ADAEZE POV
"What does that mean?"
Nothing.
The panel just sat there, glowing its faint blue-white, the words ORIENTATION BEGINS NOW still sitting at the top like a heading on a bad assignment. Forty-three days remaining underneath it. She had asked the question out loud because she had no idea if this thing worked like a search engine or a person or something else entirely and she was not about to assume.
She pulled the key from under the rug, locked the door from the inside, and sat down on the floor in front of the panel with her back against the bed frame. If she was going to do this she was going to do it properly. Not standing up, not half-ready to bolt. Properly.
"Okay," she said to it. "Let's try this again. What are the forty-three days counting down to?"
The panel shifted. Text scrolled, not fast, steady, like it was measuring out exactly how much it wanted to give her.
PLOT EVENT: LOCKED FATE SEQUENCE. DAY 43. AVOIDANCE WINDOW CLOSES.
"Avoidance window," she repeated. "So there is something I can avoid. That is what you are saying."
More text.
CURRENT TRAJECTORY: ORIGINAL PLOT LINE INTACT. ZARA VOSS. POLITICAL DINNER. POISONED WINE. PUBLIC SETTING. ZERO INTERVENTION.
She sat with that for a second. Zero intervention. That was the part that sat wrong in her chest, heavier than the poison and the dinner and all of it. The whole court watching and not one person moving. She had read that scene on Lena's couch and felt sick about it and now she was the woman it was going to happen to and the system was laying it out for her like a weather report.
"Right," she said. "So I have forty-three days to make sure that dinner doesn't happen the way it is supposed to happen."
The panel did not confirm or deny. It just waited.
"Useful," she muttered. "Very helpful. Thank you."
She reached toward it with one hand and touched the edge of the light and the panel responded, a new menu spreading out to the left, and she saw the words MEMORY ARCHIVE and tapped it.
It opened like a folder. Not feelings, she realised quickly. The novel had given Zara feelings, emotions, the whole interior landscape of a woman in pain. The archive gave none of that. It was just facts. Dates. Names. Records. Like someone had taken a human life and entered it into a spreadsheet.
She started reading.
Zara Voss. Born to Lord Voss and a mother who died when Zara was four. Raised in the Voss estate under a father who tracked her value the way he tracked assets, noting what she could be used for, who she could be positioned next to, what returns she might bring. First court appearance at twelve. First political function at fifteen. First recorded incident of what the court labeled cruelty at sixteen, a public dressing-down of a servant girl in front of three senior nobles.
Adaeze stopped on that one.
She went back to the date. Cross-referenced it against other entries. Two days before that incident, Lord Voss had told Zara in writing that she had embarrassed him at a function and that weakness in a Voss woman was not acceptable. He listed what he expected. He used the word asset three times in one letter.
She closed that entry and kept moving.
Entry after entry, the same pattern. Zara pushed into situations she had not chosen. Zara performing what the court wanted because the court rewarded the performance and punished anything softer. Every time she was vicious, something went smoothly for Lord Voss. Every time she was not, something went wrong for her.
She had not been born like this. Nobody was born like this. They had built it into her the way you build a habit, slowly, with enough repetition that eventually it stopped feeling like a choice.
Adaeze sat with that for a moment and felt something uncomfortable settle in her chest. Not sympathy exactly. Something more practical than that. Understanding. She was wearing a woman whose cruelty was armor and whose armor had been fitted for her by people who needed her to wear it.
She moved on.
She built the threat map in her head the way she used to map drug interactions during revision, starting from the most dangerous and working down. Duchess Seran. The woman ran the court's social architecture the way a surgeon ran an operating table, controlled, precise, completely in charge of what lived and what didn't. Everything in the archive that connected to Seran had a particular quality to it, too smooth, too well-timed, the kind of events that looked like accidents when you read them one at a time and looked like a plan when you read them in sequence.
Oryn was next. Not because he wanted her dead. Because he was watching everything, filing everything, and he had already clocked this morning that something was different about her. A man like that in a court like this was more dangerous than an open enemy. Open enemies you could see coming.
She worked through six more names, assigned each one a rough threat level, noted the connections between them. Three of the six had financial ties to Lord Voss. One of them had attended every single event where something bad had happened to Zara and somehow always had an explanation for why they were there.
She went back to the main panel.
"What about Cael?" she asked. "What was he supposed to do at the dinner?"
CROWN PRINCE CAEL ERYNDAL. PLOT FUNCTION AT EVENT. WITNESS. NON-INTERVENTION. SCRIPTED RESPONSE: NONE.
She stared at that. Scripted response: none. He was written to stand there and watch and say nothing and do nothing and the story had decided that was fine.
"That's disgusting," she said out loud, to no one, to the panel, to the author of this whole thing wherever they were. "You wrote him to just stand there."
The panel did not have feelings about this.
She moved on to the plot points she remembered from the novel, running through them one by one and checking them against what the system confirmed. The accusations against Zara before the dinner. The way Lord Voss positioned himself in the days leading up to it. The specific servant who would press the glass into her hand. She checked each one and the system confirmed each one with flat, factual text and no emotion whatsoever, and she appreciated that more than she expected to. She did not need the system to feel sorry for her. She needed it to be accurate.
She was four points deep into the confirmation list when the panel shifted.
New text. Not in response to anything she had asked.
SECONDARY DEVIATION DETECTED.
She leaned forward.
"What deviation? What does secondary mean, is there a primary?"
ORIGIN: UNKNOWN.
"That's not an answer. Secondary deviation from what, from the original plot? Something is already different from how the story was supposed to go?"
The panel held the same words. SECONDARY DEVIATION DETECTED. ORIGIN UNKNOWN. Nothing else came.
She pressed. "Is it dangerous? Does it affect my forty-three days? Is it something I did or something someone else did?"
Nothing.
The system just sat there with its soft light and its flat letters and its complete refusal to give her the one piece of information that was actually making her nervous right now, and she pushed her fingers through her hair, Zara's hair, and breathed through her nose and accepted that there were limits here she was not going to argue her way past.
"Fine," she said. "Fine. I'll find it myself."
She stood up. Her legs were stiff from sitting on the stone floor and the candles had burned all the way down to flat and the light coming through the curtains was proper morning light now, pale gold instead of grey. She had been on that floor for almost two hours.
She stretched, rolled her neck, went to the window. The palace grounds were properly awake below, servants crossing the courtyard with loads, two soldiers in a quiet argument near the east gate, a woman in court clothes walking fast toward the main building with the energy of someone who had somewhere to be and did not like being late.
Normal, she thought. Everyone out there thought this was a normal morning.
She let the curtain fall.
She needed to eat something. She needed to figure out what Zara's schedule looked like for the rest of the day. She needed to understand what this secondary deviation was before it understood her first. She needed to do all of that while being careful enough that neither Oryn nor Seran nor anyone else in this building had cause to look at her too closely.
She needed to be Zara Voss convincingly enough to survive and she had been awake in this body for approximately four hours.
Great.
She crossed back toward the desk to look for a schedule, something, anything that would tell her what the day required of her, and her foot hit something on the floor near the door.
She looked down.
A letter. Folded once, no seal, no name written on the outside. It had been slid under the door while she was on the floor with the system. While the door was locked and she was certain no one could come in.
She picked it up.
Opened it.
Inside, four words. Handwriting she had never seen before in Zara's archive or anywhere else, small and neat and absolutely certain of itself.
I know you changed.
She stood in the middle of Zara's room with the letter in her hand and the system still glowing softly behind her and the morning light coming in at the edges of the curtains and she did not move for a long time.
Someone in this palace already knew.