Letters from Corinne were always the highlight of Yeijiro’s day. This latest packet had been beamed down from a Wolf claw that had been providing escort to a Swan transport, just arrived to the Golden City. It had turned around immediately, returning to darkspace before Yeijiro had even been aware he had a message waiting, but that was fine. There would be other ships coming through. These months leading up to Shadow Court were always busy with ship traffic.

Since Corinne was on Cradle, in an entirely different solar system, they were dependent on messages relayed via ships physically traveling back and forth. Electronic communications were stored in the AI networks, passed from ship to ship until they had the correct destination, then delivered to the local network of the addressee as soon as they were in range.

It was one of the least secure methods of communication available. AIs were nosy, and even encryption was no guarantee a message wouldn’t be spied on. Which was why the Serpent had entire fields of study devoted to new ways of embedding real information in untraceable ways. Messages buried beneath layers of misdirection, codes and cyphers reliant on information not contained in the communications themselves.

Yeijiro had been teaching Corinne some of these techniques, and Corinne had been developing a facility with them, but todays letter was the first time she’d sent him something entirely encoded. That immediately had his attention.

Deciphering was second nature for him. He read it as he went, rearranging words and letters, dropping the additions, filling in the skips. Corinne hadn’t been raised to this, and it was a laborious process for her still. Which meant she’d gone to a lot of trouble to keep this letter secret. As he went through it, he understood why.

She started with her usual abruptness, skipping both greeting and any sort of opening small talk to get straight to her point.

So it seems I’ve found myself on another secret mission. Why do people keep asking me to keep secrets? It’s annoying, but this time I couldn’t say no any more than last time.

When I first came to Cradle, I talked to Lord Faust, told her some (not all!) of what happened at the end of last shadow court and then later with Soon-mi. As lord of the Wolf, I thought she should know, and I was pretty sure neither of my parents were going to tell. (Okay, and maybe I wanted a chance to complain about them both to an audience I knew would take my side.)

Any rate, it meant she knew what I’d seen, and some of what I’d figured out to fight it. Which meant she came to me, and not because of anything good.

There’s been a breach. On Cradle. She could feel it had happened, but she’s no akashic. She needed someone to look at it closer, so I guess I’m back to sneaky investigations and things I’m not supposed to talk about.

I thought you should know, though. In case this turns into anything like before. I’ll definitely keep you in the loop much as I can. Looks like I’m going to be tromping around in the woods for a while, though, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me.

It ended as it began, just stopping, with no signature. That was Corinne.

This wasn’t good. Yeijiro made an entry of the information and the date in his own journal. Depending on what Corinne found out, he might need to take this to Roderich, and he’d want to have good notes.

Just as he was about to close out of the message application, a new piece of mail arrived. This one from the local network. It was an invitation, from a source Yeijiro never would have expected.