Liam stopped in front of Lab V and turned to the four men who had, by some miracle or collective diplomatic hallucination, remained oddly compliant until now.
He decided not to question it.
"Before we enter," he said, "there are three rules. First, do not touch anything on the first floor of the lab. Second, do not touch the main panels unless cleared. Third, listen to Alex."
Noah glanced back toward the security booth. "The terrifying guard?"
"The competent guard," Liam corrected.
"The terrifyingly competent guard."
"That one."
Mezos looked at the door. "Why only the first floor?"
Liam smiled. It was not reassuring.
"Because if I tell you not to touch anything in the entire lab, you'll become curious. If I specify the first floor, you'll wonder what is worse below and behave for at least ten minutes."
Rex rubbed two fingers over his brow. "That is disturbingly effective."
"It's engineering," Liam said. "Half of it is predicting failure states in machines. The other half is predicting failure states in people who think they are smarter than machines."
Noah lifted one hand. "Question."
"No."
"Why is the door made of lead?"
Liam turned toward the entrance.
The doors of Lab V were immense matte-grey slabs sunk into reinforced black stone, their outer faces layered with lead shielding and ward-sensitive sealing bands. The automated mechanism looked less like a university lab entrance and more like something built to keep a monster asleep.
"Because there… are interesting things behind it. Preferably ones Felix or Cain doesn't find out about," Liam said, pointing at Rex with his gaze.
Rex's expression went flat. "I feel unfairly assigned to silence management."
"You are the Crown Prince of Wrohan. Silence management is at least thirty percent of your job."
"Unfortunately accurate," Mezos murmured.
Noah leaned closer to the door with visible interest. "When you say interesting, do you mean politically interesting, mechanically interesting, or illegal-interesting?"
"Yes," Liam said.
Arik's mouth curved faintly.
Liam did not look at him. He had already learned that looking at Arik when the man was amused made the situation more irritating, not less.
He placed his palm on the reader.
The panel lit under his hand, blue-white first, then amber. The system took longer than it should have. Liam narrowed his eyes.
"Do not start."
The panel blinked.
Rex leaned slightly toward Arik. "He threatens doors."
"The door knows what it did," Liam said.
Then the locks released one after another with deep metallic thuds. The lead doors slid into the walls with the ponderous dignity of something old being forced to cooperate.
Cold air rolled out.
Liam stepped inside first and reached for the manual light sequence.
The lab woke in layers.
One line of floor lighting.
Then another.
Then the overhead rings flickered, protested, and came alive with a cold white glow that revealed Lab V in all its private, catastrophic glory.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Lab V looked like a disaster designed by someone brilliant, underfunded, overcaffeinated, and personally offended by storage regulations.
Gem arrays sat in half-open containment trays along the left wall, sorted by color, grade, and Liam's increasingly hostile handwriting. Ether batteries of various sizes were stacked in reinforced cradles, some commercial, some modified, and some old enough that the manufacturer seals had been scratched off and replaced with new ward-threading. Three portable storage columns stood near the back, transparent cores dim but active, each filled with suspended threads of contained ether moving like lightning trapped in glass.
Tables were covered with tools, schematic slates, calibration rods, stabilizer rings, conductive wire, cracked insulator plates, unlicensed conversion brackets, and at least one device Noah looked at for half a second before apparently deciding his soul was safer without identification.
Arik and his men became very still.
Liam noticed and ignored them.
"This," Noah said slowly, "is either a laboratory or evidence."
"Both can be true."
Mezos's gaze moved over the storage structures. "How many of these are licensed?"
"That is not a first-floor question."
Rex sighed. "Liam."
"What? They're contained."
"That was not an answer."
"It was a better answer than you deserved."
"You were considering whether any of these are storage technologies stolen from Agaron." Liam's red eyes narrowed. "They are not."
The lab went still in a different way.
Noah's brows lifted.
Mezos's expression sharpened, but he said nothing.
Arik looked at Liam for one quiet beat, gold eyes unreadable. "That was a specific accusation to preempt."
"It was a specific suspicion to prevent it from becoming tedious."
Rex exhaled through his nose. "Liam."
"No." Liam turned slightly, his coat shifting in a burgundy line behind him. "If we are going to work in my lab, let us save time. Nothing here was stolen from Agaron. Some of the structural logic may look similar because good engineering tends to develop in similar directions when solving the same problem and because Wrohan's ministers are parasites who keep trying to buy foreign expertise they do not understand. But these are mine."
Arik's gaze moved once more over the storage columns.
Then back to Liam.
"I didn't say otherwise."
"You didn't have to. Your brooch did half the judging for you."
Noah looked down at his own brooch. "Can they judge?"
"They can misread density and panic," Liam said. "Much like politicians."
Mezos's mouth curved faintly.
Arik stepped no closer, which Liam decided to acknowledge as proof of trainable behavior.
"These are prototypes?" Arik asked.
"Yes."
"For what?"
"For keeping ether stable long enough that outer districts do not lose power every winter because the palace sends them polished excuses instead of proper reserves."
The answer came out sharper than intended.
Liam did not apologize.
Arik did not look offended.
That was annoying.
Rex's expression had gone quiet. He knew enough of the funding fights to understand what Liam had not said: that Felix and Cain had cut, redirected, or delayed every serious attempt Liam had made to scale the work.
Noah glanced at the nearest storage column again, but this time with less suspicion and more interest.
"So this is infrastructure."
"This," Liam said, "is the reason half my family wants me supervised and the other half wants me funded, but if you want to know about that drama, I need at least two bottles of rum or cognac before I can speak."
He touched the panel of the elevator.
"This only goes down, and it takes a maximum of four people. You go first. I will follow."
Rex's expression changed at once.
"No."