The seventh day of the month arrived with gray skies and a cold rain that turned the courtyard outside the kitchen windows into a shallow lake of mud and dead leaves.
Lira barely noticed. She had spent the past three days running through the plan in her head so many times that the details had worn grooves into her thinking: the archive keeper leaves at two; Tessa watches the corridor; Lira enters through the general records hall; she finds the ventilation shaft; she goes in; she finds her mother’s file; she gets out.
Simple. Clean. The kind of plan that sounded reasonable when you said it quickly, and terrifying when you slowed down long enough to think about what would happen if any single part of it went wrong.
She worked the midday shift on autopilot, peeling and chopping and stirrin
