Kael listened without interrupting.
This surprised Ren. He had expected questions — the sharp, precise kind that Kael deployed in training, cutting through to the centre of something before Ren had finished building up to it. Instead Kael sat in his chair with his hands folded on the table between them and his cup untouched to his right and listened to everything.
Ren told him in the order it had happened. The night he couldn't sleep. The pull in his chest. The square and the tree and the voice and the fruit. The heartbeat that had lived behind his ribs ever since. The rot threads spreading through the mana currents a little more each day. The silver-eyed children. Yuna.
When he finished the room was quiet.
Kael looked at the table for a long time. His jaw was tight. The lines in his face that Ren had read as weathering looked different now — deeper, the kind of lines that come not just from weather but from carrying something for an extended period without putting it down.
"How long have you known?" Ren asked.
Kael looked up. "Known what exactly."
"That something was wrong with the tree."
A pause. "Four years," he said. "Since I came to Willowbrook." He looked at the cup. Did not pick it up. "You feel it differently when you work near it. Not clearly. Nothing you could put into words or take to anyone official. Just — a change. Like a room where someone has opened a window you did not know was closed. Something in the air that was not there before." He stopped. "I told myself it was the neighborhood. The garbage facility. The general quality of this part of the city."
"But you knew it wasn't."
"I knew it wasn't."
Ren waited.
"I did not investigate," Kael said. The words came out flat and exact, the tone of someone making a precise accounting. "I came to Willowbrook because I was done. Done with ranked combat, done with politics, done with the things that happen in the upper levels of this city that no one at the lower levels is supposed to know about. I wanted a quiet place to finish quietly." He looked at his hands. "I found a quiet place next to something that was not quiet at all and I chose not to look at it."
"Because looking would have required doing something about it."
"Yes."
The room was quiet again. Outside the window the city moved in its evening way — distant voices, the occasional bell, the soft sounds of a place settling into night.
"I'm not here to judge what you did or didn't do," Ren said. "I need to know what you know. Anything you noticed in four years, even things that seemed small."
Kael looked at him for a moment. Then he stood and went to the back of the room where a low shelf held a collection of objects — books, a few rolled papers, a small wooden chest with a simple latch. He opened the chest and removed a folded piece of paper that had been folded and unfolded enough times that the creases were soft and the edges worn.
He brought it to the table and laid it flat.
It was a list. Names. Dates. Ren could see immediately what it was — the same pattern he had found when he searched the archives. Names with dates of arrival in the city. And then nothing after. No departure dates. No graduation records. No deaths.
"I started keeping it two years ago," Kael said. "When I noticed the pattern." He sat back down. "One of the students here when I first arrived — a girl named Sasha, water affinity, quiet, very good with small precise movements — disappeared in my second month. I was told she had transferred to another academy. I believed it." He touched the paper. "The next one disappeared eight months later. I was told she had returned home, family circumstances. I believed that too." His finger moved down the list. "By the third one I stopped believing."
Ren looked at the list. Eleven names. Dates spanning four years. All Willowbrook students or students from the other minor academies in this district.
All with gifts that Kael had marked in small notation beside each name.
He looked at the notations.
Every single one said the same thing: silver eyes.
"All Insight-blessed," Ren said.
"All Insight-blessed. Yes."
"And you kept this list and did nothing with it."
The words came out more direct than he intended. Not cruel but not softened either. Kael received them without flinching.
"And I kept the list and did nothing with it," he confirmed. "I am aware of what that means."
Ren looked at the names. Eleven children over four years. Eleven families who had received whatever official explanation had been constructed — transfer, return home, circumstances — and had believed it or had not believed it and had no way to push back regardless.
He thought about his own parents. His father reading a short letter very carefully. His mother's bright eyes going somewhere distant when Yuna's name entered a room.
He folded the list and looked at Kael. "Can I keep this?"
"It's yours."
The city archives were in the main administrative district — a long, low building three streets back from the central avenue, staffed by clerks who moved through the stacks with the practiced efficiency of people who had made peace with spending their working lives surrounded by paper.
Ren went the next morning before the training day started.
He had thought about how to approach this. Walking in and asking for records of missing students was not going to produce useful results — either the records had been altered, in which case asking officially would tell whoever had altered them that someone was looking, or the records were intact but access was restricted. Either way a direct approach was wrong.
He asked instead for general enrollment records. Standard. The kind of information anyone admitted to a city academy was entitled to request about their own institution. The clerk who helped him was a middle-aged woman with a careful face who found what he needed without comment and set it on the reading table and left him to it.
The enrollment records for Willowbrook going back six years.
He worked through them carefully, cross-referencing against Kael's list. The names matched — each of the eleven students appeared in the enrollment records with their intake date, their gift classification, their assigned room and meal stipend amount.
And then nothing.
No exit record for any of them. No transfer documentation. No record of the official explanation that had apparently been given to Kael — no transfer notice, no family-circumstances notation, nothing. They had been enrolled and then they had simply stopped appearing in the records, as though someone had reached into the files and removed the pages that would have explained the gap.
Ren sat with the records and thought.
Removing records required access. Access to the archive required either an administrative position or authorization from someone with one. The level of authorization required to clean eleven sets of records over four years without leaving any trace of the cleaning itself — that was not a minor clerical position. That was someone with significant institutional reach.
He noted this and moved on.
He asked the clerk, on his way out, whether there were records of inter-academy transfers — specifically the documentation that accompanied a student when they moved from one institution to another.
The clerk looked at him. "Those would be in the receiving institution's intake records."
"Of course," Ren said. "Thank you."
He left.
He visited three other academies over the following three days.
Not the main academy — not yet, not directly. The other minor institutions in the city's lower districts: Harrow Hall, which served students with gifts related to earth and stone; Fenwick School, which handled what the classification system called ambient gifts — blessings too diffuse or subtle to fit neatly into combat or elemental categories; and the Copper Building, which had no official name beyond its color and housed the students whose gifts had been classified as potentially useful to the merchant sector.
He asked about transfer intake records at each one.
None of the eleven students on Kael's list appeared in any of their intake records.
He stood outside the Copper Building on the third day and looked at the sky and thought about where eleven students could go if they had not transferred to any other institution in the city, had not been sent home, had not died of anything officially recorded, and had not simply walked out through the city gate.
They were still in the city.
The tree had told him this. She is still in the city. And she is not free.
They were in the city and they were not in any institution and they were not in any record.
They were somewhere that did not appear in records.
He nearly walked past it by accident.
He had been returning from the Copper Building, cutting through the administrative district to get back to Willowbrook before dinner, and he had taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up on a street he did not recognize — narrower than the surrounding streets, running between the back wall of the main academy complex and a row of storage buildings that backed onto it.
He would have kept walking. There was nothing remarkable about the street.
Except his Insight showed him something.
He stopped.
The mana in this street was wrong. Not dramatically — if he had not been looking with his full Insight open he would not have noticed at all. But with the Insight open and calibrated as it had become over three months of daily use, the wrongness was clear: a current of mana moving underground, beneath the paving stones, running in the direction of the main academy's back wall. Moving slowly. Steadily. Not the natural diffuse flow of ambient mana through soil and stone.
Directed. Intentional.
He stood on the narrow street and watched the underground current with his Insight and followed its path with his eyes.
It went directly beneath the main academy's back wall and disappeared.
He looked at the wall. Solid stone, well-maintained, the same construction as the rest of the main academy complex. No visible door. No entrance of any kind.
He walked the length of the wall slowly, watching the mana current, noting where it ran strongest. At one point — about forty feet from the corner — the current was noticeably denser. He stopped there and looked at the wall and saw nothing.
He pressed his palm against the stone.
Through the stone, faint but unmistakable, he felt it.
Heartbeats. More than one. Slow. Too slow for waking people.
And alongside the heartbeats, a thin continuous flow — mana being drawn out and redirected, steady as water through a pipe, in the direction that led toward the city's center.
Toward the World Tree.
Ren stood with his palm flat against the back wall of the main academy and felt his own heartbeat and the World Tree's heartbeat and the slow wrong heartbeats on the other side of the stone and understood exactly what he was standing next to.
He stood there for a long time.
Then he took his hand off the wall and walked to the end of the street and turned the corner and sat on a low stone step and thought about what to do next.
Going in through the wall was not possible — the stone was solid, no gaps his Insight could find, and he did not have the mana capacity to move stone. Going in through the main academy's front entrance without authorization and without a plan would announce his presence to whoever had arranged this, who was clearly someone with significant reach inside the institution.
He needed to go in without being seen.
He needed Oshi.
"No," Oshi said.
They were in the dormitory. Oshi was sitting on his bed with his knees pulled up and his hands folded around them, which was his default resting position. He had listened to everything Ren told him with the calm, attentive expression he brought to most things. And then he had said no.
"I need someone who can move through a space without being noticed," Ren said. "Your gift is exactly that."
"My gift is not exactly that. My gift is that I suppress my mana signature instinctively. It makes me hard to notice in a crowd. It does not make me invisible and it does not make me able to walk through restricted areas of the main academy without being seen by anyone who happens to look directly at me."
"But it reduces the chance significantly."
"It reduces the chance of someone's mana sense detecting me. It does not reduce the chance of someone's eyes detecting me." He looked at Ren steadily. "What you're describing is infiltrating the main academy's restricted areas. That is expulsion if we're caught. Possibly worse depending on who we run into."
"I know."
"And you're asking me anyway."
"Yes."
Oshi was quiet. He looked at his hands. "Why me? You could go alone."
"I could. But I can't suppress my own mana signature. Anyone with a sensitivity above D-Rank would feel me as soon as I entered the building. You can cover both of us if you're close enough — your suppression field extends about three feet."
"Four feet," Oshi said. "I measured it last week."
"Four feet. That's enough for both of us if we move carefully."
Oshi was quiet for a longer moment. Outside the window the evening was settling into dark, the lanterns beginning their rise above the city rooftops.
"What do you expect to find?" he said.
Ren told him about the heartbeats. About the mana current flowing underground. About the eleven names on Kael's list and the absence of any transfer records and the clear implication of what was happening in the space behind that wall.
Oshi listened to all of it without changing expression. When Ren finished he was quiet for a moment.
"If there are people in there," he said carefully, "we cannot get them out tonight. Not two of us. Not without a plan."
"I know. I just need to see what's there. Confirm it. Get enough information to know what we're actually dealing with."
"And then what?"
"Then I tell Kael. And we make a plan that can actually work."
Oshi looked at him for another moment. Then he unfolded himself from the bed and stood. He was not tall — shorter than Ren, narrow through the shoulders, the kind of build that disappeared in crowds even without the mana suppression.
"Four feet," he said. "Stay within four feet of me at all times."
"Four feet," Ren agreed.
"And if we run into anyone above C-Rank we leave. Immediately. No arguing."
"Agreed."
"And you owe me something after this."
"What do you want?"
Oshi thought about it. "I want Kael to give me a proper training plan. He's been giving me passive exercises for my suppression control. I want active combat training."
"I'll talk to him."
"Tonight. Before we go."
"Tonight," Ren said. "Before we go."
They went at the second bell of the night.
The main academy's back entrance — a service door used by supply deliveries, unlocked during delivery hours and secured after — was locked by the time they arrived. Oshi spent forty seconds with a thin piece of wire that he produced from somewhere in his sleeve without explaining it and the lock opened.
Ren decided not to ask about the wire.
Inside: a service corridor, stone-floored, lit by a single mana lamp at the far end casting more shadow than light. Storage rooms on either side, doors closed, the smell of cleaning materials and old paper. No people. No sounds from further in except the distant, muffled sounds of a large building settling into its night state — the creak of old timbers, the movement of air through passages.
They moved quickly and quietly, staying close, Oshi's suppression field covering them both. Ren kept his Insight open and tracked the mana signatures around them — a few warm bodies on upper floors, moving slowly, night-patrol patterns. Nobody in this wing.
He followed the underground current.
It was easier to trace from inside — closer to it, the pull was more distinct, a directional sense he had developed over weeks of feeling it from outside. He led them through the service corridor and into a secondary passage that ran behind the main hall and down a set of stairs that went lower than the building's ground floor.
Below ground level.
The stairs ended at a door.
Ren stopped.
The door was different from everything else in the building — newer, the stone around its frame recently mortared, the door itself heavy iron rather than wood. A mana lock. He could see it — a complex construction of interlocking mana threads woven through the iron, requiring a specific key-pattern to release without triggering whatever was built into the alarm function.
He could not open it.
But the door had a gap at the base. Small — less than two inches of clearance between the iron and the stone floor. Enough.
He lay flat on the cold floor and put his eye to the gap.
The room beyond was long and low-ceilinged, lit by mana lamps placed at intervals along the walls. The lamps were dim — not decorative dim, functionally dim, the minimum light required for monitoring rather than living. The floor was stone. The ceiling was stone. Along both walls, arranged in rows with the precision of something that had been carefully organized rather than casually assembled, were beds.
On each bed: a person.
He could not see faces clearly at this angle and this distance. He could see the general shape of people lying still — too still, the stillness of deep unconsciousness rather than sleep. He could see the mana above each one — thin, dim, the output of someone whose reserves were being steadily drawn down. Above each bed, connecting each person to a series of thin copper pipes that ran along the ceiling toward the far wall, were mana threads. Fine as spider silk. Constant.
He counted the beds.
Eleven on the left side. Eleven on the right.
Twenty-two people in total.
Kael's list had eleven names. The World Tree had said silver-eyed children. Twenty-two was more than he had expected — either the list was incomplete or the operation had expanded beyond what Kael had been able to track from the outside.
He looked for Yuna.
At this distance, at this angle, in this light — he could not identify individual faces. He could see hair, the general shape of features, the particular stillness of each person. One figure near the far end of the left row had dark hair and was small — small the way Yuna had always been small, the way their mother was small, the family's particular quality of being compact and taking up less space than expected.
He could not be certain.
He pressed his palm flat against the floor under the door gap and extended his Insight as far as it would reach into the space below — past the door, through the gap, into the room. The mana he found there was wrong in the way the tree had described: not dead, not absent, but drained. Being pulled out continuously in small steady amounts, fed through the copper pipes, carried upward and through the building's foundation in the underground current he had followed here.
Fed to the World Tree's roots.
He withdrew his hand and got up from the floor.
He looked at Oshi, who had stayed close and silent through all of it, his face carefully neutral. Oshi looked back at him and said nothing.
They went back the way they had come.
Kael did not say anything for a long time after Ren finished.
He sat at the table with both hands flat on the surface and looked at the middle distance. The list — his list, the folded paper with eleven names — was on the table between them. Ren had added a notation at the bottom: 22 total. Both walls. Copper pipe extraction system. Underground mana current to World Tree roots.
Outside the window the city was fully dark. The second bell had passed. The third was still an hour away.
"Twenty-two," Kael said.
"At least. The room could have more that I couldn't see from the floor gap."
Kael looked at the list. His jaw was doing the tight thing again. "I thought eleven was the complete picture. I had been watching for four years and I thought I had found the whole of it."
"You found what was visible from outside. Whoever set this up has been careful."
"Careful." The word came out flat. "They have been doing this for four years under the nose of every ranking official and noble family in this city and nobody has noticed and you are calling it careful."
"I'm calling it what it is."
"It's monstrous." He said it quietly. The kind of quiet that comes after volume has been considered and rejected as insufficient for the weight of what is being expressed. "Those are children. Children who came to this city because they were blessed and someone decided their blessing was a resource to be harvested."
"Yes."
"And whoever decided that has enough reach to clean official records, maintain an operation in the basement of the main academy, and run mana extraction pipes through the city's foundations without anyone investigating the construction work."
"Yes."
Kael looked at him. "Do you know who?"
Ren had been thinking about this since he got up off the floor in the corridor. The access required. The institutional reach. The ability to maintain something this large and this carefully hidden for four years while remaining above suspicion.
"Not with certainty," he said. "But whoever it is, they are not small. They are someone that people in this city trust. Someone that nobody would look at and think: this person is capable of that."
"A respected person."
"A very respected person."
Kael was quiet for a moment. "What do you need from me?"
"Right now? I need you to keep training me. Harder than you have been. The gap between what I am and what I need to be is still too large." Ren looked at the list. "And I need you to stop drinking."
A pause. Kael looked at him.
"Not permanently," Ren said. "I'm not asking for that. I'm asking for now. For however long this takes. I need the version of you that got to B-Rank, not the version that's been sitting in a chair at Willowbrook for four years."
The silence stretched out.
Then Kael reached over and picked up his cup — the one that had been sitting untouched to his right all evening — and carried it to the window and poured it out into the dark.
He set the empty cup down on the windowsill.
"Training starts at the fourth bell tomorrow," he said. "Not the fifth. The fourth."
"I'll be there," Ren said.
"And the boy — Oshi. I'll give him a proper active training plan."
"He'll be glad to hear it."
"He could have just asked."
"He did," Ren said. "Three weeks ago. You told him ambient suppression gifts didn't benefit from combat training."
Kael looked at the empty cup. "I was wrong about that."
"You were wrong about a few things," Ren said. "That's all right. You're correcting them."
He picked up the list from the table and folded it carefully along its worn creases and put it in his pocket.
"Goodnight, Kael."
"Goodnight."
He went upstairs. He lay on his bed in the dark and felt two heartbeats and thought about dark hair and small figures and a room full of people who had come to the city to build something and had instead become material for someone else's ambition.
I found you, he thought toward whatever frequency Yuna might be tuned to. I don't know for certain it was you yet. But I found the room. I know where you are.
I'm coming. Give me time.
He closed his eyes.
Above the city the lanterns drifted and the World Tree pulsed its slow light and somewhere below the main academy's back wall twenty-two people breathed in their wrong, too-still way, their mana flowing out of them through copper pipes into the dark.
Ren breathed in the dark too. But differently.
He breathed like someone who had somewhere to be.