She was in the archive room.
Not reading — sitting beside the shelves where Zane's drives lived alongside her own decades of gathered material, the specific stillness of someone who had heard that an archive existed and was waiting to understand what it meant for what she had built.
She looked up when we came in.
At me first. Then Darius.
She read our faces the way she read everything — quickly, comprehensively.
"Sit," she said.
This time I sat without the usual protest.
Darius sat beside me.
"The practitioner kept records of everything," I said. "Including a monitoring she placed on you. Forty years ago. For six months."
Maren's hands on her walking stick were very still.
"I found the anchor," she said.
"Yes," I said. "You removed it. But in the six months before you found it—"
