THE NEXT MORNING I arose before dawn, dressed, picked up the bag containing the thousands of talints and the wall pass—it felt very heavy now—and went downstairs and slipped into the streets.

Once again, Talagray was rumbling to life with countless esteemed and veteran officers beginning their duty. I felt terribly self-conscious as I walked among them, trying to control my gait, my posture, my bearing. Was I walking too fast? Did anyone hear that soft clink from my bag? Yet no one had any mind for me at all. There were far more greater things to care about in this place than I.

I’d left the back door to Aristan’s house unlocked, so it was a simple thing to open it and slip inside. Once again, I was battered with the awful reek of corpse-stink. I prowled through the house like a common burglar and found Aristan still in her bedroom, the toes of her bare feet still purple and curling.

I stared at her body, heart beating. Then I glanced around the room, wondering where to hide a fortune where Miljin and Uhad might find it. Yet I remembered: I’d seen Miljin search a room just the other day, hadn’t I? I knew his methods.

I walked to the other side of the bed, crouched, unsheathed my knife, and pried up a floorboard. There was not much room below but still room enough. I carefully placed the seven thick coins below, along with the wall pass. Then I replaced the board, paced back to the backdoor, cracked it to confirm the lane beyond was empty, and departed, my heart still fluttering in my ribcage.

I made it back to the Iudex tower before midmorning, climbed the steps, and knocked five times on Ana’s door—the signal that that job was done. I was met with a lilting “Thank you!” then ran back down the stairs, suddenly worried any one of these officers might stop me.

Yet they did not. I dabbed sweat from my brow as I continued on to the next task.

How queer it suddenly felt: I’d been a model officer for almost all my career, but I had to join the Iudex to become a true criminal.

---

—

“ARE YOU ALL right, Signum?” asked Nusis. “You look a little antsy.”

“P-pardon, ma’am?” I said, startled. I wiped more sweat from my brow and glanced around her office, as if worried someone else might have noticed. “Oh. I apologize.”

“Oh, don’t,” Nusis said. “I was just worried it might be a reaction to your new immunities grafts. Or, maybe it might be something you caught out on the Plains of the Path.” She leaned forward over her desk, interested. “Have you felt any curious flickering sensations when you defecate, perhaps?”

I wondered what to say to that. “I think it might just be the stress of the job, ma’am,” I said honestly.

“I see…Well, if you need any stimulants or sedatives, let me know. I’ve got a variety here, and most are very safe. Now…you have a reagents key for me, I think?”

I handed over the plain little bronze disc I’d found in Rona Aristan’s empty house. “Yes, ma’am. Found it yesterday among the possessions of the individuals we were investigating. I was hoping you could check it for me.” I sweated slightly, though nothing I said was a lie.

Nusis studied the little key. She no longer seemed like the cheery red flicker-thrush as I’d come to think of her, for she moved slower, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in some time. The cause was clear: there were piles of parchments mounded on her desk, enough to challenge even Ana’s usual seas of texts. It had taken me hours to get in to see her, as well: apparently whatever she was working on was even more important than a visit from the Iudex.

“Hmm,” Nusis said, peering at the key. “This one is rather shabbily made. Simple bronze, with tin prongs and a crude bridge. Very amateurish. I don’t perceive any gaseous emissions of note…though they may be masked by my specimens.”

She gestured at the many vials and tanks around her laboratory-like office. I eyed one of the many worms thoughtfully inspecting the seal of its glass prison.

She sniffed the vial. “I can’t catch much scent here that I recognize, unfortunately. But then, I am not altered for aromatics, only vision. But I can run it under the usual tests—exposing it to telltale plants and fungi and the like, which will react if there is anything pheromonally interesting. Could that do?”

“Whatever you can do to assist, ma’am,” I said.

“Very good. Now…” She sighed. “The other business. Captain Kiz Jolgalgan, correct?”

“That’s correct, ma’am.” I nodded at the papers and said, “I hope this isn’t all about her.”

“This? Oh, no. These are Preservation Board approvals. The Legion is preparing a new armament to combat the titans after the breach. Lots of grafts and alterations go with it—mostly explosives.” She gestured along her back wall, where glass jars containing a dark powder sat in a row. “Some kind of bombard. I’m to review and process the paperwork confirming that none of these alterations can escape the canton and cause havoc.” She cast a bleary eye over the remaining parchments. “But paperwork is a task I’m well accustomed to. I manage paper more than reagents these days. Now, I am curious…why did you ask about this Jolgalgan?”

I explained the interviews with the Engineers from yesterday, and all I’d learned with Miljin.

Nusis’s expression grew somber, so much so that I forgot about my own anxieties. “I see,” she said carefully. “Well. I regret to inform you that everyone who knew Captain Jolgalgan is dead.”

“Dead? Truly, ma’am?”

“Yes. She was a member of the Twelfth Cohort of the Apoths. And all of that cohort died at Sapfir, during the breach. Can’t even recover their bodies. Horrid thing. You will have no one to interview, I’m afraid.”

“But Jolgalgan,” I said. “Is she also…”

“Her status is…a different matter.” Nusis pivoted to her safe, then paused. “Might you avert your eyes again, please, Signum?”

I did so while she again went through the laborious process of unlocking her safe. She popped it open and slid out a scroll of parchment. Then she took the reagents key from her desk and placed it in the safe, next to all her boxes of immunities grafts. “Might as well keep that in here for now…I mean, it is evidence, yes? Anyway. I went ahead and fetched Jolgalgan’s alteration papers for you…She’s a Sublime, like you and I. An axiom, inducted and altered some six years ago in the Kurmin canton. Scored very high on her exams. Something else you two have in common, I think.”

I coughed and nodded.

“But Jolgalgan always demonstrated—how shall I put this—issues of the psyche,” said Nusis delicately.

“Issues?” I asked.

“Anger. Fits of rage. And anxiety, and paranoia. She was a hard worker, but she was hard to work with. She has had a pattern of complaints and outbursts throughout her career.”

I opened my engraver’s satchel. “Is it all right if I…”

“Be my guest,” said Nusis.

I selected the ash-scented vial again and sniffed at it, anchoring this conversation in my memories. “What was wrong with her?” I said. “Something to do with her alterations?”

“No,” she said. “No. It is not that.”

I watched her. Eyes still, mouth fixed in a soft frown. She had gone somewhere far away in her mind, I felt. I waited.

“You are aware, Signum,” she said, “that I was assigned to be on this investigation team because I served in Oypat.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what do you know of Oypat?”

“I’d never heard of it until Blas. I learned it had been a canton that had been consumed by dappleglass, the same contagion that’s been wielded as a weapon here. That is all of it.”

“Well…I will tell you now, Kol, that what happened in Oypat made many people fear alterations as much as the titans. With good reason. I was a junior officer then, barely out of Sublime training. Axiom,” she said, tapping her head. “Figures and mathematics.”

“I remember, ma’am.”

“Of course you do. I worked on the environmental monitoring team during Oypat, ensuring that no dappleglass escaped the territory. I peered through a spyglass day after day, watching distant hills being eaten by grass. And then in the afternoon, when I served in the medikkers’ wards, I saw people having the grass cut from them—tangles in their kidneys, in their lungs, in their uteri. Many more died, of course. Especially after we sealed the whole thing up. They never made it out.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Those that did survive were resettled by the Iudex. And some…some of the Oypati say that it wasn’t the dappleglass that killed their home. They say it was us. That we imperials killed them with our lethargy. But that isn’t so. We tried. It was just too complex. The great and heavenly world is just all too complex, sometimes.”

“I see,” I said. “But—what’s this to do with Jolgalgan, ma’am?”

“You have heard that Jolgalgan has a curious look to her,” she said. “Yellow, curly hair. Yes?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“That is because though she has a Kurmini last name, the captain was not born to a Kurmini family. She was adopted. Her birth name was Prarasta. An uncommon name—mostly because all the people who’d normally have such a name are now dispersed or dead.” She fixed me in a sad gaze. “Jolgalgan was Oypati, you see. She escaped the dying canton when she was a child. Lost her parents. And was resettled. Such a history…Well, it’s no wonder she displayed afflictions of the psyche.”

I felt my skin break out in goosebumps. “I notice, ma’am, that you haven’t told me whether Jolgalgan died with her cohort.”

“I haven’t,” she said. “Because Captain Jolgalgan has been missing for weeks.” She handed the scroll of parchment out to me. “She vanished just a few days before the assassination of Commander Blas, as a matter of fact. And just before so many Engineers suddenly started dying of the very contagion that killed her canton. Curious—isn’t it?”