The Sterling archives were everything Lucas had expected and nothing like he'd imagined. Row upon row of crystalline storage matrices arranged with contained data, their surfaces flickering with streams of information that moved too quickly for human eyes to follow. The interface responded to his touch with fluid grace, projecting holographic displays that materialized and dissolved at his command.
Lucas started with the obvious searches—eighth ancestor, missing families, recent disappearances. The results were frustratingly sparse. References to seven founding families, detailed genealogies stretching back millennia, economic records, territorial agreements, but nothing about an eighth bloodline.
'Maybe I'm approaching this wrong,' he thought, changing tactics. 'If someone wanted to hide information about a missing family, they'd scrub the direct references first. But secondary sources, administrative records, might still contain traces.'
