The notice signal did not repeat.
That was almost worse than if it had.
For a single breathless second, the archive wing seemed to hold its shape around the sound of it, every shelf and drawer and cabinet suddenly attentive to the possibility that the corridor beyond might now be moving with purpose. Then the outer silence returned, thin but not empty, and Fang found himself listening to the building the way one listens to a room after an argument has ended but the tension has not yet gone.
Dr Sane was the first to move.
She did not rush, but the urgency in her changed posture was immediate. The correspondence slips remained tied in the satchel, the witness copy lay entered in the upper log, and the newly surfaced brass tag with Ravel Senn's name still rested beside the branch index. Fang could see the calculation in her face now, the measure of how much of this could be hidden, how much could be delayed, and how much would need to be defended in plain sight.
