Lind waited until the schoolhouse settled into its evening quiet.

  The banished children slept early. They always did. Something about being unwanted made exhaustion come faster. The wards hummed softly along the walls, fox-thread charms glowing dull red, stitched and restitched until they barely remembered their original purpose.

  She walked the corridors slowly, touching doorframes, listening for nightmares.

  Only when she was certain they were all asleep did she return to her office.

  The room was small, slanted slightly to accommodate the curve of the fox’s flank. Books leaned where shelves refused to sit straight. Student projects crowded every surface—paper birds, clay figurines, chalk drawings that had been carefully preserved with fixative.

  So many foxes.

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  Too many eyes.

  She set a kettle on the small burner and waited for it to boil, though she already knew she wouldn’t drink the tea. The ritual mattered more than the result.

  Under her desk, hidden behind a false panel she had installed herself, was the cabinet.

  She unlocked it.

  Inside were files that officially did not exist.

  Copies she had made quietly, over years, whenever a banishment involved a child. Family histories. Birth records. Marginal notes scribbled in fear or rage. Evidence that the city’s punishments did not end where it claimed they did.

  She removed Yren’s file.

  It was thinner than most. His mother had been careful. Quiet. No prior offenses. The accusation had come suddenly, like a fracture without warning.

  Conspiracy. Thoughtcrime.

  Lind traced the indentation of Aera Velru’s signature on the consent form. The ink was shaky. Pressed too hard, as if she’d hoped to carve the truth into the page beneath.

  “You didn’t mean it,” Lind whispered. “You never meant harm.”

  The fox shifted beneath the building, a gentle roll that tipped the tea kettle just enough to rattle.

  Lind closed the file.

  For years, she had believed mercy was a small thing—comfort, protection, forgetting.

  Now she understood it differently.

  Mercy was refusal.