'You said the seal was in here,' she said to Kael. 'The birth-cord seal.'

'I said the archive holds it.'

'It's in the cabinet.'

Kael turned. He looked at the cabinet the way a man looks at a thing he has walked past for years, and Sera heard the thought before he said anything, and the thought was not about the seal at all. She came here for something she has not told me.

She let him keep it.

'The cabinet is sealed under the same suspension,' he said.

'Then unseal it.'

He did not move. Fen did, one hand already on the hasp, and the guard took a half step forward and stopped, because Kael had gone still in the way Sera had learned to read across a room, and stillness from him was the last warning before an order.

'Open it,' Kael said.

The hasp gave. Inside, on a folded square of grey cloth, lay a disc of black river-glass, no wider than a palm, etched with a sigil that caught the lamplight and held it.

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