Zeke moves with a flat, unhurried efficiency. I follow him on the balls of my feet, watching where I place my weight.

  The service entrance opens into a narrow hallway lined with identical wooden doors, each one marked with a small brass plate - titles and ranks in a system designed to process people rather than remember them. The floor is hard stone, unforgiving underfoot.

  We reach the balcony railing at the hallway's end. Below us, the Guild's public hall - rows of long wooden benches, the kind of space where people spend whole days waiting to be acknowledged. Empty now, lit only by the lantern at the far end where two guards sit at a desk with a card game between them.

  Zeke pulls me back against a stone pillar.

  "Two o'clock," he murmurs.

  I look. The guards are hunched over their hands, lantern between them, arguing in the low voices of men who have been at this for hours.

  "I'm telling you, he's got the luck of a hanged man," one says, tossing a coin onto the desk.

  "He's just slow," the other replies. "Probably fell asleep in the privy again. If Bruce isn't back in five minutes I'm taking his share of the pot."

  To reach the blue-walled corridor on the far side, we have to cross the open length of the balcony in the spill of their lantern light. Zeke jerks his chin - that way, move now. I stay low and keep my eyes on the guards while they bicker about the hand. We cross the open stretch and reach the shadows of the far archway just as one of them laughs, the sound carrying farther than he intended.

  Zeke doesn't check if they heard. He leads me into a corridor where the walls shift to deep blue tile. At the end: a pair of double doors. Behind them, the seized assets. Behind them, the package, and whatever answers are left for me.

  "Your turn," he murmurs. "The third guard will be back. Don't take long."

  The doors are dark wood, close-grained, and the moment I step near them I feel a low hum through the soles of my boots - not a sound, just a vibration. The building registering that I don't belong here.

  I slide the lenses on. The weave inside the doors lights up violet, threads crossing and recrossing in a tighter pattern than anything on the service entrance.

  I need bare skin to feel the pushback properly. I already know this. Zeke's shadow stretches long across the tiles behind me - he's close, waiting - and there's nothing to be done about it. My fingers fumble at the glove buttons, the lag in my nerves making the simple task awkward, like trying to work with cold hands in thick mittens.

  "The guard isn't going to spend the whole night in the privy, Ashley." Zeke's voice, flat and without inflection. "Move."

  He doesn't say it with impatience or disgust. He says it the way you'd tell someone their shoelace is untied. I pull the glove off and let it drop to the floor.

  Under the lenses, the indigo lines on my skin pulse faintly, the same frequency as the threads in the door. I don't look at his face. I press my bare hand to the wood and start working. It takes longer than it should - the muscle lag means I have to fight my own fingers for precision, coaxing the weave away from its core in increments. But it gives, eventually, with a clean metallic click.

  I pull the doors open. We step through into a hallway that is an exact copy of the one we just left - same blue tile, same vaulted ceiling, a turn ahead. We move quickly.

  We round the turn and I stop.

  We're standing in front of the same double doors. My glove is on the floor where I dropped it.

  "We didn't turn around," I say.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Zeke looks at the doors, then back the way we came. "Again."

  We go through a second time, faster. Same result. The doors, the tiles, the glove - a perfect, seamless loop that returns us to the start every time.

  I pick up my glove. "The building won't let us through. We don't look like we're supposed to be here."

  "Then we need something that says we are." He's already looking back toward the public hall.

  We've barely made it back to the office corridor when boots echo from a side passage - the third guard, returning from wherever he'd been. Zeke's hand closes on my shoulder and he steers me sideways into the nearest dark office, pulling the door shut behind us. The latch clicks a half-second before a shadow crosses the frosted glass panel.

  I stand with my back against the door until the footsteps fade and the murmur of two voices becomes three.

  When I move away from the door I nearly walk into a notice pinned to the back of it. Handwritten, official letterhead.

  "Final Reminder," I read quietly. "All temporary access tokens must be returned to the duty desk before departure. Failure to surrender authorized emblems will result in a docking of credits."

  Zeke leans over my shoulder. "Tokens."

  "Supposed to be with the guards. Picking their pockets under a lantern isn't-"

  "Look at the date."

  I check the bottom of the notice. Months old. They're still pinning reminders because the staff is still ignoring them. Which means somewhere in these offices, someone left theirs behind.

  We move through the room - drawers, shelves, the tops of filing cabinets. Nothing.

  Zeke glances at the clock on the wall. "Split up. Five minutes. Anything with a Guild seal small enough to pocket."

  "Five minutes," I agree.

  He leaves first, melting toward the next office. I count to ten and go the other way, deeper into the wing, away from the guards. The corridor gets quieter with each door I pass. At the far end there's a door that's different from the others - iron-reinforced, no nameplate, no keyhole. Not a clerk's office.

  I check the corridor behind me. Empty. Then I pull my tools and start working the lock.

  It opens with a soft pop, almost apologetic.

  I slip inside and lean against the door until my breathing steadies. Research room. The air has a chemical edge that catches at the back of my throat - reagents, something burnt, the particular smell of things being taken apart to see what's inside. The workbenches are cluttered with instruments both magical and mundane, reference texts stacked open beside tools I don't have names for.

  If there's documentation on the runes anywhere in this building, it would be here.

  I go to the back shelves. High up, spine outward: "Advanced Optical Filtration and Spectral Analysis." Too high to reach without effort. I stretch up onto my toes, get two fingers on the spine, and pull.

  It comes off the shelf faster than I expect and I catch it against my chest, the impact knocking the air out of me. Something falls from between the pages and clatters onto the floor - a small silver disk, etched with the Guild's official seal. Someone was using a high-level access token as a bookmark.

  I pocket the disk and open the manual.

  I go through the whole book. Then the loose scrolls on the shelf beside it. Then the ledgers stacked underneath.

  Nothing. Not one diagram that resembles what's on my hand. No documentation, no warnings, no counter-research. The Guild has records on everything they've ever confiscated and not one of those records mentions the thing that's currently working its way up my arm.

  I sit down on the stool at the nearest bench and look at my gloved hand and feel the weight of the night settle on me.

  Every risk I took to get inside these walls. Every inch of skin I traded to keep the curse slow enough to function. For a room full of papers that have nothing to say to me.

  I stand up. I have the token for Zeke. That's what I came here to find, and I found it, and that's going to have to be enough. I'll give him the disk, finish the job, and figure out the rest later - how much time I have, what I do with it.

  I turn toward the door.

  There's a desk near the exit that I nearly walk past - cluttered, buried under loose papers and charcoal sketches and the half-finished notes of someone who left mid-thought. The kind of surface that accumulates rather than organizes.

  On top of the pile: a scrap of parchment with a single detailed drawing on it.

  I stop.

  The lines are exact. The jagged three-pointed star, the specific way the secondary marks branch from it - it's the primary seal from my palm, rendered in someone else's hand.

  I cross to the desk in three steps, push a paperweight aside. The researchers here weren't studying a person. They were studying an object - something they'd confiscated and pulled apart, something they recognized as dangerous enough to document carefully. My mind goes to the ring, the way the seals on the box were stacked, but the proportions in this sketch are wrong for that. Different object. Same curse signature.

  At the bottom of the page, cramped handwriting: "153-27. Highly volatile. Recommended for immediate transfer to secure storage."

  153-27. I say it to myself twice.

  Then I look at the papers around it - the researchers' notes, the chain of documentation leading to that number - and I leave them exactly as I found them, every page where it was.

  My five minutes are up. I take the silver token from my pocket, pull my glove tight, and go find Zeke.