The bells had been the first thing to go. Metal made noise when brush caught it, and noise drew things with teeth out of the dark beyond the border.
Klee stood on the cobblestones outside the lower gate of Mondstadt and adjusted the strap across her collarbone. Her pack was three stone heavier than it had been when she was small, loaded with packed sulfur cakes, saltpeter dried over tallow, and seven sealed brass cylinders lined with paraffin. It didn't rattle. She had packed coarse sheep’s fleece between the casings until nothing moved, even when she dropped from a sill.
A spring puddle lay across the gutter, brown and level with the curb. She broke her stride, stepped two feet wide of it, and kept her boots dry. Stagnant water was an invitation for rust, and primer caps spoiled if you carried damp off the road.
The wind tasted like flour and wet stone. It was wrong. The cider mills hadn't burned yet.
She took the stairs toward the plaza slow, one boot heel at a time, her right thumb working against the cuff of her left glove. Fourteen coarse stitches of boiled sinew held the cuff to the hide. One, two, three, four. She knew the count without looking, but she counted anyway. Her mother had said once that an idle hand in an alchemist’s shop was just waiting to knock over a crucible. Klee hadn't been in her mother’s workshop in six years, but the thumb kept moving.
"My, aren't you a serious traveler for such a sunny morning."
The voice came from the shadow under the milliner’s awning.
Klee didn't jump. Jumping ruined your footing. She turned from the hips, her hand resting flat against her thigh, four inches from the flap of her utility pouch where the strike-papers were kept dry.
Kaeya leaned against the timber post, his arms folded across the ruff of his collar. He looked absurdly young. His eyepatch was the clean, dark calfskin he’d worn before the skirmish at Cider Lake took the bridge out, without the salt-scale stiffening the edges. His boots were polished. There was no dust on his sword knot.
"You're out of uniform," Klee said.
Kaeya’s brow lifted. His single blue eye tracked from her boots—stiff leather, double-soled, bound with copper wire at the ankles—up to the faded, grease-stained vermilion of her coat. The hem had been let down twice; the original scarlet showed in two pale bands above the mud.
"A keen eye," Kaeya murmured, pushing off the timber. His weight shifted smoothly, the way a wolf stepped over fallen birch. "Though around here, I usually ask the questions first. Especially when someone walks through the main thoroughfare carrying enough alchemical grade red sulfur to strip the paint off the cathedral doors. You smell like an armory furnace, little lady."
"The seals are intact," she said flatly. "You won't smell them unless you’re trying to pick a fight."
"Force of habit." He smiled, but his left hand stayed near his rapier’s basket. "Let’s take a walk up to the courtyard. The Acting Grand Master has a fondness for people who carry their life on their backs."
He didn't mention the patrol report he’d stuffed into his waistband twenty minutes earlier, but she caught the corner of the blue wax seal poking out from his belt. It was the Falcon seal from Falcon Coast—the outpost they’d abandoned the winter after the sky went grey. In this season, that outpost was still garrisoned by eight men and a cook. He was lying about running into her by accident.
"Lead," she said.
They went up the stone stairs together. Kaeya kept half a pace ahead, offering his flank, giving her room to run if she bolted. She didn't bolt. She watched the masonry of the library wall. It was whole. The high buttress on the north side still had its gargoyle, the stone snout unbroken, water dripping from its chin onto the lavender bushes below.
Inside the headquarters, the cedar floorboards smelled of linseed oil and beeswax. A terrible, useless waste of tallow, but the knights had always kept the floors slick.
Kaeya didn't knock with his knuckles; he clicked his ring against the oak twice and shoved the door open.
"Jean," he said. "We have an artisan from the trade road. Or an extremely stubborn runaway."
The room was bright. Too bright. Sunlight cut through the tall lattice windows, illuminating dust motes that floated above stacks of parchment that looked whole, white, and undamaged.
Jean stood behind her desk, her shoulders straight as an ash spar. Her hair was pinned tight, not a single loose curl trailing into her collar. Next to the tall shelf of botany folios, Albedo was tracing a line of charcoal across a ledger, his coat immaculate, the gold star at his throat catching the morning glare like new coinage.
He didn't look up immediately. When he did, his charcoal snapped against the rag paper.
"Kaeya," Jean began, her tone carrying that specific, measured fatigue that Klee remembered better than the lullabies her mother used to hum. "I asked for the patrol logs from Springvale, not—"
She stopped.
Klee stood in the center of the braided rug. Her hair was long, tangled beneath her cap, tied back with a strip of tanned gut to keep it out of the spark-range. The clover-leaf crest on the brass buckle of her chest strap was pitted with acid burns, but the shape was unmistakable.
Jean’s fingers tightened on the edge of her blotter. "Where did you get that coat?"
"It’s mine," Klee said. Her voice was too low for a girl her size, raspy from years of smoke inhalation and breathing cold mountain salt. "I grew out of the sleeves three years ago. I had to sew in strips from an old tent fly."
Albedo set the broken piece of charcoal on the desk. He stepped forward with that slow, balanced stride that never made a sound on dry timber. He didn't look at her face; he looked at her wrists, at the calluses on her thumb where the friction-lighters bit into the skin, and then down to the small, round pouch hanging from her left hip.
Dodoco was grey now. The ears were worn down to the linen weave, and the left eye was a flat brass upholstery tack driven through the flannel into cork.
"The resonance," Albedo said quietly. His voice hadn't changed at all. That was the worst part. In twenty years, his voice would sound exactly like this: smooth, cool, like slate dipped in snowmelt. "It's three octaves lower than the ambient trace in the courtyard."
"Albedo?" Jean asked, though she hadn't taken her eyes off Klee’s face. "What does that mean?"
"It means her catalyst is discharging at a decay rate we only see in fossils from the valley below the Wyrmrest," Albedo said. He reached toward Klee's collar, his hand steady, fingers curved. "May I?"
Klee took half a step back, her spine stiffening until her shoulder blades touched the heavy iron handle of the shut door. "Don't touch the neck-seal. The primer’s dry-cured. If you jar the cap, the sulfur will foul."
Albedo withdrew his fingers without offense. He simply lowered them to his side. "You're using white clay to stabilize the ignition core. Why? Red clay from the plains yields four times the heat."
"Red clay cracks when the frost gets into the casing," she said. "You know that. You told me that when we had to clear the ice-trolls out of the cavern by the nail."
Silence fell over the office. It was thick enough to choke on.
Jean looked between them, her mouth pressed into a thin, pale seam. "Klee is currently in the lower reading room with Lisa. She has been there since breakfast, copying three pages of the Knights' code for disturbing the ducks in the moat."
"I know," Klee said. "I dropped four firecrackers into the reeds because I thought they were hiding a water slime. You took my pack for two weeks and made me clean the lanterns in the barracks."
Kaeya leaned his back against the doorframe, his thumbs hooked in his belt. He was watching Albedo, not her. "An imposter with a very thorough memory. Or something our Chief Alchemist would rather not explain to the Grand Master upon his return."
"Varka isn't returning," Klee said.
The words came out without weight, just fact, like stating the boiling point of vinegar.
Jean’s hand flattened entirely against the mahogany desk, her knuckles whitening under the skin. "That expedition is under sealed orders, traveler. You will not speak of the Grand Master's movements in this room."
She was holding back the courier’s pouch on her left hip. Klee saw the brass clasp—it was the three-ring lock used only for dispatches from the northern pass. In Klee’s time, those dispatches had stopped coming before the snows melted on the plateau. Jean was pretending she still had men out there who could write back.
"I didn't come to talk about him," Klee said. She unbuckled her pack strap with a single, practiced snap of her thumb and let the heavy hide bundle drop to the rug. The brass cylinders inside gave a dead, muffled *thud*. No chime. No rattle. "I had an accident in the cellar under the laboratory. The third shelf. The one behind the jar with the pickled lizard tail."
Albedo’s eyes narrowed slightly. "The false backing."
"The stone wheel with the seven teeth," she said. "The teeth were loose. I used a bronze chisel to set the fifth pin because the spark-seal was leaking grease, and the room... folded."
She hated dandelions. A stray white tuft had drifted in through the open window and settled on her sleeve. She pinched it between two fingers, rolled it into a greasy pellet, and flicked it toward the waste bin. It landed three inches short, gray against the cedar.
"You shouldn't keep that wheel on the wall," she added. "It leaks cold. Everything in that room smelled like old lard after the axle dropped."
Albedo looked at Jean. "The astrolabe in the sub-cellar has not been unsealed since Alice departed seven years ago."
"I know what it is," Jean said, her tone strained, pitched high at the edge like a bowstring drawn past its mark. "And I know what Alice left in our care. Which is why this—this person cannot remain in the headquarters unescorted."
"She isn't an imposter, Jean," Kaeya said, his voice dropping the playful purr it had carried on the street. He looked older now, suddenly, around the corners of his mouth. "Look at her boots. She walks like she's expecting the flags to give way under her. Our little Spark Knight runs until her knees bleed."
"She had fourteen stitches on her first bracer," Klee said to the floor. She wasn't looking at any of them now; she was looking at the hem of Jean's white tunic. It was so clean. There weren't any smoke stains along the fringe. No scorched grease from the field lamps. "Master Jean gave it to her because the brass buckle kept pinching her wrist when she threw. She told her that if she pulled the thread out, she wouldn't get another one until harvest."
Jean closed her eyes for three long seconds. When she opened them, the Acting Grand Master was back, cold and narrow.
"Where is your Vision?" Jean asked.
Klee didn't answer with words. She reached into her collar, pulled up the thick braided horsehair cord, and drew the brass casing out from beneath her shirt.
The red gem was there. The three-leaf clover was inside the glass, but it didn't pulse. It didn't warm the air around her collar. The light inside was fixed, dead-still, like a red stone dropped into deep well water where the sun never reached.
Albedo stepped across the rug until he was standing directly before her. He smelled of chalk dust and dried lavender, the way he always smelled before the cold took his hands.
"What broke it?" he asked.
"Nothing broke it," Klee said, her voice dropping into that small, dry space where she kept her powder ratios. "It still works. It just doesn't burn unless I ask it to."
She looked up into his pale, ash-colored eyes. She had forgotten how small he was. When she was seven, he had seemed tall as the bell tower, but now his forehead was level with her eyebrows.
"You have chalk on your knuckle," she told him. "The blue kind. From the ledger."
Albedo looked down at his right hand. The smudge was there, bright cobalt against his pale skin. He didn't wipe it away. Instead, he reached behind him, slid a key off his belt ring—a long, blackened iron key with three square notches—and set it on the corner of the map table.
"Jean," he said without looking back. "The lower archives need to be cleared."
"Albedo—"
"Now," he said.
The wind from the open casement caught the maps on the wall, fluttering the edges of the Starfell Lake survey. For the first time since she had walked through the gate, Klee felt the cold air hit the back of her neck.
It didn't feel like the city she had blown to pieces. It felt like a room full of ghosts who hadn't realized their well had run dry.