The transition from a systemic market war to a physical security breach didn't announce itself with the ringing of the palace alarm bells. It began in the deep, freezing quiet of the three-o'clock hour, as a subtle change in the pressure lines supplying the central scriptorium's pneumatic message tubes.
Elara sat at her secondary desk in the lower archive vault, her fingers steady as she aligned a mechanical slide-rule against the latest shipping manifests from the eastern delta. The charcoal-grey coat she wore was buttoned to the jaw, the heavy wool smelling faintly of old sea coal and the bitter salt spray she had carried down from the sea wall. Beside her, the hijacked western cryptographic terminal was clicking with a low, rhythmic cadence, its internal brass wheels dropping into place every sixty seconds to clear another batch of southern textile contracts through the imperial mainframe.
