Chapter 808: Connection

Vesa brought forward the surviving connection entries.

The entries recorded use of the staging connection and preserved its local address. They did not identify the far end of Andrew’s personal route.

Alex examined the plate himself.

He asked Vesa to check the entries left in the supervisor’s device against the operator’s account.

"The remote side stopped answering before Mingyue reached the upper controls," she said. "The path is closed, and the surviving controls give us no final destination."

He set the plate down.

The operator watched his hands.

"You won’t believe me if I say I don’t know where he went."

"Give me something I can follow, and I will. That address ends at a room he has already abandoned."

Alex picked up the plate and stood.

"The officer will come back for the reports you sent. Don’t spend that interview telling him about the door again. We have the people you brought through it."

The man nodded slowly.

Outside, the supervisor was being taken into another room. He tried to speak when he saw Alex, promising useful names and information about the Prince.

"Give your account to the officer," Alex said. "He will ask you about the order you carried out."

The man stopped offering names when Alex refused to let him choose the subject.

Alex contacted Mingyue. The surviving controls gave them no way to reopen Andrew’s route.

She was quiet for a moment.

"He left us people under a falling floor while his records burned," she said.

Alex looked through the doorway at the operator’s wrapped hands.

"He knew people were still inside when he gave the order."

"That doesn’t make it less irritating."

"No."

He heard Luna ask something beside Mingyue, who answered her before returning to their conversation.

"Keep the watch on the receiving roads," she said. "Those people still need to get through."

Alex gave Dorian a small team to check the buildings the workers actually named and kept the rest on their assigned posts.

An argument broke out in the waiting room before he could leave.

The older technician stood beside a chair, refusing to sit where an officer had pointed. The supervisor was visible through the open door of the adjoining room.

"Put me somewhere else," the technician said.

"He can’t reach you from there."

"He gave us the work. He wrote our reports. Every time I said a part wasn’t ready, he’d tell the others I was delaying them."

The supervisor looked toward him.

The technician lowered his burned hands and kept speaking.

"He’ll listen to what we say, then tell you which of us is lying before we’ve even finished."

Alex moved to the doorway.

"Close that door. Take their accounts where he can’t hear them."

The officer opened a smaller room across the passage. The technician went inside with the injured woman from the lower workroom, while another guard remained outside the supervisor’s door.

Alex followed them far enough to see the woman lower herself onto a seat.

Her ankle had been wrapped, and one side of her hair had been singed close to the scalp.

"Will we be sent back to him?" she asked.

"No."

"What if the Prince asks for us?"

Alex looked at the two of them.

Andrew had already tried to destroy the post with them inside. The woman still feared what would happen if he decided they belonged to him again.

"He doesn’t decide where you go from this room," Alex said.

The technician sat down carefully, keeping his hands off the arms of the chair.

"I maintained the equipment," he said. "I’m not saying I didn’t. I signed the tests."

"Then tell the officer which tests. If a door could lock while people were still below, tell him who knew it."

"I complained about that."

"Was it written down?"

The man looked toward the plate Alex was holding.

"Maintenance replies were copied to the upper station. Some went to the ordinary office too, when we needed parts."

Alex called the archive attendant and gave her the reference the technician remembered. She found one reply among the purchase records already recovered from Kael’s office.

The technician listened while she read his warning back.

His shoulders eased as he heard his own words from before the fire. The officer put the old warning beside the account he had just given.

The officer asked him why he had continued working there afterward.

He looked down at his hands.

"I was afraid to leave."

Alex let the officer take the answer. He asked an attendant to check the technician’s dressing and made sure the injured woman had water before leaving them to speak.

Vesa returned with a message from the civic office.

The copies from Kael’s archive were intact. Another copy of the destruction order had joined them. The staff were receiving questions from people who recognized the offices, units and names in the records.

Vesa landed on his uninjured shoulder, folding her four wings close.

"He should have burned the post before telling them why," she said. "That was careless."

Alex looked at her.

"Useful for us," she added, and brought forward the next receipt.

Alex went to the room where the copies were being compared. The security officer had put the material on separate tables so the people asking about missing relatives did not have to stand behind those disputing property claims.

Beatrice sat at the nearer table with her father’s blue case.

She looked up when Alex entered.

"They’re saying the Prince got away."

"He did."

Her gaze dropped to the papers.

"Does that mean this stops?"

Alex looked at the interrupted transfers, the bank approvals and the names her father had trusted.

"Darius’s account didn’t leave with Andrew. Neither did Varyn’s orders."

Beatrice nodded, but did not immediately return to reading.

"What about the people who only followed them because they were afraid?"

"They’ll have to say what they did. So will the people who gave the orders."

She moved one of the copied receipts aside and made space for an older man approaching with a damaged case of his own.

Alex stepped back to let him sit.

The man placed his damaged case beside Beatrice’s. His wife’s name appeared beside a guarantee, he said, and she had never agreed to give it.

Beatrice opened a fresh page and asked him when he first learned of it. She began writing as he answered.

Alex stayed long enough to hear the first part of the man’s account, then told the officer to send him any threat made against the witnesses or the surviving records.

When he returned to Edonia, Mingyue was waiting near the garden with Luna beside her.

"The workers will speak," he told her. "The supervisor was still trying to manage them from the next room."

Mingyue’s expression hardened.

"You separated them?"

"Yes."

She nodded, but her gaze lingered on the route back to Proxima.

Luna reached for Alex’s hand. He closed his fingers around hers and walked with them toward the garden.

Behind them, the people Andrew had ordered burned were alive under guard. His instructions had survived in their records.