CHAPTER TWO 

10 days until Alignment
Valencia, Spain — 8:05 a.m. local time 

Lucas pulled the apartment door shut until the latch clicked, then started down the stairwell, his work satchel over one shoulder, fingers skimming the rail. The steps had worn smooth in the middle from decades of feet treading up and down them. The building had taken the shape of other people’s lives long before Lucas arrived. 

He crossed the foyer to the entrance. The lift waited patiently behind its brass-trimmed doors. Nobody in the building trusted it unless they had bad knees or heavy shopping. 

Outside, El Cabanyal was already bright, warmth beginning to gather in the walls.  Beyond the fountain by the Rosario church, the streets ran in old straight lines towards the sea. Narrow houses pressed shoulder to shoulder along them, their tiled fronts crowded with shutters and small balconies, each house painted a different bold colour from its neighbour.

Lucas adjusted the strap on his bag and set off towards the tram.

A scooter buzzed too fast around the paved square surrounding the fountain, and someone on a balcony swore at it without looking down.  Opposite, a woman snapped a tablecloth over her balcony rail and let the crumbs fall as if they were someone else’s problem now, while a shopkeeper hosed down the pavement outside his doorway.

Lucas liked it best at this hour.

He had ten minutes. If nothing official slowed the line, he would reach the library early enough to risk the staff-room coffee, drink half, and remember why he usually knew better.

A new notice had been taped to a painted wall near the corner. The Authority seal sat at the top, blue-black and official. ALIGNMENT SAFETY PERIOD, then a wall of small print about visibility, cooperation, and public calm. The tape had already begun to peel in one corner. 

The word “visibility” made Lucas glance down.  His shirt cuff had slipped back, showing the blue stripe of his band, Pisces engraved neatly in the silver centrepiece. He pulled his sleeve down without thinking and kept walking.

Rafael, his supervisor, would already be at the library, happily pretending there had been some genuine reason to arrive early. If Isabel was there too, she would have found a lazy repair or a half-finished job and be quietly furious with whoever had decided near enough was good enough. The thought made him smile.

He turned onto a wider street, where the morning had picked up speed – cars­ and delivery vans rushing past with the first real urgency of the day.

He had gone maybe half a block, thinking through the day’s work and the shipment for New York, when tyres screeched behind him.

A horn blasted long and hard.

Lucas turned in time to see a work van cutting across two lanes, too fast, shouldering through a gap that wasn’t quite there. The van swung towards the kerb and stopped a couple of metres ahead, crooked enough that the traffic behind it had to squeeze around.

The horn went past still blaring.

From the work van, Tomás threw one hand out the window and waved after the car. “Still love you!”

His hand dropped as Lucas reached the passenger door.  For a second, Tomás sat very still, colour high in his cheeks. Then he realised Lucas was looking, and his usual confidence came back. He leaned across and pushed the passenger door open. He was big across the chest and shoulders, the kind of size that came from moving stone for a living, his black hair pushed back from his face.

“Get in.”

Lucas looked at the van, then at Tomás. “You nearly killed me.”

Tomás glanced up and down the street, as if checking whether that was, in fact, the case. “No. I was extremely accurate. Get in.”

The van smelled of warm bread and old upholstery. A paper-wrapped sandwich sat in the console between them, already opened at one end. Behind them, a crate of concrete rubble and broken tiles sat strapped tight to one side of the van.

Lucas got in and closed the door before the next horn could start.  He sat for a second, still gripping the door handle. Then he remembered his seatbelt, clipped it in, and exhaled deeply. “Well, that was dangerous,” he said.

Tomás looked genuinely puzzled for a moment. “Nobody exploded.” He checked his mirror, found a gap, and eased the van into it.

Lucas looked over. “And you saw me from across two lanes?”

“Three.”

“That’s worse.”

Tomás kept his eyes on the road. “I may have misjudged my speed,” he said, brushing some crumbs from the steering wheel. He picked up the sandwich from his console and held it out without looking over. “Here.”

Lucas took it and peeled back the paper. Tortilla, soft through the middle, bread dark with tomato and oil. Better than the library vending machine by far.

“What are you doing on this side of town?” Lucas asked.

“A stone balcony nearby has been dropping bits of itself onto café tables. I stopped it. Now Rafael needs me to fix a damp wall in that beautiful old library of yours.”

Lucas bit into the bread and tomato.

Tomás gave Lucas just long enough to start chewing, then glanced sideways.

“Good?”

“It’s fine.”

“Fine?” Tomás made a small, offended sound. “I should have left you to your tram.”

They drove on for a while, the traffic thickening around them, Lucas finishing the sandwich and folding the wrapper up in his lap.

“Try not to upset Rafael too much today,” said Lucas. “He’s been stressed about an important manuscript that’s finally being shipped out to New York.”

 Tomás glanced over. “Finally?”

“Meridian Archive’s been waiting months for it. Isabel only finished the repairs yesterday.”

“You say ‘Meridian Archive’ like I should know what that means.”

“It’s a private museum, on the Brooklyn waterfront.” Lucas looked out through the windscreen as they slowed behind a delivery bike. “They’re running an exhibition called ‘Sky and Ruin’. Ancient sky records, accounts of disasters, fallen kingdoms. That sort of thing.”

Tomás gave him a half-smile. “Your sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

“It sounds like the sort of place where a cough gets reported. And what’s so important about this book of yours that’s going there?”

“Our manuscript is a compendium.” Lucas heard the word and corrected himself. “A collection, of older texts copied across many centuries, then bound together in one volume.”

“In other words, lots of boring writing in the same book.”

“Some of it’s dull,” Lucas said. “But having all that material in the one place is useful. Two people can describe the same event and make it sound like two completely different things. Different language, different gods, different ways of making sense of it. Normally you might spend years realising two pieces of text were even connected. This book has already brought them together.”

Tomás had gone quiet.

Lucas glanced at him. “Too much?”

“No, no.” Tomás adjusted his mirror. “I was just deciding whether to drive us into a wall.”

Lucas’s ears went red. “Sorry.”

Tomás’s smile faltered and he gave Lucas an affection thump on the arm, so hard that Lucas rocked sideways in his seat. “You like old books.”

“I know.”

“No. I mean, you really like them. You talk about them like they’re alive.”

Lucas gave a small, surprised smile. “I like that.”  He let the thought sit for a moment. “I suppose I like thinking someone survived in them.”

Tomás beamed. “See? That was nice.”

Lucas looked out the side window. “Not biologically, of course.”

Tomás sighed. “And now it’s gone.”

*                                  *                                  *

Several blocks later, the traffic ahead had come to a halt.

A flatbed truck had stopped halfway through a turn into a narrow street. The cab had just made it through, but the overhanging load had not. Long lengths of timber sat dangerously close to the old brick building on the bend. If the truck continued, it would scrape the whole stack along the wall, or take the corner with it.

The driver stood beside the cab, hands on his head.

A scooter was boxed in behind, engine still running. The hatchback behind them had nowhere to go, the driver stabbing at the horn in short, impatient jabs.

Tomás sighed and was out of the van before Lucas could say anything.

The driver started explaining. Tomás listened for about three seconds, then put one hand up - not rude, just someone who’d already solved the problem - and walked past him to the building’s corner to see for himself.

Lucas watched through the windscreen.

It wasn't the whole corner that was the problem. About a metre and a half up the wall, one rough stone block stuck out by ten or twelve centimetres — old, misshapen, badly set from the day it went in, never corrected, and sitting at exactly the wrong height for the overhanging load.

Tomás stood at the wall and set his right palm flat against the face of the proud block. His sleeve rode back, exposing the silver Capricorn centrepiece at his wrist, framed by the deep-clay brown stripe of his band. His left hand braced against the course above it.

He planted his feet and drew a slow breath.  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the protruding block eased inward, slow and stubborn.  Not with the hard scrape Lucas expected, not with mortar cracking out of the joint, but with a low, dull sound from inside the wall, as if the pressure were being moved rather than forced. Lucas shifted forward in his seat. Tomás was not only moving the lower stone; he was holding the weight above it steady while the block shifted into place.

When the stone had settled back into the wall’s rough line, Tomás kept both hands there for another breath.   The joint tightened.  The mortar drew in around the reset stone, packed close, regripped, and the corner sat more solidly than it had before he touched it.

At his wrist, the band gave one faint green pulse. Tomás did not look down.

He stepped away from the wall and gestured the driver back into the cab.

The flatbed crept forward.  The timber cleared the corner by a fraction, and then the whole truck was through.

Tomás slapped the side of the truck as it passed, said something through the window that made the driver bark a gravelly laugh, and came back to the van dusting his hands together as if he’d only moved a box.

Lucas waited until the door was closed. “You moved a building.”

Tomás put the van in gear. “Barely.”

Lucas looked out the side window and smiled.

“Don’t tell Rafael how quickly I did that,” Tomás said, pulling into traffic. “I usually charge him four hours to do the same thing.”

 *                                  *                                  *

They had barely got moving again when Tomás flicked his indicator, began to slow, and swung in to the kerb outside a café.

“Why are we stopping?” Lucas asked.

Tomás switched off the engine and sighed, placing a hand against his own chest. “Because,” he said, with exaggerated patience, “you ate half my breakfast.”

Lucas lowered his eyes to the sandwich wrapper in his lap. “This was half?”

But Tomás was already out of the van.

The café stood on a corner under sun-bleached shutters, three small tables crowding the pavement outside.  The men at them had the look of having been there since the place opened – short black coffees, cigarettes burning down between their fingers, a newspaper being passed back and forth.  They all looked at Tomás and nodded as he walked past; he gave them half a wave without breaking stride.

Inside, the noise arrived all at once: cups ringing on saucers, the long hiss of the machine, a radio behind the counter playing something old, more guitar than words.  At the back of the room, a football match ran on a television with the sound turned right down. Warm bread, strong coffee and burnt sugar hung in the air and wrapped around Lucas as they entered.

The café was not large, but every part of it was being used: several small tables, a long granite counter with a row of stools tucked beneath it, and a low glass screen running along the back.  Behind the glass sat the morning’s work: thick yellow wedges of omelette, blistered peppers, olives shining in oil, fried potatoes, golden churros, and pastries dusted with sugar.

As they passed the first table, Tomás laid a hand on one man’s shoulder, leaned across and folded down the corner of the newspaper the man opposite was reading. The man pretended not to notice, then glanced sideways at Tomás and smirked.

He was barely past them when an old woman at the next table swung around and pointed at him with a piece of toast.

“You,” she said.

“Me.”

“You forgot about the crack in my kitchen ceiling.”

“Tuesday, we said.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yesterday was Tuesday.”

“Then it’s had an extra day to settle. I’ll be there later this afternoon. You have my word.”

“I’ll be waiting,” she said, still pointing her toast at him.

Tomás gave the old woman a small salute and kept moving before she could remember anything else he’d forgotten.

The tables were full, so Tomás dropped onto a stool at the counter. He leaned one broad forearm on the granite as Lucas took the stool beside him.

“Morning, Tomás,” the owner said. “And who is your friend?”

Lucas started to say good morning, but Tomás was already answering for him, as if this saved everyone time.

“This is Lucas.  He works with old books at the library,” Tomás said. “And he drinks the coffee they keep there, so we’re staging an intervention.”

Maribel looked at Lucas with genuine concern. “Library coffee?”

“It isn’t always –” Lucas said.

He could feel Tomás staring at him from the corner of his eye.

“It is usually terrible,” Lucas admitted.

“We can do something about that,” she said.

“We’ll have two, please, Maribel,” Tomás said.

“Just one.” Lucas shook his head. “I don’t like strong coffee.”

“Two.” Tomás did not look at him. “The proper ones, not the quick ones.”

Maribel didn't dignify the instruction with an answer; she was already knocking the old grounds out.

Lucas checked his watch.

“Relax,” said Tomás, grinning.  “If Rafael complains, tell him I kidnapped you.”

“You basically did kidnap me.”

“Good. I’m a bad liar.”

While the machine ran, she cut a square from a tray cooling at the end of the counter and set it in front of Lucas — plain to look at, a flat lemon sponge under a thin crust of sugar, still warm enough to smell.

“Coca de llanda. Out twenty minutes ago.” She nudged it towards him. “Tell me what you think.”

She cut a second square and set it in front of Tomás.   He ate a corner, considered it like a man grading an exam, and nodded once. “Better than last week.”

“It’s exactly the same as last week.”

Tomás frowned, took another bite, and ate it more slowly this time.  He didn’t look convinced.

The coffee came, dark and bitter in exactly the right way. Lucas drank, and for a moment forgot the library, the shipment, the whole morning.  He shut his eyes for a second.

Tomás was watching him when he opened them.

“Don’t,” Lucas said.

“I said nothing.”

“You moved your eyebrows.”

Tomás smiled and let Lucas eat and drink in peace for almost a minute.  As Lucas finished the last bite of cake, Tomás set his cup down and knocked twice on the counter. “Right, Maribel. Try not to suffer without me.”

Tomás left money on the counter, more than coffee and cake could have come to. Maribel walked over and swept it into her hand without counting, the rhythm of two people who had stopped keeping score a long time ago.

They were nearly at the door when a young woman caught Tomás by the sleeve. “You know my Aunt Patricia?”

Tomás went still. “I thought she wanted to keep me a secret.”

“She has a broken tile on her front step. I worry somebody will trip. Could you look at it?”

“Of course,” Tomás said.

“Today?”

Tomás pulled a pained face at the ceiling. “I don’t think so.”

The young woman waited.

He exhaled. “Five. Tell her I’ll be there at five o’clock.”

She smiled, thanked him and left with her coffee.

Outside, the morning had warmed another degree.  Lucas looked at him as they reached the van. “You could have said no.”

“To which one?”

“Any of them.”

“And then what?” Tomás unlocked the van. “If I say no, they call someone who charges a fortune to do nothing. Or worse – someone who tells them it’s fine when it isn’t, and somebody gets hurt.”   He shrugged. “I’d rather be tired.”

As they got into the van and buckled their seatbelts, Tomás said, “I want to arrive at the exact second that Rafael thinks I’m no longer coming. It’s a very tiny window but I think I can manage it.” He looked genuinely delighted by the prospect. "He gets this little vein. Here." He tapped his own temple.

Lucas placed his bag on the floor in front of him. “You know he wouldn’t like you saying things like that.”

“I know,” Tomás said. “That is why I say them only in the van.”

 *                                  *                                  *

The Biblioteca Valenciana – the Valencian Library – is housed inside a sixteenth-century monastery, San Miguel de los Reyes, to the north of the city. As they drove through the narrow streets towards it, Lucas caught broken glimpses between apartment blocks: one tower first, then a run of high wall, then the second tower rising behind it.  Then the streets opened onto a wider avenue and suddenly the whole building came into view — too large and too old for everything around it.

Tomás swung the van off the public road, without slowing as much as Lucas would have liked, into the service drive running down the side of the library towards the loading area.

Driving alongside the monastery wall, the city seemed to fall half a step behind them, the sound of traffic thinning. Somewhere a few streets away, the rattling of a tram faded behind the buildings.

Tomás brought the van to a halt with a brief squeal from the tyres, dead centre in the parking space.

“Off you go,” Tomás said, nodding towards the front of the building. “Go and get paid to sit down for eight hours.”

They both got out.  Tomás went around to the back of the van while Lucas was bent into the passenger footwell, trying to untangle his bag strap from around the seat lever.   He had just worked it free when a loud crash made him jerk upright, slamming his shoulder against the glovebox.  He stood up and saw Tomás standing beside the large metal waste-container, empty crate in hand, and looking satisfied with himself. 

“You just dumped concrete rubble from the other side of the city into our bin?” Lucas said.

“Yes, it’s had quite the journey,” Tomás said as he walked back, threw the emptied crate back into the van and brushed dust from his clothes.

Lucas looked at him for another second, then gave up. “Thank you for the lift,” he said.

“And the breakfast.”

“I said thank you for the lift.”

Tomás grinned and shut the back of the van.

Lucas left him to it and began walking around to the front of the building.  He always took pleasure in arriving at his workplace as if he were a tourist.  For most of the people who came here, the library was a destination: a thing to be seen, photographed, crossed off.  A pair of visitors stood near the front, taking a photo of the façade.  As Lucas passed them, they were still looking up, taking in the real thing for a moment longer.

Even after years of working here, Lucas still had mornings when he could not quite believe this building was where he was allowed to spend his days.

He pushed through the front door, and as it closed behind him, the air changed at once.  He was greeted by the familiar smells of polished wood, a faint trace of beeswax, and the dry sweetness of paper from deeper inside the library.

The Biblioteca was never completely silent. It had low voices, doors opening and closing, shoes on old stone. But the monastery took the noise and softened it.

The library was only just beginning to wake. Straight ahead, a few early visitors moved towards the main rooms and the courtyard beyond, while Lucas turned right towards reception and waited for the receptionist to buzz him through the controlled staff door. A short corridor led to the staff workroom, where the hush of the entrance hall gave way to working noise: keys tapping, drawers opening and closing, muffled movement.

Halfway along the corridor, Rafael’s office branched off to the left.

Lucas stopped at the open office door.

Rafael Núñez sat at his desk with his jacket over the chair, glasses low on his nose, sorting through a small stack of pages.  Behind him, a window overlooked the workroom.

“You’re early,” he said, without looking up.

“I was lucky enough to get a lift with Tomás.”

“And you survived? Did he dump anything in our bin?”

Lucas paused.  “Not that I saw.”

Rafael sighed. “That means yes.”

Lucas stepped through the doorway, into the office. “He moved a wall on the way here.”

Rafael’s eyebrows lifted a fraction.

“A little bit of a wall,” Lucas said.

“That sounds like him.” Rafael’s mouth moved, not quite a smile.

On the desk, squared perfectly with the edge, sat a thick yellow A4 envelope. It contained the paperwork for the shipment bound for the Meridian museum in New York later that afternoon.

The shipment contained the manuscript Lucas had told Tomás about on the drive over, in considerably more detail than Tomás had asked for. Isabel’s repairs were finished; the manuscript was elsewhere in the library now, waiting to be packed for transport. The envelope would travel with it, carrying the insurance certificates, customs forms and handling instructions needed at the other end.

For two weeks, it had moved from desk to desk, gathering pages, updates and signatures. Only Pau’s final condition report was missing. Once that was in, Rafael could sign and seal it and finally end four months of polite emails, revised dates and increasingly pointed reminders from New York.

Elena Weiss, director of the Meridian Archive, would go through the paperwork herself when the shipment arrived.

Isabel had been the reason the manuscript was still in Valencia. With only ten days until the Alignment, New York had been pushing for it every day lately.  But Isabel had finished the final repairs only late the previous afternoon and, reluctantly, given it clearance to travel.

Lucas wondered how many times Rafael had taken the blame rather than passing it to Isabel.

Only now did Lucas notice Rafael looked more tired than usual, even allowing for the pressure from New York. 

When Lucas first began working here, younger, slower, and careful in a way people mistook for uncertainty, Rafael had responded by handing him fragile work earlier than was sensible and then walking away without watching.

Lucas had spent several years quietly trying to deserve that trust.

“So it’s definitely leaving today?” Lucas said.

“They expected it last week.” Rafael laid his hand on top of the envelope.

Rafael took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Yes, it’s leaving today. Everything else is ready. I’m just waiting on Pau to print out the final condition report for me so I can seal this thing and stop thinking about it.  I’ve had a headache for three days that seems to have made itself at home.”

He put his glasses back on and stood. “Anyway.  Now, I have to go and meet Tomás about the damp wall on the other side of the building.  I’m sure he’s going to tell me that it’s worse than I think and going to cost more than I budgeted for.”

“He might not.”

Rafael looked at him.

“He will,” Lucas said.

“And after that, I need Tomás to look at the service door in the staff workroom.  It’s been sticking for weeks.  Isabel knows how to make it cooperate, but that’s not going to satisfy Health and Safety. I’d rather he fix it before someone reports it, the system closes around it and a ten-minute repair becomes three weeks of nonsense.”

Pau, the newest member of the junior staff, appeared in the doorway with a glass of water and a packet of aspirin. He hovered there for a moment, unsure whether he should wait for permission to come in, then hurried towards the desk. “Here are the tablets you asked for.”

“Thank you.” Rafael pushed two tablets from the foil, swallowed them with a mouthful of water, and, careful by habit, set the glass on the far side of the desk, well away from the envelope. Pau reached for the packet as he turned to go.

“Leave those with me, would you?” Rafael said. “I suspect I may need more after seeing Tomás.  And how’s that condition report looking?”

“I’m almost done,” said Pau.

Rafael sighed. “The first copy was fine.  The second one was fine.  If you print it again, I’m charging you for the paper.”

“Of course.”  Pau gave a small nervous smile, nodded quickly, and disappeared back into the workroom.

Rafael checked his watch, then glanced at the envelope on the corner of his desk. “Nobody moves that envelope, please. I’m one report away from being done with it.”

Lucas nodded, and Rafael left, turning to the receptionist as he headed for the front doors. “I’m going to see Tomás about the damp wall. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, he’s explaining the price.”

Lucas made his way into the staff workroom, the practical heart of the place.  It smelled of warm electronics, toner, and the faint plastic tang of label tape.  Desks, trolleys and controlled clutter filled the room. At a long table, two assistants were sorting returns into careful piles. Lucas’s workstation sat at the back. His cracked ceramic pen cup was where he had left it.

The conservation room was behind Lucas’s desk, through its own controlled door: the place where damaged manuscripts were cleaned, steadied, repaired, and sometimes saved.

The room within the room.

Lucas arrived at his desk, set his bag down and unlocked his computer.   Behind him, the conservation door opened.  Isabel Ortega came out sideways carrying a flat box in both hands, using her hip to hold the door open.  She huffed a loose strand of hair from her face and looked exactly as Lucas had expected:  annoyed because somebody had done something almost properly.  Isabel ran conservation. The physical condition of the manuscripts was her territory; Lucas’s was the words and history inside them.

“Bad morning?” he asked.

“Someone ran a page strap directly over a repaired hinge.”

Lucas paused. “That sounds bad.”

“Thank you. I’ll include that in the condition report.”

He made the wise choice not to offer any more opinions and moved his bag out of her way.

Isabel set the flat box down beside his keyboard and began checking the label.

Pau appeared at the edge of Lucas’s desk, gripping the latest printout in both hands.

“I brought this before I take it to Rafael,” he said. “I thought maybe someone should look at it first. The line spacing is still a little—”

“Pau,” Lucas said.

Pau stopped.

Lucas spoke calmly. “Rafael said the first version was fine.”

“I know. I just thought this one might be cleaner.”

“Breathe,” Isabel said, making an effort to sound patient.

Pau took a breath, then another. His shoulders lowered.

“Good,” Isabel said. “Now go and put it on Rafael’s desk and stop helping.”

Pau nodded and went into Rafael’s office.

He laid the sheets neatly beside the Meridian envelope and lined the corners up.  He smiled, pleased with himself.

He was about to leave when he noticed a clipboard left untidily on a cabinet on the other side of Rafael’s desk. One corner hung over the edge beside a messy stack of papers.

Pau crossed the room hurriedly to put everything back in order.  He neatened the pile, then saw the words “Meridian Archive” on a form attached to the clipboard.  He picked it up to check whether it was anything he’d forgotten to include.

He heard his name called from the workroom.

He turned quickly, eager to answer, and felt the corner of the clipboard tap against something.

Half a second later came the knock of Rafael’s water glass tipping over on the desktop.

Pau made a small, useless grab for it, too late. Water ran across the desk in a clear sheet, reaching the yellow envelope before he could move around the chair.  The paper darkened at once.

Pau let out a short, panicked noise and froze.

In the workroom, Lucas and Isabel looked up at once.

Pau reached out, then stopped.  Wet paper. Ink. Pressure. Damage. He knew just enough to be afraid of making it worse.

He turned slowly to the office window, ashen-faced, the clipboard still in his hand.

Isabel saw his face and moved first.

“What happened?” Lucas said, already following her.

By the time they both reached the desk, water covered half of it.  The spill had soaked through the yellow paper, the documents inside already clinging together, and gathered under Rafael’s keyboard, which sat like an island in the middle of it all. A thin line had begun to drip from the desk edge onto the floor.

Lucas felt the water the way he always felt water: its weight, its spread, the places it had already gone and the places it was still trying to enter.

Lucas raised his hand without thinking, reaching for the water that had already seeped inside.

“Don’t,” Isabel said from behind him. “Not from the envelope. The papers inside are already wet. If you pull water through them, you could drag the ink or tear the fibres. Just the water around it.”

Lucas stopped at once.

“Yes.  Sorry,” he said.

“Okay,” said Isabel.  “Carefully.”

He reached instead for what had spread across the desk.

The water answered, sliding out from under the keyboard and across the desktop to gather beneath his hand.  Lucas lifted it slowly, drawing it tighter as a clear globe formed, hanging in the air a few centimetres below his palm, turning slowly.

Isabel was beside him now.  She picked up Rafael’s glass and held it beneath the hovering liquid.

He kept steady for one breath, then lowered the water cleanly into the glass.

A single soft note as it landed.

No splash. His band pulsed once.  Lucas barely noticed.

“Good,” she said, which from Isabel was a standing ovation, and pushed past him to the desk.

Pau still had the clipboard clutched in one hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“Give me room,” Isabel said.

“I can—”

“Pau.”

He stepped aside.

She lifted the soaking envelope with both hands, supporting as much of it as she could, her whole attention narrowing to the paper.  “Conservation room.  Better light.  Blotters.  If we hurry, we may not have to replace everything.”

“Should we wait for Rafael?” Lucas asked.

“Not while the paper is still wet.”

Isabel carried it out of Rafael’s office and across the staff workroom, keeping it level while Lucas cleared the way.

At the conservation door, she bent awkwardly towards the access pad, both hands occupied. Her staff card swung forward on its lanyard. Lucas caught it gently and tapped it against the reader.

The lock clicked. He pulled the door open and stepped back, giving Isabel room to pass.  Then he followed her inside.

The door closed behind them, cutting the staff workroom noise down to a distant murmur.

The conservation room always made Lucas drop his voice without meaning to. It smelled of almost nothing, which was the point: filtered air, clean surfaces, no dust, no polish, nothing that could cling to paper. Under the adjustable lamps, the wide bench was already waiting.

Everything had been chosen to do one thing: to touch fragile things without harming them.

Isabel went to the nearest bench and placed the envelope onto a support tray, snapped on a lamp, and angled the light low so she could properly assess the damage.

Lucas stood beside her, ready to help.

“Don’t help,” she said.

He stood back.

“Lamp.”

He stepped forward and adjusted it.

“Not there.”

He moved it again.

“Better.”

Isabel tested one wet edge with fresh blotting paper, checked for ink, then pressed a new sheet lightly over the soaked surface. No rubbing, no dragging. She lifted it away, replaced it with a dry sheet, and took only what the envelope would give. The yellow began to come back from translucent to opaque, like colour returning to a face.

“Are the forms okay?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

With a thin spatula, she eased open the edge.  She did not try to pull any of the contents out yet. Pulling wet paper was how you tore it. She opened the envelope’s mouth only enough to let the lamp reach inside.

Then she stopped.

“There’s something handwritten inside here.  That’s not right.”

The ink had blurred, but the top line was still visible: a page number and a single word. The rest of it was caught inside, clinging to the papers around it. The writing was small, square block print:

Lucas read it once. He knew the word. It was ordinary Latin to him.  Ruin. Destruction. Collapse.

He read it again.

“Page one eighty-four.  Of the manuscript.”  He frowned. “Why is there a handwritten note about it mixed in with the transfer paperwork?”

“I don’t know, Lucas.”  Isabel didn’t look up, already reaching for a fresh blotter.

He turned towards the holding cabinets where the manuscripts were kept.  “It’s probably a loose note that got caught up with all the other paperwork. I should check page one eighty-four.”

Isabel looked at him. “You should tell Rafael about it.”

“I will.  I just want to know what I’m telling him.”

She sighed through her nose.

Lucas crossed to the holding cabinet.  “Rafael is busy with Tomás.  If the note is about the manuscript, and the manuscript is leaving today–”

“Okay, check and then go find Rafael.”

He entered his code and waited through the short confirmation delay. The cabinet released with an internal click.

He lifted the box out, keeping it level with both hands, the way you carried something that had survived centuries of damp, fire, insects, politics, and care.

He set it on the clear end of the bench, away from Isabel and her delicate work, and opened the lid.  He eased the manuscript from its box and set it on a cradle, letting the support take the weight of the spine.

He took the page turner and worked his way to page 184.

The Latin was small and brown-black, dense in the old hand, tight from a scribe trying to fit too much into too little space. He scanned the page until he found the word.

Interitus.

It was part of a larger passage.

He began to read slowly, translating under his breath:

After the sea-ringed city was drowned, the last witnesses set down what they could not explain.

When the five wanderers gathered, they cast their light toward the earth.

The altered ones rose in their four natures and burned brighter than flesh could bear.

As they burned, a red wound turned upon the face of Marduk's star.

Ash and hunger blanketed the bronze kingdoms until their roads fell silent.

Interitus reigned in their place.

He did not move for a moment.

This was not a prophecy. He told himself that at once, firmly.  It was an account. A record of a catastrophe already over, preserved in a dead language by someone who did not have the words, and so used the words they had.

“The altered ones rose in four natures.”

The phrase was not proof. Altered ones could mean blessed, cursed, foreign, divine, monstrous. Four natures could mean almost anything. And still his mind went straight to Fire, Water, Earth and Air.

“…five wanderers gathered…” 

Wanderers was an old word for planets.  Usually, the phrase would have felt vague. But with the Alignment in ten days’ time, it was difficult to explain away.

“As they burned, a red wound turned upon the face of Marduk's star.”

“Marduk’s star” meant Jupiter, under an older god’s name. But Jupiter’s red spot was a wound no ancient scribe could possibly have seen from Earth. Not with the naked eye.

So why was it written as though someone had seen it?

“Burned brighter than flesh could bear.”

Lucas read that line twice. It was the one that disturbed him the most.

And then there was “Interitus.”

It translated literally as destruction, ruin or death.

But here it felt heavier.

“The word’s not being used like ordinary ruin,” Lucas said. “It’s being used like the name of something.”

Isabel, still bent over the envelope, did not look up. “Like an event?”

Lucas did not answer at once. His eyes had gone back to the word.

“Yes.  Or what remained after an event.”

She said nothing.

Lucas leaned closer to the page. He followed the line again, then the one above it, trying to make the old syntax behave.

“Lucas.”

He glanced up quickly, expecting the rest of the note, a second line, a name, anything.

Isabel’s eyes had not left the envelope. “You’re breathing on the manuscript.”

He straightened at once. “Sorry.”

He moved back from the cradle, and was briefly grateful to her, because she had reached into the place he had fallen and pulled him out by the collar without even raising her head. The room returned. The page was a page again.

But the word stayed.

Interitus reigned in their place.

He needed to know whether the same pattern of language had ever appeared together elsewhere.

He was not chasing one word. He had seen fragments before: altered people, fourfold language, sky omens, ruined kingdoms. Separately, they were scholarship. Together, here, ten days before the Alignment, they looked like a pattern.

He did not want to take Rafael a feeling.

He wanted to take him a fact.

“I’m going to check whether any of this appears elsewhere,” he said.

Isabel had the spatula deeper in the envelope now, working along the trapped edge of the note a millimetre at a time. Her whole attention was on the place where wet fibres might separate cleanly or tear.

“I thought you might.”

“I’m not interpreting it.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m checking recurrence.”

“If you say so.”

He left carefully, letting the door close softly behind him.

His workstation was only a few steps away. He sat, woke the screen, and opened the staff catalogue system: manuscript records, loan files, and archive entries shared between institutions around the world.

He typed the terms into the search field, set to return exact matches first, then partial matches:

Interitus “altered ones” “four natures” Marduk

He pressed Enter and watched the screen, feeling foolish for the tightness in his chest. It was a database. A professional tool.  He had used it hundreds of times.

The system searched.

It took a couple of seconds longer than it normally would, then the window refreshed.

No results found.

Lucas stared at the line.

A search like that should have given him pages of partial matches.

Instead, there was nothing close enough for the system to offer him.  That did not make sense.

Behind him, the conservation-room door opened.

“Lucas.  I have the rest of the note.”

Isabel’s voice was different this time.

He turned.

For a moment, Lucas thought it was good news. Then he saw the look on her face.

She stood in the doorway, one hand still gloved, the other braced against the frame.  She had not brought the note to him; the paper was too fragile to move.

“What is it?” he asked, already out of the chair and moving towards her.

Isabel did not answer.  She stepped aside as he reached the doorway, letting him pass.

The note lay bare beneath the lowered lamp, freed from the envelope at last. The blotters sat beside it in a damp, faintly stained stack.

A minute ago, Lucas had needed the rest of the note. Now he was less sure.

And suddenly Lucas knew.

Not from the handwriting. Rafael had made sure there was no familiar hand to recognise.

Before the system closes around it.

Lucas had heard Rafael use that strange little phrase for years, ever since the Authority had begun reaching into the catalogues, archives and civic records. Not the kind of phrase most people noticed and remembered, perhaps, but it had stayed with Lucas. Once the system closed around something, Rafael would say, whoever controlled it decided what it meant and who got to see it.

Rafael would have checked every page in that envelope himself that morning. He had put the note there, then kept the envelope guarded on his desk. Lucas felt each piece lock into place, one after another.

It was intended for Elena to read before completing intake of the manuscript, before cataloguing, before whatever was buried on page one eighty-four became something the Authority could reach.

Lucas looked back towards his desk.

Do not search any of this through the official system.

He returned to his computer slowly, nausea rising as he understood what he had done.

The search window was still open.

A new line had appeared.

Not something he remembered ever seeing before.

Plain black text at the bottom of the screen, small enough that he almost missed it.

Query logged.