Raizen stared at her.

"Alteea? In the Underworks?"

"That’s the hunch."

"What for?"

"I told you - I don’t know."

The corridor stretched away on both sides of them, dim and silent, the lower archive level still humming in the background with the deep mechanical pulse of the Heart’s distant operations. Raizen pushed both hands through his hair. The headache behind his eyes was settling in for a longer stay than he’d hoped.

"Why do you think she went down there?"

Kori shrugged. "The trade routes have been getting more active lately. Bigger shipments, more scrap or low-quality Luminite, more frequent. The Underworks is moving more goods than it was two months ago, and some smugglers aren’t being slowed down. The patrols aren’t being increased. Whoever’s running things down there is operating with complete confidence. Which usually means they are either extremely dangerous or have a deal with someone from up here."

"And the Council?"

"Ab-so-lu-te-ly hates it!" Kori let out a small laugh, grabbing her own stomach, as if it was the funniest thing in the whole world. "The cheaper goods that come up from below are eating into the Council families’ import margins. The expensive things they’re used to selling at marked-up prices - The Underworks markets have ’em for a fraction of the cost. Not the same quality, of course, but close enough that customers don’t always care."

"So why doesn’t the Council shut it down?"

"They want to, but they can’t."

"They can’t?"

"Darling, we met in the Underworks. Has that thick head of yours already forgot? We’re talking about The Underworks." She flicked Raizen’s forehead with one finger. "The Council has political power. The Underworks has logistics. And right now, the Underworks logistics network is more sophisticated than the Council’s enforcement capacity. Wardens don’t go below the third sub-level without orders or strong guts, and orders haven’t been coming. Ever since the Marcus drama you and Feris caused, the Wardens haven’t set one foot down there. Alteea’s been... Distracted, and The Council doesn’t do anything except discuss and plan. But they absolutely suck at putting those plans in action, so they depend on someone like Solomon or Alteea."

Raizen processed everything. The image he held of the Underworks - Obi’s forge, Cinderette’s flowers, Granny Louissa’s stews, the families he’d come to know in the months before Neoshima and the Academy - sat next to the new information without quite fitting. The Underworks of his memory was a place where life was hard and people were all smuggling behind each other’s backs. The Underworks Kori was describing was a place where life was getting easier, where someone down there was pushing growth, where the trade routes Obi worked on the edges of were becoming a serious commercial network.

He thought about Obi. About visiting. About sitting on that worn anvil in the forge and asking how things had been. He realized, with a small, surprised warmth, that he was glad. Whatever was happening down there - whoever was running it - it meant the people he cared about were eating better. The flowers Cinderette grew were probably reaching more corners of the undercity. The work Obi did was probably finding more demand. Life was getting better for the people who lived in the place Neoshima pretended didn’t exist.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "Let’s go up."

"Mm."

They walked back toward the elevator. Raizen kept his eyes forward, deliberately not looking back at the door they were leaving behind. He didn’t want to see whether the lights in Eiden’s office were still on, and he didn’t want to enter that room again. But the graphs were stuck in his mind – the frequencies, the responses, the second energy signature.

The elevator opened on their approach. Kori pressed for the main floor and leaned back against the wall, crossing her arms. The elevator hummed upward.

She glanced at him sideways.

"So," she said. "Did you at least have fun?"

Raizen blinked. "What?"

"In Ukai. Before everything was covered in smoke, the sky got holes in it and you came back looking like someone replaced half your blood with old coffee. Did you at least have fun?"

Raizen lazily wiped his right eye with a finger. The honest answer required actual recall. He let his memory open - let himself reach for the parts of the trip that hadn’t been mission, hadn’t been performance, hadn’t been the architecture of saving his own arse while pretending to be a polite student. Just the moments. The ones he’d tucked away while everything else was happening.

Falling from the dragon. The wind in his face, the world spinning, Elin’s voice cutting through the air with an exasperation that didn’t quite hide her amusement.

Hitting Kenzo with a tornado kick and being caught by him before he hit the ground. The sound of Kenzo’s laugh - booming, shameless, full-bodied - while Raizen tried to figure out which way was up.

Spending those few hours with Hikari. Standing on the edge of the platform with Saffi, watching the lanterns rise and exploding when they reached the hole. The lizard’s weird insults.

His own face changed. The smile that arrived was not forced. It came up the way smiles came up when a person was remembering something genuinely good - slow, small, a little crooked at the edges.

"Yeah," he said. "I had a lot of fun."

The elevator reached the main floor. The doors opened on the Heart’s central level, the engineers still moving between bays, the deep mechanical rhythm filling the air the way it always did. Kori pushed off the wall and stepped out. Raizen followed closely behind.

"Well," she said. "If you’re going to be a good Royal Scholar, you’ll get to see other cities, too."

Raizen stopped walking.

"Wait, really!?"

Kori turned and looked at him.

His face had gone wild - eyes wide, posture forward, the specific energy of a kid who had just been informed that something he wanted very badly was actually achievable. He hadn’t traveled much before Ukai, but he’d loved it. The mountains, the trees, the festival, the bench above the city - every part of it had felt like proof that the world was bigger than the cliff he’d grown up on, and the world being bigger had made him want to see more of it.

Kori’s expression shifted. Not much, but for her - the faintest tilt of her head, the slight raising of one eyebrow – was a generous reaction, equivalent of oh, this is cute.

"Yeah," she said. "But only if you do your homework."

"I’ll – uh – definitely do my homework!"

"Mm-hm."

"I will!"

She started walking again. He followed, and the thought of more travel - more cities, more skies he hadn’t seen, more cliffs and platforms and weird foods and people whose names he didn’t know yet - was working on his mood the way fresh air worked on a stuffy room.

"Speaking of homework," Kori said.

She turned down a side corridor, leading him through a section of the Heart he hadn’t been in before. Not workshop bays or laboratories - just blank, padded rooms separated by thick walls, the kind of spaces used for combat practice or sound containment or whatever else required isolation. Most of them were empty. Some doors stood open, the interiors lit by overhead lamps that gave the padding a soft, neutral colour.

Kori stopped at one of them, and stepped inside.

The room was empty except for a single table near the wall and a slate sitting on it. The slate was an older model – the one from two years ago - its case worn around the edges, its screen dark.

Kori walked over and picked it up.

"Hikari wanted some Eon training earlier," she said. "I had to come supervise, and forgot my slate when we left."

"Damn," Raizen said. "You can remember where you left stuff?"

Kori didn’t look at him. She tapped her temple - specifically, the side of her face where the Chasmis eye sat behind her hair, the snowflake pupil hidden under the silvery strands she always kept arranged across it.

"Having a Chasmis also improves cognitive function, remember? You learned that in school. Memory, processing, retention - they all sharpen when the eye activates."

"Right. I forgot."

"Ironic."

Before Raizen could come up with a reply, Kori turned and pushed the slate into his hands.

"Here." 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

Raizen looked down at the screen. The display showed a few documents - Kori’s, clearly, judging by the dense formatting and the specific shorthand she used in her notes.

His face went pale.