He had known, in some register, that the extinction declaration was optimistic rather than confirmed. You couldn't confirm something you hadn't witnessed directly and he had not witnessed it directly. He had built the legal architecture around an assumption and the assumption had held for forty one years because Vessa was extraordinary at disappearing.
Apparently she had stopped disappearing.
He looked at the garden.
Thought about a young woman with sharp eyes who had filed his documents for twelve years and had never once given him reason to doubt her and had then left his service without explanation eight months after the Seraphim situation and had been invisible ever since.
Sable.
His mind went there immediately.
Not because he had evidence. Because Vessa surfacing at the same time as the Blackwood estate going suddenly and completely dark on intelligence was not a coincidence. It was a sequence. Cause and effect.
Vessa had come out of hiding.
