She recognized one of them. The family name appeared in her mental map of the capital's nobility cluster — not prominently, not in the first tier, but present, connected to the Meridian cluster through a marriage two generations back that she had noted during her initial review of the nobility's alliance structures.
"Write this up," she said. "Full report. The same structure as your diagram but in prose, with source citations for each connection. Take your time with it — accuracy matters more than speed for this kind of document."
He nodded. Then: "What will you do with it?"
"Add it to the file I'm building," she said. "These things don't stand alone. They connect to other things, and the connections take time to map, and the full picture is what makes the action possible."
He absorbed this. "It takes a long time."
"Yes."
"Even when you know something wrong is happening."
