They turned a corner into a narrower corridor, lined with closed doors bearing department numbers half worn away by time, and it was there that Andrew froze.
Three figures blocked their path.
At the center stood a man whose age was difficult to guess, his head shaved close, his back held with a rigidity that was almost painful to look at. He wore no insignia, no rank markings, nothing that might have betrayed any kind of authority, and it was precisely that absence which made his presence all the more unsettling. Two men flanked him, perfectly still, hands clasped behind their backs as though standing at parade rest, waiting for an order that never seemed to be in any hurry to arrive.
"Andrew," the man said.
Not a greeting. A simple confirmation of identity, delivered in the same tone one might use to check a box on a form.
Andrew straightened, but Emma saw it immediately, with a clarity that had nothing natural about it, the struggle playing out beneath that rigid posture. His shoulders, too square. His jaw, too tight. Sweat already beading at his hairline despite the persistent cold of the badly heated corridor.
"Councilor Marek," Andrew answered. "I'm on duty. I'm showing the Capitol to..."
"I know who she is." Marek didn't even look at Emma as he said it, as though the information had already been filed, processed, archived, and he felt no need to verify it a second time by actually looking at her. "Internal surveillance reports flagged unauthorized access to classified documents. From your terminal. This week."
It wasn't a question.
"I..." Andrew swallowed. "I haven't accessed anything I wasn't cleared to..."
"I didn't ask for a justification." Marek's voice neither rose nor fell. It stayed at the same mechanical flatness throughout, as though the very idea of modulating his tone struck him as an unnecessary expenditure of energy. "I know perfectly well it isn't you reading those files, Andrew. She has you read them for her. And I also know she's been hiding something from the rest of the Council for several weeks now. Something serious enough that she didn't dare trust it to an official channel."
He paused, just long enough for Andrew to understand that no denial would be believed.
"If Agatha is holding information that could shape the future of this continent, and she's chosen to keep it to herself, that's no longer a matter of political discretion, Andrew. That's a betrayal of every single person living behind these walls. And I would rather hear it now, from you, than too late, from a corpse."
The silence that followed wasn't theatrical. It was simply the void Marek let stand, because he clearly saw no reason to fill it himself.
And it was in that void, precisely, that Emma saw it.
It was a sensation before it was ever a thought, something closer to instinct than to image. More like a feeling of tipping, as if she were watching a coin spinning in midair, suspended between its two faces, and she could see, with an unbearable clarity, the two outcomes Andrew was weighing at once. On one side, a lie, fragile, poorly built, the kind that would crumble under the first real question. On the other, the truth, which he had clearly been trying to bury since the moment this conversation began.
Say it. Tell me what it really is.
She didn't even form the thought consciously. It came more like a reflex, the same one that had been pushing her, ever since she woke up, to tear through every secret anyone tried to keep from her. She simply wanted to know. She never knew whether that need, however pure or however selfish it might have been, belonged entirely to her, or whether it had somehow tangled itself with Andrew's own hesitation. All she knew was that the moment she felt it, something inside her pushed. A pressure, faint, almost imperceptible, like a single finger pressing down on a scale already balanced on the edge of tipping.
The coin landed on the wrong side, for Andrew.
"The war," he breathed.
The word dropped into the corridor like a stone falling into a bottomless well.
Andrew's hand flew to his mouth, too late, his eyes wide with a horror that wasn't feigned, as though he had heard his own voice say those words before he'd even had the chance to decide to say them.
For the first time, something shifted on Marek's face.
It was brief, barely more than a held breath too long, a slight slackening at the corner of his mouth that he caught and smoothed over almost at once, the way one catches an object that nearly slipped from one's hands. The news had genuinely struck him, somewhere beneath that armor of practiced calm, before he'd had the chance to see it coming.
"Say that again," he said, and for the first time, his voice carried something that came close, very close, to urgency.
The silence that followed lasted only a second, but Andrew seemed unable to break it on his own, as if paralyzed by the sound of his own voice, which had just betrayed him.
"The reports," he went on anyway, in a breathless rush, his voice carrying a confidence that wasn't his own. He had already lost everything the moment that first word left his mouth. He might as well see it through. "They talk about movements. On the other side of the Sundered Ocean. It isn't going to hold much longer. Lady Agatha knows. And she was going to tell the Council, I swear it! She was just waiting for the right moment, she never meant to hide anything, I promise you!"
Marek said nothing for a long moment.
There was no outburst of anger, no flicker of triumph in his voice. But the crack that had run through his face a moment earlier hadn't fully vanished. It had simply folded itself back in, the way one carefully sheathes a blade rather than discarding it. Something behind his eyes had just rearranged itself, like a signal flare quietly going up.
"Good," he said finally.
A single word. But his voice, this time, carried a different weight, the voice of a man who had just been handed exactly the news he'd been dreading.
He turned on his heel, his two men falling into step behind him with the same silent precision, and walked away without another glance at Emma, not because she had stopped mattering to him, but because there was now, somewhere behind his eyes, an entire war to prepare for, and no curiosity in the world weighed more than that.
It was only then that she felt the world pull away from her.
It wasn't pain, not exactly. More like a withdrawal, as if someone had reached out and turned down, in one sharp motion, the intensity of everything around her. The colors of the corridor seemed suddenly paler, washed out, and the edges of Marek's retreating shape blurred faintly, like a photograph snapped a half second too late. A strange numbness crept into her limbs, a cottony detachment that had nothing to do with ordinary fatigue, more like some part of herself had wandered off to retrieve whatever she had borrowed from Andrew, and hadn't quite made it all the way back yet.
What just happened? Was it because of me that he said it? The question drifted through Emma's mind with an odd distance, as though she were watching her own panic from somewhere outside herself, unable to fully feel it.
Andrew didn't have that luxury. He was sweating in heavy beads, his forehead glistening despite the persistent cold of the corridor, his hands shaking with a tremor he no longer bothered to hide.
"Emma?" His voice reached her as if through a wall. "Are you alright? You look..."
He didn't finish the sentence. His gaze drifted toward the spot where Marek had vanished, then came back to her, and Emma understood, even through the fog still dulling her thoughts, that he genuinely couldn't decide which of the two unfolding disasters deserved his attention first.
"Listen to me," he said at last, his voice dropping to a rushed, almost pleading whisper. "What just happened, I need to forget it. And so do you. You heard nothing, I said nothing, none of those words ever left my mouth." He dragged a trembling hand across his damp forehead, as though he could wipe the entire situation away with it. "I have to warn Lady Agatha before Marek does it his way, before this becomes public. Go back to your quarters, you should remember the way by now. Alone, for now. I'll come find you later, I promise, but right now, I need one thing from you. Just one."
He paused, as though even that last sentence cost him some enormous effort.
"Forget."
Emma studied him. For all his usual anxious nature, she had never seen him this close to outright panic, the kind of fear that no longer bothers hiding behind good manners.
She didn't understand.
Mostly because it was her, not him, who truly bore the responsibility for what had just happened, even if she had no intention of admitting it, and even if the whole thing still felt blurry, almost ungraspable, to her too. But mostly because, even granting that she understood the substance of the news itself, this war was supposed to concern the entire continent, wasn't it? Bad news, certainly. Very bad news. The kind everyone should, in theory, grow worried about, slowly, collectively, the way one watches a storm still gathering somewhere on the horizon. Not the kind that makes a grown man fall apart in front of you.
Wasn't Andrew's reaction, all things considered, a little excessive?
But the only thing she could do was let him go, without ever getting the rest of the story. Once again, she was being left in the dark. Far too often, for her taste, these past few days.
Andrew read it in her eyes, the silent understanding that she couldn't refuse. He started off at a trot, then, as though struck by a sudden thought, broke into a run toward the far end of the corridor and vanished through a door whose existence she hadn't even suspected a second earlier.
The silence that followed his departure had a different texture from every other silence she'd known at the Capitol. Not heavy. Not hostile. Just empty, and entirely hers.
Emma smiled.
Maybe, just maybe, this could work in her favor after all. It was time for some mischief.