The column had a voice.
Not literally — Kai understood that much. It wasn't sound, wasn't even the impression of sound. It was more like standing in a library where every book was already open to the right page, and all you had to do was look. The information didn't arrive so much as clarify — details surfacing from depth the way shapes emerged from fog when you drove toward them.
He stood in the center of the chamber and the column showed him things.
Year 43 Post-Founding. Northeast Corridor. A man named Aldric Vasek, twenty-two years old, with the specific kind of ambition that hadn't yet learned to disguise itself.
The column didn't editorialize. It simply recorded.
