Anselm glared up at Shade Tree from behind his expansive desk, struggling to master his fury. “So what are you doing here? Get out and look harder! There must be a trace of them somewhere! Some fragment, at least!”

“Do you really think I’d have come to you like this if I still thought there might be?” The young man leaned against Anselm’s office doorjamb seeming almost bored. Anselm wondered, not for the first time, if he’d just been mistaking insanity for genius in the boy, all these years. “Both I, and an associate of even more singular talent in such matters, have followed every detectable trail,” Shade continued. “It’s all char—to the end of any thread. If my operative hadn’t overheard the boy and their investigator discussing it, we’d never even have known the documents existed.” He shrugged in seeming indifference. “They beat us to this one. That’s all there is to it.”

“All there is to it?!” Anselm shouted, despite himself. “First you kidnap a girl I didn’t ask for and don’t want! Then you fail to discover, much less secure, documents I’d have killed for! In a single afternoon, you’ve gone from seemingly reliable intelligence savant to serial saboteur of this entire campaign!” He slammed a fist down on his desktop. “THAT is all there is to it!” Unbelievably, the insolent little shit just stood there curling his lip as if it were his own patience being tested here. “At least have the decency to pretend some molecule of shame. Anyone would think you were my employer, for all the—Or is that it? Have you switched sides? …What did it cost Rain to buy you?”

The boy actually rolled his eyes. “Perhaps it would be more useful to return when you’ve had time to digest this disappointment a bit?” He cocked his head, as if to say, ‘Your move.’

Anselm surged to his feet, rage licking at the onion skin of discretion preventing him from an unrestrained attack on this infuriating upstart.

Shade straightened, shifting his weight forward in wary readiness, even daring to pull a shield around himself—like a swarm of black bees to Anselm’s energetic vision. “Go ahead, sir,” the boy said quietly. “Gouge out your eyes and ears. Hack off your own arms and legs. I can well imagine how good that might feel—for a moment or two.”

Anselm hung immobilized between fierce yearning to atomize this presumptuous ingrate…and, much farther down, a deeply distasteful recognition that the ass was technically correct. Shade was, sadly, irreplaceable—for the moment, anyway.

Nothing frightened this insufferable adolescent; a useful feature on some occasions—his most unattractive quality on others. “You’re a very clever lad,” Anselm growled softly. “But the day you’re stupid enough to push me too far will be your last in this world.”

“I know,” said Shade. “Whatever you may think, I am very aware of your superiority. If it ever came to direct combat between us, I imagine my survival would be measured in seconds, at best. But pandering to you would make me altogether useless, radically increasing the chances of my destruction, I think.”

“Can either of us even imagine you pandering to me?” Anselm sneered.

Shade shook his head. “Which is precisely my point. If I have something to apologize for, you can be very certain I will, sir—abjectly. But when I am aware of something you may benefit from knowing, you can be just as certain I will tell you, directly and without fear of your displeasure. That, I believe, enhances my value.”

“Oh, well then…” The fire of rage abandoned Anselm as suddenly as it had erupted, extinguished by a hopelessness that left him too weary to keep standing. This had been…such a dreadful evening. “And what, in today’s pile of wreckage, do you imagine I might benefit from?” He sat down again, and threw his hands up in surrender. “By all means, enlighten me.”

The lad studied him for a moment, as if genuinely perplexed. “I can understand your disappointment about the documents, sir. I required a few moments myself to…vent some rather intense frustration before arriving here. And I can see how fatigued you are. These past few weeks—”

“If you’ve something to say, get on with it,” Anselm interrupted.

Shade shrugged and nodded. “All right. I am somewhat confused by your apparent…readiness…to spite the fish that got away by throwing back the ones we’ve caught.”

Anselm gazed at him, somewhat surprised. He’d expected better than this—even now. “Oh! Did we catch something after all? …I was somehow unaware of it.”

Shade smiled at him, strangely. “Well, to begin with…there is the girl, sir. And the discovery of correspondence between Rhymer and Clarke’s family.”

“The correspondence you failed to secure?” Anselm was beginning to wonder just how confused Shade actually was. “And the girl—who knows nothing useful, and seems likely to mean little if anything to Rhymer? The girl whose very presence here is a potentially damning political and legal liability to me personally, let alone to our efforts at impugning The Lady’s character? Did I ask you to catch me any such fish, boy?”

“Since when am I asked to do anything?” To Anselm’s displeasure, that ‘condescending’ tone had crept back into Shade’s voice. “I can’t recall being asked to arrange any of that storm you seemed so pleased with just a couple weeks ago. Your wistful musings about seeing our true power manifest again, as in days of old—‘Something written large upon the very sky,’ if I recall correctly—were, as always, conveyed to me by others without any specific instruction at all. Conveniently, if you were called before arbiters tomorrow, you could tell them honestly that you’ve no idea how the thing was done, or who, exactly, might have been involved. The Archivist himself couldn’t say you lied. Is that not our usual arrangement, sir?”

“Your point?” Anselm asked with rekindling impatience.

“More recent musings were conveyed to me about two Andinol boys, one extremely elusive, and the other in recovery somewhere, after very strange rescue from the Saddle flood. I was given to understand that kidnap would be entirely permissible should those boys prove to be one and the same. Beyond that, I recall no other specific guidance—for the usual reasons, I presume. Does any part of this assessment seem inaccurate to you, sir?”

“No,” Anselm growled. “Just pointless.”

Shade took a step forward, his irritation suddenly undisguised. “I saw a unexpected opportunity to draw Matthew Rhymer out, and I jumped on it. If our usual arrangement was not in force on this occasion, that should have been clarified ahead of time. Not even you, sir, can both micromanage my pursuit of your unstated goals, and remain immune from direct responsibility. If I am to assume your risk—”

“But you didn’t,” Anselm interjected, careful to preserve his poise now that Shade’s seemed to be teetering. “You brought her here, to my house, making her my responsibility. And, if that were not sufficiently imbecilic, you left the specified target of our surveillance—for so many weeks now—completely unobserved. By us, at least—for hours afterward.”

“The girl had to be transported to someplace secure. Given my urgent need to return to the field, this was the only such place, and I could hardly have left the troll to—”

“If there was any shred of value in this catastrophic miscalculation,” Anselm spoke over him, “it lay in seeing who the Clarke boy reached out to for help upon finding her gone. But we weren’t there to see that, were we? No, we were transporting a girl worse than useless to me, while they were learning of—and destroying—documents that might finally have won this game for me!” Try as he might, Anselm couldn’t keep his voice from rising. “Our usual arrangement is predicated upon my assumption of your good judgment, boy—which seems suddenly in shockingly short supply. Is it possible that you don’t understand what will happen when it’s proven that I’ve held an Andinol woman prisoner in my house—for no reason I can readily justify? Can you possibly imagine that anyone will believe I didn’t intend to? No doubt The Lady and her instruments are celebrating your unthinkable gaffe as we speak. I’ll wager they’ve already sent word to the arbiters. Are you offering to fall on that sword yourself, to protect my good name, and our campaign?” He leaned back, filled with contempt. “I’d be very surprised to hear it. If you’d brought me Rhymer himself, I’d have the proof I need to justify such actions. But this girl is useless! Admit it; this whole maneuver was stupidly conceived and stupidly executed in a reckless rush from start to finish.”

The boy remained silent, for once—which would have afforded Anselm more satisfaction were it not obvious from the set of his jaw and the look on his face that Shade was struggling, even now, not with fear or embarrassment, but with anger and impatience—still. “I respectfully disagree, sir,” Shade said through gritted teeth.

“With which part?” Anselm scoffed.

“That girl is nothing like useless. She’s the most useful gift I’ve brought you yet.” He fell silent again, visibly leashing his inexplicable temper. “All the more so, now that we’ve discovered, at all, the recent correspondence between Rhymer and Clarke’s family. It is…awkward, sir, but necessary, it seems, to admit that I’d expected you to see this at once, or I’d have…clarified things sooner.”

Well, Anselm thought, this might finally get interesting. “One of us is clearly missing something.” He shrugged. “Let’s find out which one of us that is.” He leaned back and waited.

“The letter I secured for you just before the storm,” said Shade, “told us little but the boy’s name, how much whatever he is means to them, and that they assumed he was still near enough to find. Useful, but no proof of anything we wish to prove. The documents I learned of tonight—in the nick of time—clearly contained a great deal more. The entire story, I suspect.”

“And wouldn’t it be nice to have those in our hands now,” Anselm mused, utterly mystified as to what Shade hoped to accomplish by pointing this fact out again.

“But we do have them!” Shade threw his arms out in frustration. “The contents of those documents are locked up in a guest room on the floor below us! Or, at the very least, a significant portion of them. How can you not see that?”

Ah… Anselm thought. How disappointing. He had hoped the boy might really have some unexpected trick still up his sleeve after all. There’d been no chance to tell him since Shade’s dreadful announcement had eclipsed all other matters. “I’ve already met with her,” Anselm said wearily. “While you were out losing those documents. If the Clarke boy knows more than seems apparent, he’s not trusted her with any of it. She’s aware of the letter you intercepted. They got one too; she’s confirmed that. And though she’s heard about Rhymer from Clarke, she never knew him personally. She didn’t even meet Clarke himself until recently, and has no idea at all about this secret correspondence, or anything else of real use to us.”

“And you believe that?” Shade said, half a smile playing on his lips.

All your hopes pinned to this one sad assumption, eh? “Trust me, I know a lie when I hear one, boy, and for such an intelligent girl, she’s an astonishingly poor liar.” Anselm might even have felt a little sympathy for Shade, were the boy not so horridly full of himself.

Oddly, Shade’s smile only widened. “Well then, now we know a third new thing. She’s a much better liar than either of us had reason to expect.”

Anselm leaned forward, hoping the boy had something real this time. “Meaning what?”

Shade went back to lean against the doorjamb with a knowing smirk. “It was hard to get into the room with them, back in the hospital. Too many people and too much equipment in too little space. So I was unable to hear much of their conversation. But I could see them pretty clearly through the doorway, or the windows as necessary, and virtually all I ever saw her doing in there—whenever he was sleeping—was stare at her phone. Hours at a time—for nearly a week.” He cocked his head and shrugged. “I’ll admit, I didn’t think much of it at the time. What does any of them do these days but stare at their sad little devices?” He crossed his arms and gave Anselm a ‘checkmate’ grin. “But now, I’ll wager whatever you’d like, sir, about what she was reading all that time.”

“Have you any real proof of this?” Anselm asked, almost fearful of the hope now straining in his breast. “Or are you just grasping at straws still?”

“The operative who overheard their talk of this correspondence with police tonight also heard the mother say she thought the girl had ‘read more of it than any of them.’”

“Do we have this phone of hers?” Anselm asked, back on his feet without memory of having gotten there.

“Sadly, it was crushed as we took her—by your troll, sir. The troll I might have sent her off alone with, I suppose, so that I could stay and watch the boy.”

“Can you just…give all that a rest, please?” Anselm said, already reviewing his conversation with the little vixen. So much smarter than he’d thought. Really, very impressive. If she weren’t Andinol, he might have tried recruiting her. “So you think—”

“She has it, sir. Right up here.” He tapped a finger against his temple, looking terribly pleased with himself—which, if he was right, Anselm no longer minded all that much. “We can just go down right now and take it from her.”

“No.”

“No?” The grin died on Shade’s face. “Why on earth not?”

Anselm shot him a warning look. “The fact that everything may not be lost after all does not change our relative positions, boy, or the respect I think you’d better start remembering to show me if you want your tenure here to end well. Is that clear? Neither of us has forgotten where you came here from, or why. I am done indulging your cheek.”

“Understood, sir. May I reiterate, please, that I am not confused about who is—”

“Yes, yes; the value of candor. I heard you.”

“If I may, sir, please allow me to clarify that, whatever my manner at times may seem to suggest, no part of my service to you is in any way resentful. The passion I sometimes fail to manage well is driven by my utter agreement with, and support of, your views and your cause. I dare to claim that no one in this house wishes your success more deeply than I do, sir, precisely because of where I came from, and why. I believe…I hope you know that, sir. Even when I test your patience.”

Anselm regarded him thoughtfully, convinced of at least some truth in what he said. He remembered the ragged boy who’d first come to his attention, years before. The pain and anger that boy had worn like a cloak of burning metal, and the gratitude he had demonstrated when Anselm had agreed to take him in. A few successes could not have washed all that away in so little time. But neither could such an outburst have been inspired by one brief scolding. Fear had never driven anything Shade did, so… “An exceptionally pretty speech, especially coming from you,” Anselm mused aloud. “What inspires it all of a sudden? … Truthfully.”

Shade’s eyes remained trained on the floor—his cheeks strangely flushed. “Sir, it would help me… At the risk of seeming to question your judgment—which I do not mean to do—”

“Out with it.”

“I am profoundly confident that, after so much time, the means to achieve our goals are finally waiting just downstairs. It…might help me understand how to…anticipate your wishes more effectively if I understood more clearly why you choose not to use what I have handed you.”

Anselm’s attention sharpened. Shade’s distress seemed suddenly both more genuine, and qualitatively different than the haughty, cocksure fits of pique he usually indulged in. There was something more here. Something new, he wondered, or something old, perhaps? “Who said I would not use it?”

The lad looked up with a bruised expression, as if to see whether he were being mocked. “You just said…”

“I said we will not go down and tear the information from her mind.” He gazed more deeply at the boy, and saw it; something old, indeed. Who’d have thought it? So shallowly buried under all that insolent bravado. “I have no intention of throwing you away, Shade Tree,” he said gruffly. “Or anything of value you provide me with. If your ambitions are to be fulfilled, you will need to learn a great deal more about patience, and diplomacy, and respect for the damage even lesser beings can do you, if you fail to play them better than they’re playing you. You do get in your own way—quite a lot—though age will fix that, not that I expect you to believe me. But if I bat you down at times, it is because I don’t dismiss you. I wish you’d handled quite a few things differently today, but if you’re right about what this girl knows, I mean to extract every ounce of it from her—if a bit more slowly than you’d like me to.”

“But, why?” he pressed. “It would be the work of minutes—seconds maybe. We might even do it in her sleep—like any other harvest. Would she even know?”

“Stop—and think,” said Anselm. “If the evidence we need is there, I will eventually have to produce her to prove it—before arbiters—before the Archivist himself, I’m sure. There will be no way to conceal from them whatever we have or haven’t done to her. If I am to prove The Lady undeserving of rule without doing my own standing as much or more damage in the process, it must be clear to everyone that my treatment of this girl has been beyond reproach—other than having taken her captive to begin with, of course.” He shrugged. “There may be ways to spin that crime to fairly harmless outcomes. Desperate measures undertaken to unmask even more desperate wrongs committed above me, willingness to risk my own reputation out of loyalty to all our people… I might even manage to make her abduction seem a self-sacrificial gesture. Or, if things go badly, I might just end up disgraced and nullified politically.” He sighed. “But if I am found to have violated her mind, or her spirit…” He pinned Shade with his gaze. “We both know how much more severe the punishments for crime of that kind is.”

“I…could cover such risks, sir. You would never have to—”

Anselm shook his head. “Worse still, if it should ever come to light. And what if we should take such risks only to find that whatever’s in the girl’s mind is still insufficient to make our case? No, if this girl’s mind contains the evidence I need, I must acquire it in ways that leave her presentable at trial. If I were to consider what you suggest at all, it would be only as a last, desperate resort. For now…we’ll try this my way.”

“So…you will at least confront her then?” Shade asked, clearly unconsoled. “Tonight?”

For once, Anselm hoped his smile would convey more understanding, even sympathy, than intimidation, though it had been a great while since he’d been much good at smiles of any kind. Whatever damage their rapport had suffered this evening must be patched now, if possible—for all sorts of reasons. “Your talent is formidable, young man—for better, and for worse. But I respect it, as I hope that you will respect mine someday. Our current frictions are, as I have said, largely a matter of differing age. You are still a hornet, which is, in part, why I employ you. I, however, am a spider. We are both dangerous in our own ways. Hornets have been known, from time to time, to kill spiders, but I’m sure we could find a great many webs around this house with dead hornets wrapped up carefully inside them. It can only improve your edge to recognize this fact, and remember it. Do so, and you may live to be a most impressive spider someday too. If either of us is to come through this intact, however, we must both remember that The Lady is a spider far older and more dangerous than any other I’ve encountered. For now, please tolerate my caution, and do nothing else to rock the boat.”