Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!
The knock ca not at the door but at his forehead, two precise taps with a single knuckle, and Rex woke up from sleep the way he usually did, quickly and without disorientation, his awareness assembling the room in the first half-second of consciousness.
"W-What?!" Rex then realized that he was still with Elizabeth today, and so he cald down for a bit. "Oh, it’s you..."
Rex could see Elizabeth was sitting at the edge of the bed, fully dressed, her hair pinned back in the arrangent she used when she intended to be sowhere professional within the hour.
She had a cup in one hand and was watching him with the patient expression of soone who had been awake for so ti and had been waiting a reasonable interval before resorting to the forehead knock.
"You sleep like soone who has no concerns about what you did to last night," she said. "I’m still hurting in certain parts, you know."
"I don’t have many concerns that benefit from worrying about them," Rex said and sat up. "It’s so early today."
"Ever heard about the early bird getting the worm?"
"Nah."
She sighed and handed him the second cup from the bedside table, which turned out to be coffee, and he accepted it with the straightforward appreciation of soone who needed it and didn’t bother pretending otherwise. The morning light coming through the window was the thin, early kind, enough to see clearly but not yet the full brightness of mid-morning.
Rex stretched once and looked at Elizabeth, who had clearly been up for longer than it would have taken to dress and pin her hair.
"You went downstairs," Rex said.
"Yeah, I had to get so coffee to fully recover my exhausted body right now," Elizabeth said. "And I forgot that this kitchen had a fresh pot."
"How long were you down there?"
"Long enough," Elizabeth said. "Until I heard sothing that I shouldn’t have heard, but forget about that for now."
She said it without further explanation and then opened the docunt resting on her knee, signaling the apparent conclusion of that line of conversation. "Let’s also forget about last night and, for once, focus on the Legions of Anti-Reincarnator."
Rex chose not to press further. Elizabeth’s expression resembled that of soone who had already processed a significant thought and was done with it, and he knew that asking would only reopen old wounds.
He drank his coffee and let her have the silence.
Elizabeth had discovered the docunt in Rex’s jacket pocket—the compact from Kregg, sealed with the mark of the Balance Keeper. She had it open on her knee, reading it with the focused attention she reserved for anything that demanded careful interpretation.
[Elizabeth Von Starlight — Desire Level: 60/100]
Rex noted the number and set it aside. ’Holy shit... I thought it was going to be maxed out after that long-ass encounter.’
’But it’s still a win-win because I could do a lot more to her by doing a lot of different sex.’
Sixty was aningful but not yet close to the threshold where the dynamic shifted from calculated to sothing more organic. It would move at its own pace from here, and the pace was fine.
"Are we going to talk about this again?" Rex asked.
"Yeah, it’s important."
"The relay structure," Elizabeth said without looking up from the docunt. "The three contacts between Kregg and Solmordia."
"Do you have nas?"
"No," Rex said. "He knew the positions and the general communication cadence, not the identities."
"The Legion’s network was designed so that each node only had enough information to perform its function."
"Compartntalization," Elizabeth said. "Standard for an organization that’s operated covertly for thirty years."
"The trade consortium in the Valdric Sovereignty and the administrative figure in the Aurelian Compact that he ntioned," Rex said. "Those are more useful starting points."
"The positions he described are specific enough to narrow the search significantly."
"The trade consortium is the simpler problem," Elizabeth said. "Valdric records are accessible if you know what you’re looking for and have the right institutional access."
"The Aurelian Compact is more complicated." She turned a page. "Their administrative records aren’t shared with the Academy."
"We’d have to go through the diplomatic channel, which would signal to anyone watching that we’re looking."
"Then we don’t use the diplomatic channel," Rex said.
Elizabeth looked up briefly. "You have another channel."
"I have soone who does," Rex said.
She studied him for a mont and then looked back at the docunt, which was apparently enough of an answer for now.
"The Aurelian Compact has an institutional administration of about forty senior figures," she said. "If Kregg’s description of the role is accurate, we’re looking at soone with access to incoming talent assessnt."
"They screen new arrivals," Rex said. "Reincarnators who surface in Aurelian territory."
"And the ones they flag don’t make it through," Elizabeth said. "They go to the Legion’s network instead."
"Or to Solmordia’s," Rex said. "There’s probably a sorting chanism."
"If the sorting chanism runs through the sa administrative figure in the Compact," Elizabeth said, "then the two networks aren’t as separate as Kregg implied."
"They share infrastructure."
"Or they share a gatekeeper," Rex said. "Soone who decides which new arrivals are useful to which group."
"That would make the Aurelian contact significantly more valuable than a single relay point," Elizabeth said. Elizabeth worked through the problem carefully, using her thod of thinking out loud when she was confident that the other person could understand her. "A broker."
"Soone who services multiple buyers."
"This also explains why Kregg didn’t have a na," Rex said. "A broker at that level would be protected by everyone who uses the service. Nobody who depends on them is going to expose them."
"The Legion and Solmordia are running parallel acquisition operations," Elizabeth said, "and they’re both relying on the sa screening infrastructure to do it."
She paused. "That’s either a very efficient arrangent or an extraordinarily fragile one."
"Both," Rex said. "Which is why the contact has survived thirty years."
"Efficiency keeps them useful. Fragility keeps everyone quiet."
Elizabeth closed the docunt and looked at the window. The thin morning light was sharpening into sothing more definitive, and outside, Aethelgard was already beginning the hum of its morning activity, the city’s sounds filtering up from the streets below.
"This is the most comprehensive intelligence the network has received on the Legion since we first confird their existence four years ago," Elizabeth stated, her tone flat and precise, as if she were rely stating a fact rather than giving a complint.
"The previous information ca from recovered communications fragnts... one defector whose account was limited to his operational cell... and inference from the pattern of disappearances." She looked at Rex. "What you brought back from that canyon in forty minutes is more valuable than what four years of active investigation produced."
"Kregg was a senior commander," Rex said. "The information was there to be gotten."
"Four years of active investigation didn’t get it," Elizabeth said. "That’s the relevant point."
She paused. "I’m not going to pretend it isn’t."
Rex drank his coffee and looked out the window.
"There’s going to be a question about thod," Elizabeth said. "Lady Valentina is thorough."
"She’s going to want to understand how you extracted this level of detail from a single contact in a canyon with no recording apparatus and no witness verification."
"I’m thorough," Rex said.
Elizabeth looked at him steadily. "That’s not going to be a sufficient answer for a formal review."
"It doesn’t need to be sufficient for the formal review," Rex said. "It needs to be sufficient for you, and you’re the one presenting it."
"You’re asking to vouch for an intelligence thod I didn’t observe and can’t verify."
"I’m asking you to vouch for the intelligence," Rex said. "The thod was professional, and it was effective."
"The output is sitting in your hand. Those are the things that matter for the review."
"They are not the only things that matter," Elizabeth said. "But I take your point."
She set the docunt on her knee. "Lady Valentina is still going to ask."
"Let her ask," Rex said. "You can answer the questions she actually asks without answering the ones she doesn’t."
"Valentina," he said.
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