Chapter 100 A Buried Truth

• The truth did not appear all at once, nor with the clarity of an orderly revelation. It emerged as things do that have remained buried for too long: fragmented, stained, resisting being faced directly, forcing the seeker to advance cautiously, collecting disconnected remnants that would only later begin to form a disturbing whole.
• It was Dante who found the first thread—not within the active systems, too monitored, too intervened, saturated with foreign eyes—but in a physical vault, one of the old ones, predating even the mansion itself. It was a space Verona had insisted on preserving, justified at the time with a phrase that had sounded almost whimsical: in case the network ever lied. Then, it had seemed eccentric. Now, with proper perspective, it sounded like a warning carefully ignored.
• The vault smelled of old metal and paper, of accumulated time and secrets preserved by inertia, as if every object stored there had been waiting for the exact moment to be touched again.