The stone floor of the Knights of Favonius headquarters was cooler than she remembered.
Klee sat with her knees together on the ironwood bench outside the Acting Grand Master’s office, her boots barely clearing the flags. They were not her old boots. The soft red calfskin with the brass buckles had rotted in a trench outside the Mare Jivari three autumns ago. These were stitched from dun hide, reinforced along the instep with dull river-iron to keep the kickback of high-compression saltpeter from fracturing her metatarsals.
She smelled the candles first. Mondstadt still used tallow dipped in mutton fat for the corridor sconces. The cheap grease left a film on the back of the palate, like lukewarm soup spooned from an unwashed kettle. In Fontaine they used triple-pressed paraffin that burned white and odorless. Even in the desert she had grown used to kerosene. The tallow was foul. It belonged to an era of greasy stewpots and drafts under heavy oak doors.
Her fingers worked the third brass rivet on her left gauntlet. Three turns clockwise until the thread caught, half a turn back so the gasket did not pinch. She repeated the motion twice. It kept the salt tremors from traveling past her wrist.
The heavy oak door swung inward.
"Enter," Jean's voice said.
It was not the voice of the woman who had signed the border quarantine writs during the long winter. It was lighter. The rasp that three years of coughing up ash-damp air had carved into Jean’s throat was entirely absent.
Klee stood up. Her knees made a dry, faint pop.
Inside, the office smelled of paper pulp and fresh clover. Sunlight cut across the broad desk through the leaded diamond panes, illuminating the dust motes suspended in the warm air. On the blotter lay a stack of requisition forms tied with blue twine—neat, unhurried, whole.
Jean was behind the desk, her sword leaning in its parade scabbard against the credenza. Her coat lacked the black band sewn over the right epaulet. Beside the tall arched window stood Kaeya, an unlit slender cigarillo balanced between his knuckles. On the footstool near the archival cabinet sat Albedo, his sketchbook propped against his thigh, charcoal already moving across coarse cream vellum.
None of them moved toward her. That was correct. A stranger who walked through the Whispering Woods with an unsealed catalyst and scorch marks on her elbows did not receive embraces.
"The guards at the side gate were quite flustered," Kaeya murmured. He turned the cigarillo over his thumb. The silver ring on his index finger was unchipped. "They claimed a young lady carrying four times her weight in refined sulfur walked straight past the checkpoint and asked if the bells still rang at five. Do they?"
"They ring at five," Klee said.
Her voice sounded rough to her own ears. It was too low for the room. When she had lived in the dormitory upstairs, she had piped her words like a reed whistle. Now the sound sat in the bottom of her ribcage, gravel scraped across slate.
Kaeya’s eye narrowed slightly. The blue iris caught the noon light. "You have an unusual accent. Some Liyue cadence in the vowels, but the consonants are stiff. Like someone who spent two years speaking only to hilichurls."
Klee did not answer him. She looked at Albedo.
He had not looked up from his paper. The charcoal rasped—short, measured scratches. "Sit, please," he said.
There was a stool by the map table. Klee walked to it, her gait measured, the heels of her iron-plated boots clicking on the parquetry. As she sat, her right hand moved under the cuff of her traveler's mantle. The small brass spindle she had pulled from the crater at Brightcrown Canyon was still hot against her palm; its gears spun on friction bearings that hummed with a thin, irritating frequency. With two fingers, she pushed the lock-pin through the spindle’s balance wheel, silencing it before Albedo could tilt his chin to listen.
She rested her hands on her lap. The brass stayed hidden in the hem of her sleeve.
"State your name and origin for the record," Jean said. She held a goose quill dipped in black iron-gall ink. Her brow was furrowed with the polite, strained patience she usually reserved for merchants from Snezhnaya whose cargo manifests failed basic arithmetic. "The guards confiscated three containers of an unknown incendiary agent from your pack. Master Albedo has already inspected the seals. He tells me the containment script is... familiar."
"It's a stabilized compound," Klee said. Her eyes remained on the blotter. "The clay binder keeps the volatile oils from separating below eighty degrees. You don't need to keep it in the cistern."
Jean paused. The quill hovered over the parchment, a round black bead swelling at its nib. "I did not mention the cistern."
Klee closed her mouth. A draught from the window carried the scent of the garden below—sweet flowers and damp earth. It made her stomach cramp.
"The containment geometry is an old iteration of my third-order dampening circle," Albedo said without raising his head. The charcoal strokes did not falter. "I abandoned that formula eighteen months ago because the sublimation point was too low for field transport. Yet whoever pressed these bricks managed to counter the crystallization by incorporating pulverized cor lapis. Clever. Messy, but clever."
"It's not messy," Klee said flatly. "It works."
Albedo’s pencil stopped.
He looked up then. His teal eyes were flat, cool pools of glass. He looked at her ears—the long, swept-back elven points that her hood only half-concealed—and then down to the leather pouches strapped across her chest, each tagged with faded linen strips and stamped with a four-leaf clover in cracked vermilion lacquer.
"Who taught you to cut the wick with a half-twist?" Albedo asked.
"You did," Klee said.
The silence that entered the office was heavy. It had weight, like wool dropped into water.
Kaeya laughed, though the sound had no humor in it. He tucked the cigarillo behind his ear and stepped away from the leaded glass. "Now that is a novel gambit. Usually travelers claim to be the lost scions of the Lawrence clan, or perhaps an emissary from the Adventurers' Guild carrying confidential orders from Fontaine. Claiming kinship with the Chief Alchemist is... bold. Particularly when he does not take pupils."
"I am not his pupil," Klee said. She looked at Kaeya’s collar. There was no scar beneath his chin. That was wrong. The serrated gouge from the mechanical harvester should have been there, puckered and white against his throat. "I'm Klee."
Jean dropped the pen. It rolled across the ledger, leaving a thin, crooked line of ink across a list of flour tariffs.
"That is enough," Jean said. Her chair scraped the wall as she rose. "The girl who bears that name is currently under house arrest in the library's lower annex for discharging an unapproved device into Cider Lake. Master Diluc personally brought three dead bass to my quarters at dawn. She has been there since seven o'clock this morning."
Klee’s thumb found the seam of her gauntlet again. One, two, three turns.
"The lock on the annex door has a sticky tumbler on the bottom right," Klee said. Her tone did not change; she might have been reporting the price of dried radish in Springvale. "If you wiggle the brass handle twice toward the hinges, the bolt falls back without the key. I hid three sparklers behind the dictionary of ancient Nordics on the third shelf. They're still there."
Jean went pale. Her mouth tightened into a line so thin her lips lost their color. She did not call for the guard. She looked at Kaeya, but Kaeya was no longer smiling.
His single eye had turned cold, measuring the distance between the map table and the window. "A remarkably well-informed intruder," he murmured. "Did Lisa tell you that? No... Lisa wouldn't leave the sparklers there. She would have used them to light her hearth."
"She didn't find them," Klee said. "I forgot them until the roof caved in."
"What roof?" Jean asked.
Klee did not answer. The room was too bright. The lack of soot on the plaster walls felt unnatural, almost offensive, like clean linen wrapped around an open sore. Her head throbbed behind her temples, the dull ache of the Ley line displacement grinding against her skull like sand in a hinge.
Albedo set his board on the table. He stood up, smooth and unhurried, and walked over to her. He did not touch her. He stopped two paces away, his hands folded behind his back, his head tilted at an angle that Klee knew better than her own face. He was observing the micro-fractures in the leather of her harness.
"Show me your Vision," he said softly.
Klee unbuttoned the top clasp of her heavy canvas mantle. Beneath it, pinned to the left breast of her faded tunic, the glass sphere was dull. The gold wings framing it were notched and blackened by heat; one of the filigree plumes had broken off entirely, replaced by a crude twist of copper wire to keep the jewel from slipping out of the socket. The flame inside did not dance. It sat low, an ember banked beneath grey ash, pulsing only when she drew breath.
Albedo looked at the casing. He leaned in, his gaze fixing on the wire repair.
"This alloy," he said, his voice dropping below the register of Jean's attention. "It contains traces of smaragdus jade. That ore is only mined in the deeper chasms of Liyue—strata that the Qixing sealed four years before the current calendar."
He knew. He did not say the word, but his pupils expanded until the ring of light around them nearly vanished. He withheld it, keeping the logic locked behind his teeth, the way he always did when a theorem was too dangerous to speak aloud before the control group was prepared.
"Master Albedo?" Jean's voice had an edge now. "What is it?"
"A forgery of remarkable technical sophistication," Albedo lied smoothly. He did not look back at the Grand Master. His eyes stayed on Klee’s face, tracing the bridge of her nose, the small crescent scar near her left eyebrow that she had earned when a mortar casing split during her twelfth summer. "Or an artifact of an anomaly we have not yet cataloged. Either way, she is not dangerous in her current state. Her elemental flow is severely depleted. She has experienced considerable systemic shock."
"She carries five pounds of modified blast-powder through the city gates," Kaeya pointed out from the desk, his hand resting lightly on the pommel of his sword. "In most nations, that is considered an act of war, or at least very bad manners."
"I have more in the woods," Klee said.
The three of them looked at her.
"The cache near the Whispering Woods tree," she continued, looking directly at Jean now. "The roots are hollow on the north side. There are twelve charges packed in paraffin. If it rains, the water will pool in the lower trench and short the mercury triggers. They will explode before midnight if you don't dig them up."
Jean took a step toward her. Her face was an impossible mixture of authority and horror. "Why would you put such things near the road?"
"Because the things that came out of the valley don't like fire," Klee said.
"What things?"
Klee looked down at her own scarred knuckles. The skin was rough, calloused from years of handling brass files and sulfur wedges without gloves. She felt the heavy spindle in her sleeve, the gears cold now, frozen by the lock-pin she had driven into its gut.
"They aren't here yet," she said.
The silence returned, but this time it was broken by the sound of boots on the stairs outside. A runner, moving quickly, the scabbard clattering against the banister. The door rattle preceded three sharp raps on the wood.
"Acting Grand Master!" a voice called through the panels. "An incident at the Thousand Winds Temple! The ground... the ground gave way, ma'am. The patrols say there's an iron ring rising out of the bedrock, and the sky above the amphitheater has turned violet."
Jean didn't look away from Klee.
"Kaeya," Jean said, her tone dropping into the cold, flat rhythm of command. "Take the vanguard. Clear the lower road."
"Already on it," Kaeya said, but as he passed Klee, he paused. He looked down at her, his visible eye searching her face with an intensity that had nothing to do with duty. He smelled of horse sweat and bitter mint. "Stay in this chair, little spark. We have a great many things to discuss when the sun goes down."
He slipped out the door, the latch falling behind him with a sharp click.
Albedo remained. He picked up his charcoal once more, but he did not draw. He stood by the window, watching the street below, his fingers black with soot.
"The lock-pin in your sleeve," Albedo murmured, not turning around. "Did I make it?"
Klee reached into her cuff. Her fingers touched the cold, squared teeth of the brass wheel.
"No," she said. "I did. You told me the tolerances were too loose, but you didn't have time to fix them."
The Grand Master was buckling her broadsword to her hip, her movements tight and mechanical. Outside, the cathedral bells began their slow, rhythmic tolling for the fifth hour. Five deep, iron strokes that rolled over the clay roofs of the city and vanished into the blue lake.
Klee counted them.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
In the past, each stroke had meant dinner: cold mutton, sour bread, and the sweet, fermented grape juice Kaeya kept in the lower cupboard. She had hated the bread then. She had wanted honey cakes from the bakery by the fountain.
Now, as the fifth strike died against the lead glass, she realized she had completely forgotten what honey tasted like.