She told herself she was just going to watch.
That was the rule she set in the morning, standing in the eastern market with something hot from a stall she'd started using because it was far enough from her usual patterns that Dael's people hadn't placed anyone near it yet. Just watch. Follow the route further than she and Ren had followed it. See if the route itself told her something the route's end point couldn't.
Not approach. Not make contact. Just observe.
She had made this rule before with other things and she knew what it was worth. She made it anyway.
Seb ran his route in the late afternoon as usual.
She picked him up at the eastern market's edge — the point where he crossed from the quarter's interior toward the border streets — and followed at a distance she'd calculated as beyond peripheral awareness for someone his size and age who wasn't expecting a follow. She kept other pedestrians between them where the street allowed it. She matched his pace rather than tracking it, which was a different thing — tracking required constant adjustment, matching required anticipating, and anticipating meant she had to think about where he was going rather than watching where he went.
She knew where he was going. She'd watched this route twice before. What she didn't know was what happened after the eleven-second exchange outside the civic records office. Where the Marked contact went. What building he entered next. Whether the records office was his final destination or a waypoint.
That was what she was here for.
Seb moved through the border streets with the fast unconscious efficiency she'd noted before. He didn't look around much. He had the particular quality of someone who had made this journey enough times that it required no attention — his feet knew the route and his mind was somewhere else entirely, the way minds went when bodies were doing familiar work.
She followed his mind being elsewhere and felt something she didn't examine too closely.
The exchange happened as before. Eleven seconds. The Marked contact on the steps, the folded paper, the pocket. Seb walking away without looking back.
She let Seb go.
She stayed with the contact.
He went inside the records office and she positioned herself across the street — a different position than before, further back, angle adjusted — and she waited.
Nineteen minutes.
He came back out carrying a leather document case he hadn't had when he went in. He went down the steps and turned left and walked with the purposeful pace of someone moving between official locations. She followed.
Two streets. Three. The document case under his arm. His stride unchanged.
He turned into a building that had the sigil of the civic administration above its door — a different department from the records office, something she couldn't read the name of from her distance. He went inside.
She waited.
He didn't come back out.
She waited longer. Twenty minutes. Thirty. The street moved around her in the way that Marked district streets moved — purposeful, maintained, indifferent to a girl standing across from a civic building with no obvious reason to be there.
At forty minutes she accepted he wasn't coming back out the front. Either the building had another exit or his working day ended there and she had followed him to his desk.
She had the building. She had a department sigil she could identify if she got closer. She had the document case as a link between the records office and whatever this building processed.
She did not have a name. She did not have a thread that connected this building to whoever had sent the note. She did not have anything that told her what happened to the information above this level or who received it there.
She had followed the route further and found another wall.
She stood in the border street and the last of the evening light went. The gas lamps came on, one side working and one side not.
A wall. One more wall.
What she needed wasn't further along the route. It was behind it — who had approached Seb eight months ago, when his mother got sick and the money became necessary. That face was the thread back into the Underground. Back toward whoever was managing things from inside this world.
Seb knew that person. He might not know he knew.
She thought about tomorrow. About Dael's net and the narrowing routes and the storage room floor at Doss's and the ceiling she'd stared at while thinking about a thirteen year old boy and his mother and the money that was necessary.
She thought about what the next step actually was.
She had known what it was before she'd come out here. She had come out here to confirm that the clean version would work so she didn't have to take the next step.
The clean version hadn't worked.
She walked back toward the Underground and thought about what she was going to do tomorrow and didn't let herself not think about it, which was harder than it sounded, because some part of her had been not thinking about it for two days and that part knew exactly what it was doing.
She thought about it anyway.
She owed Seb that much at least. To think about it clearly rather than arriving at it sideways.
The Underground received her, familiar and dark, indifferent as always.
She walked through it and thought about a boy who had learned to take up less space than he needed and she thought about what she was going to ask him to carry and she thought about the cost of it clearly, without flinching, without the sideways approach that would have made it easier.
She thought about it until she reached Doss's building.
Then she stopped thinking about it and went inside and lay down on the floor and stared at the ceiling and made herself say it plainly, in the privacy of her own head, without the language that would have softened it.
Tomorrow I am going to approach Seb.
She held that.
Then she closed her eyes.
She didn't sleep for a long time.