"Installed in what," I asked, though some cold, certain part of me had already guessed the shape of the answer before he said it.
"In whatever turned those villagers in Daenia into the things we fought in that forest," Namey said. "In whatever turned that queen into something that could hunt purely on inherited fear. I think someone's manufacturing the corruption on purpose, Jon, shipping it out to specific towns on a schedule, and I think I recognize this exact numbering convention because I helped build the system it's riding on top of, years before anyone ever thought to weaponize it this way."
The hall around us kept its noise, laughter from a nearby table, someone haggling loudly over a bounty split two tables over, and none of it touched the small cold silence that had opened up around our own booth.
"Why," Luxy asked, quiet. "Why do this to whole towns."
"Look at the last column," Namey said, and turned the paper another few degrees so we could all see it properly. Beside each destination sat a second entry, smaller, in a different hand: a guild contract number, and beside that, a payment figure that made Savage let out a low, disbelieving whistle.
"They're seeding disasters," Namey said, "and then selling the cleanup. Every one of these towns gets hit, panics, and puts out a bounty for adventurers to clear it, and every one of those bounties routes through guild contracts that Genesis takes a cut of, same as it always has, except now they're not just profiting off the game people already wanted to play. They're manufacturing the crisis first, and then charging people to survive it."
"That's not a game anymore," I said, and heard my own voice go flat and strange in my own ears. "That's an industry."
"That's exactly what it is," Namey said, and something in his face had gone pale and drawn in a way I hadn't seen on him since the first afternoon he'd gone quiet over an ordinary system flicker three days out of Daenia. "And I don't think Tomiyasu built any of this. I don't think he'd have allowed it within a mile of anything he made, whatever else is true about the man. Which means somebody rewired his creation after he lost the chair to do it."
"Shinji," I said.
"I can't prove that yet," Namey said, careful, the particular careful of a man choosing his words around something he was more afraid of than he wanted to admit out loud. "This stamp, the ash-grey circle, I don't recognize it from anything official. It's not a Genesis logo, not one I ever saw internally. But whoever's running this operation had to have access to the exact routing architecture I helped build, which narrows the list of people capable of it down to a number small enough that I don't love sitting with it."
"Corvin Ashe," I said, half to myself, turning the name over the way I'd been turning it over since Yomi first said it to me in her blank little world.
"Maybe," Namey said. "Maybe he's the sigil on the paper. Maybe he's something else entirely and this is just the machinery he's riding around inside of. I don't know yet. What I do know is that somebody is turning entire villages into product, on a schedule, with paperwork clean enough to survive an audit, and that whoever's doing it has been doing it for longer than just the weeks since Hallowmere." He tapped the manifest's date again, the one beside Hallowmere's name. "This route was scheduled three weeks before the raid that took your home, Jon. Somebody knew Hallowmere was going to burn before you ever flew home to watch it happen."
I sat with that a long moment, the noise of the hall receding somewhere far away from me, my grandfather's letter and Abigail's letter both sitting quiet and unbearably light against my chest.
"They knew," I said. "Before I even got there. Before the girl in white ever came to warn me."
"I think so," Namey said, quiet. "I'm sorry, Jon. I wish I had a gentler way to hand you that."
"Don't," I said. "I'd rather have it ugly and true than gentle and half finished. I've had enough of people softening things for me lately." I thought of Abigail's letter, the line she'd made someone else write down word for word: you don't get to let a big enough fire convince you that it fixed anything. "So what do we do with it."
"We can't take this to any authority in Corvane," Namey said. "Guild contracts run through the exact system I just described. For all I know, half the officials in this city are drawing a quiet salary off the same manifest schedule that got your grandfather's town burned to the ground. We need proof heavier than one paper pulled off a dead mercenary's coat, and we need it somewhere Genesis can't quietly make it disappear before anyone with actual power gets a look at it."
"Where does that leave us," Luxy asked.
Namey folded the manifest carefully back along its original creases, the way you'd fold something you already understood might end up being the only surviving copy of itself.
"It leaves us needing to find the source," he said. "Whoever's shipping modified cores out to specific towns on a schedule has to be doing it from somewhere. A facility, a cluster of servers, something with a physical footprint even inside a world built to feel like it doesn't have one. I have a guess where to start looking, and I don't love it."
"Where," Savage asked.
"Highhollow," Namey said, and I felt something in my chest go very still and very cold at the sound of it. "It's remote enough, mountainous enough, and far enough from any of the major guild seats that it'd make sense as a place to run something nobody official was ever meant to find. It's also, and I don't love the coincidence here any more than the rest of you are about to, the exact region Savage already told you a rumor about your own father is currently sitting in."