He worked through the night, the way he did when something genuinely mattered — not the careful, paced research of an ordinary case, but the specific, focused urgency of a man who understood that what he found in the next few hours might reshape everything the compound believed about its own history.
The reference Maren remembered was easy enough to locate, once he knew what he was looking for — a single line, in the oldest physical recordings the practitioner's archive contained, predating even the earliest organized mechanism material by what the dating suggested was decades.
*The original cache remains secured at Marrow. Until the bloodline question is resolved, it stays where the founders placed it.*
No further explanation. No context for what "the bloodline question" meant, or who
