The office door swung shut on its own weight one evening two weeks later, and Remus looked up from a half-finished ledger to find no one standing in the doorway at all.
"Rhaeya," he said, to the empty room. "I assume you're here about the letter."
She let the invisibility drop mid-step, cloak already thrown back, and something in the small, involuntary flinch that crossed her face told him he'd guessed right before she said a word.
"My father sends his thanks," she said. "And a request. He'd like your help with something considerably more delicate than delivering mail."
"Close your eyes," she added, before he could answer, already breaking the letter's seal.
He obeyed, and the flash of light that followed lit the room white even through his closed eyelids, bright enough that he understood, with a cold certainty, exactly how thoroughly Andrea's curiosity would have cost her if he'd let her open it herself back on the train.
"A precaution," Rhaeya said, once the light had faded, "in case anyone tried to read it who wasn't me."
"I'm glad I didn't test that theory secondhand," Remus said.
"My father wants me to enlist your help," she said, folding the letter away, "in a mission of my own. King Belsarius keeps a secret from everyone close to him, myself very much included, and my father believes it's dangerous enough to be worth uncovering properly."
"You're his fiancée," Remus said. "Shouldn't that put you on his side of whatever this is?"
She gave him a look that suggested the question was, at best, charmingly naive. "Our marriage exists because the Northlands and the Midlands both need it to, not because either of us chose the other for any warmer reason," she said. "My first duty was always to keep those two territories tied together. My second was to learn what I could from inside his own household, since he keeps me at enough distance that I've never once been trusted with the answer honestly. He won't even summon me to his own chambers most nights."
"I've had my fill of scheming for a lifetime," Remus said, and meant it more than he expected to when the words left his mouth. "I build things. I fix things. This particular game has cost me a general's rank and my own free run of two cities already, and I'm not eager to bid it any higher. But I'll build you one thing, since you're asking rather than stealing this time."
"What's that?"
"A hidden camera," Remus said, already reaching for the charcoal behind his ear. "Small enough to go unnoticed, sharp enough to actually be useful. It'll cost me my last remaining basilisk eye to make it, and once I've spent that, there isn't another one anywhere in my inventory or on order. So make it count."
Craft: Hidden Camera.
Materials Used: 1 x Basilisk Eye (final unit). Note: no further units available. This material cannot be replaced through Craft, Modify, or trade at present.
The finished device sat small and unassuming in his palm when he handed it over, no larger than a coin, and Rhaeya turned it over once with real care before tucking it away inside her cloak.
"Beyond this," Remus said, "I'm out. I hope that's fair to both of us."
"It's more than fair," she said, and something almost like genuine warmth crossed her face for the first time since he'd met her. "Hopefully this is the last time either of us needs the other for anything at all."
She was gone within the minute, invisibility swallowing her whole before she'd even reached the door.
That night, Remus's dreams filled with images that belonged to neither of his lives: a vast, floating shape built from two pyramids fused together at their widest point, drifting slow and silent through a sky he didn't recognize, and a girl's face, tattooed with a small green triangle at the center of her forehead, staring at him with an expression he couldn't quite read as fear or recognition.
He'd gone to bed that night later than usual, the ledger from the railroad's second-quarter earnings still spread open across his desk when Andrea finally came in and physically closed it in front of him, the closest she'd ever come to ordering him to sleep. He remembered, in the last clear moment before the dark took the rest of the night away from him entirely, lying on his back in the dark listening to the Ember Works settle into its own nightly quiet, forge coals ticking as they cooled, a night bird somewhere out past the training arena, and thinking, with the particular satisfaction of a man finally allowing himself to feel it, that for the first time since he'd woken up in this body he had built something that felt less like a fortress under siege and more like an actual home.
He woke to nothing at all. No sound, no warning, no last coherent thought he could later reconstruct. Whoever moved through Autumnshade's corridors that night moved through solid walls without triggering a single ward, silent enough that not one of the automatons standing watch so much as turned its head, and by the time anyone else in the compound noticed anything wrong, Remus was already gone.
He came back to awareness inside a coffin-shaped enclosure in the belly of something vast, wasp-shaped, built for flight in a way that felt fundamentally wrong to look at directly, sixty-three other identical enclosures arrayed in neat rows along the walls around him.
"Is this one strong enough?" a voice asked, somewhere close, unhurried. "The last one burned out too quickly. We can't afford to surface again until we're ready to strike properly."
"He is," another voice answered. "This one will carry more of our ship than any of the ones we've already taken. I can feel it in him already."
Whatever happened next arrived as pure sensation rather than anything Remus could later put a clean shape to, a pain that had no location in his body because it seemed to come from somewhere underneath his body entirely, layered beneath it the muffled, ongoing sound of other people screaming in enclosures he couldn't see. He didn't know how long it lasted. He knew only that it stopped, eventually, replaced by a sickening, bottomless sensation of falling.
The ship broke apart above open water and open rock both, screaming metal and splintering wood, and the enclosure holding him tore free of the wreck entirely, throwing him clear an instant before the rest of the hull came apart against the ground in a spreading wall of fire.
He crawled free of the shattered glass on hands that wouldn't quite hold his own weight, found a stretch of bare rock to sit down on, and managed, before the dark finally closed over him completely, only a single ragged sentence.
"Where the hell am I."
Three figures crossed the rock toward his unconscious body a moment later: a man with skin the deep red of banked coals, a girl with a small green triangle tattooed at the center of her forehead, and another girl whose skin held the pale, cool blue of something that had spent its whole life somewhere the sun rarely reached.
"It's exactly like my dream," the tattooed girl said, crouching close, something unsettled moving behind her eyes. "But what does it mean?"
"He might be here to hurt us," the red-skinned man said. "We should end this while he's too weak to fight back."
"He's unarmed and half-dead," the blue-skinned girl said, already kneeling to check the rise and fall of his breathing. "Our own customs say we feed the hungry and heal the wounded, even our enemies, before we decide anything else about them. Once he can stand, we take him to see the masters. Let them be the ones to decide what he actually is."
None of the three of them, crouched together over a stranger who'd fallen out of the sky and into the one corner of the world that had gone five centuries without a single visitor from anywhere else, had the first idea yet what they'd actually caught.