The watch station is easy to miss.
It sits between a laundry and a grain storage building in the lower Argent Wing district, its door boarded over and its windows bricked shut. There is a faded demolition notice nailed to the front that has been weathering for six years. Nobody looks at it twice.
Sera leads me around the back. There is a second door there, newer boards, and she removes three of them with the ease of someone who has done it before. We go in.
Inside it is small and dusty and smells of old stone. Two rooms. A broken table in the first. A fireplace in the second that still works, judging by the faint warmth and the smell of recent smoke.
Mira is sitting at the broken table with a candle and a cup of something hot. Drev is at the fireplace, doing something quiet and domestic with what appears to be a travel pot.
I stop in the doorway.
"You're late," Mira says.
"We had company," I say. "At the cartographer's."
Something moves across her face. She files it away the same way I do. "How bad?"
"Two that we saw. Probably more. Edvin is fine." I sit across from her. "They knew the address."
Mira nods slowly. "Aldous."
"Yes."
She puts her hands around her cup and looks at the table. "The bookbinder's was raided this morning. Church Auditors. Official seals, the whole performance." She glances at Sera. "They're not being quiet about it anymore."
Sera takes the chair beside me. "The access list."
Mira reaches into her coat and produces a folded document. She sets it on the table but keeps her hand on it for a moment. That moment tells me everything before she says a word.
"I need you to stay calm," she says.
"I am calm," I say.
"You say that every time and you're never calm." She slides the document across. "The access list for the sacramental preparation facilities. Twelve authorized names. Church officials, senior clergy, one imperial administrator." She pauses. "And one that has no business being there."
I open the document.
Eleven names I expect. One I don't.
The name sits in the middle of the list in the same administrative script as everything else around it. Ordinary ink. Ordinary paper. As if it belongs there.
Lord Edran Cayne. Authorized accessor. Active status.
I read it twice.
"That's your identity," Sera says quietly.
"Yes."
"Someone put it on the list before you chose it."
I look at the name. At the active status notation beside it. At the authorization date stamped in the corner of the document.
Three years ago.
Someone authorized the Cayne name to access the Church's most restricted facilities three years ago. I built my false identity eight months ago. Which means someone was using the Cayne name before I was. Which means someone knew I would use it. Or someone put it there for their own reasons and I walked into it by accident.
Neither option is comfortable.
"Who authorized it?" Sera asks.
Mira points to the bottom of the document. A signature, small and neat.
Sera goes very still.
I look at the signature. At the title beneath it.
Knight Commander Oswin Venn. Argent Wing, Varenthis Garrison.
I look at Sera.
Her face is doing the controlled thing. The kind that takes effort. The kind I have only seen twice before and both times something significant had just shifted underneath her.
"You know him," I say.
"He's my commanding officer," she says.
The watch station is quiet around us. Drev sets something down gently at the fireplace. Mira watches Sera with careful eyes.
"He authorized the Cayne name three years ago," I say. "Before I chose it. Before any of this."
"Yes."
"Which means either he's working with the Architect." I watch her face. "Or he put it there knowing someone would eventually need it."
Sera is quiet for a long moment.
"He gave me this investigation," she says finally. "Eighteen months ago. He pulled me into his office and told me the Church Auditors couldn't be trusted and gave me the assessor's first report and told me to follow it quietly." She looks at the signature. "He told me to trust no one."
"Did he know about you?" I say. "About the sacrament? About what you are?"
"I don't know."
"Did he ever look at you strangely? Ask questions about your history? Show any interest in where you came from before the Wing?"
She thinks. It takes a while.
"Once," she says. "Two years ago. He asked me where I grew up. I told him. He didn't say anything after that." She pauses. "He looked at my arm."
Her forearm. The one that had been visible in the alley the night we met. The smooth unmarked skin.
He's a Knight Commander. He wouldn't know what he was looking for unless someone told him. Unless someone told him what an unbranked person looks like and what it means.
"He knows," I conclude.
"We don't know that," Mira says carefully.
"He knows enough," I say. "He knows enough to have put the Cayne name on that list. He knows enough to have started this investigation through Sera specifically." I look at the document. At the signature. At the active status that has been sitting there for three years waiting. "He's been running a parallel operation. Longer than either of us."
Sera picks up the document. Reads it herself from the beginning. Sets it down.
"I need to talk to him," she says.
"Sera."
"He's either working with the Architect or against him," she says. "Either way I need to know which. And either way he knows more than we do."
"If he's working with the Architect you walk into that meeting and don't walk out."
"I know."
"I'm not willing to let that happen."
She looks at me. The something in her expression again that I don't have a word for yet. Closer to naming it this time. Still not quite there.
"Then come with me," she says.
I look at the access list. At the name that has been waiting there for three years like a door left open.
"All right," I say.
Mira picks up her cup. Takes a long sip. Puts it down. "I want it noted," she says, "that this is exactly the kind of decision I would have talked you out of if anyone had asked me."
"Noted," I say.
"Good." She stands. "I'll make more tea. You're going to need it."