The message came through the old channel at 23:11 on a Thursday.
Not Rian's signature.
Someone else, a secondary identifier she didn't recognize, three letters and a number that meant nothing until she ran them against the cipher Rian had taught her fifteen years ago in a different basement in a different part of the city when she was young enough to think that knowing the right codes would keep her safe.
Decoded: *He left something for you. Server node 7-Kestrel. Authorization: your first field name.*
She sat with the message for four minutes.
Then she opened her access terminal and navigated to Server node 7-Kestrel, which was a maintenance archive in the Order's secondary data infrastructure, the kind of server that held old compliance logs and decommissioned protocol files and things the system had stopped needing but hadn't gotten around to deleting.
The kind of server nobody looked at.
