I caught Maren in the study the next morning. She was standing in front of the map on the wall, tracing a route with her finger from Millhaven in the north to a dot labelled Haremdale City.
"You’re up early," she said without turning around.
"So are you."
"I don’t sleep well in Millhaven. It’s too quiet for my liking. Haremdale City has noise at night. Carriages, drunks, street vendors. Here, it’s just crickets and Father’s loud snoring." She turned away from the map. "I’m quite sure you want something from me. What it is, I don’t know, but I’ve noticed you hovering around for two days, waiting for Clara to leave the room so you can talk to me alone. Sit down."
I sat. The study chair was hard, and my ribs groaned in protest.
"You know about the Thorn Collective," I said. "Clara told me you know the letters came from Haremdale City."
"I know more than that." Maren set down her tea and sat across from me. "I’ve been working in Haremdale City for three years. In intelligence. I collect information for Lord Ashford, who sits on the regional council alongside my uncle."
I hadn’t written Lord Ashford. I hadn’t written a regional council, and I certainly hadn’t written Maren. The story was building a political landscape I’d never designed, filling in the blanks as though everything had been planned from the beginning.
"The Thorn Collective showed up about eight months ago," Maren continued. "Before that, the name didn’t exist. They appeared around the same time the Vellmore trade initiative was proposed. The initiative would open a new trade route through the eastern pass, bypassing Millhaven and three other towns. If it passes, Millhaven loses a third of its trade revenue. My father loses political capital, and his position on the council becomes weaker."
"The Vellmore initiative. You mentioned it before."
"Because it’s complicated, and because it’s personal." Maren leaned back. "The initiative is backed by House Vellmore. Lord Vellmore is my father’s rival on the council. The Thorn Collective started causing problems for people who oppose the initiative. The warehouse that burned belonged to a merchant who spoke against it. The councilman’s son who was beaten was the son of the man who blocked the vote. The letters Clara received, the attack at the festival. It’s all the same pattern. Someone is using the Thorn Collective to eliminate opposition, and Clara was the leverage."
"By taking her."
"The letters were the warning. The festival was the attempt. If they’d succeeded, they would have taken Clara to Haremdale City, and my father would have voted however they wanted him to. Otherwise, he’d never see her again."
I sat with that for a moment. The details were clean and logical, and what scared me was that I hadn’t written any of them.
In my outline, the Thorn Collective consisted of three goons who attacked the festival so Ren could save Clara. That was it. No political motive, no trade initiative, no House Vellmore. The narrative had looked at my three goons and built an entire conspiracy around them.
And honestly, the conspiracy was better than what I’d written.
Way better.
"You said the letters came from Haremdale City," I said. "Can you prove it?"
"I recently traced the paper. It’s Bond stock from a printer in the merchant quarter. Iron gall ink, common in the capital but rare in small towns. The language is formal, too. The kind you learn in a noble household or a government office."
"Do you have a name?"
Maren looked at me for a long moment before answering.
"A woman named Sera Voss. She runs a trade house in Haremdale City. Legitimate business on the surface. Underneath, she finances operations for people who need things done quietly. The Thorn Collective is one of her projects."
Sera Voss.
I knew that name. It was in my notes, buried in a list of merchants. Seven words, maybe. She was supposed to be nothing more than a name on a page, and now the narrative had turned her into the person funding the Thorn Collective. A character who hadn’t even made a proper appearance in the original story, apart from being mentioned in passing.
"I’m guessing you know the name," Maren said. "You reacted."
"I’ve heard it," I replied. "In passing."
"Where?"
"Channels I can’t explain."
Her jaw tightened.
"You keep saying that, and it’s starting to piss me off, you know."
Maren stood. "Sera Voss is the link. If I can prove she’s funding the Thorn Collective, I can take the evidence to Lord Ashford. The initiative stalls, the threat disappears, and Clara is safe. That’s what I’m here for. Not a family reunion. This."
"What do you need?"
"Evidence. I have the paper trail and the name. I need a connection between Sera Voss and the men who attacked the festival." She looked at me. "You were there. You fought one of them. Can you describe him?"
I could. The man in the dark coat. Brown hair, clean-shaven, with the kind of face you forgot five minutes after seeing it.
"The one who came up onto the platform had brown hair, an average build, and a forgettable face. He moved like someone trained. He didn’t fight like a thug."
Maren handed me a sheet of paper and a charcoal pencil.
"Write it down. Everything you remember. I don’t need you to be a witness. I need you to be a source."
I took the pencil. My wrist complained, but I wrote anyway.
The morning passed in a blur.
I wrote down everything I remembered about the man in the dark coat, the thin one, the broad one, and even my original three goons. I gave Maren every detail I had. It was more than any police report I’d ever read back on Earth because I’d designed the attack, watched it unfold, and knew more about it than anyone else alive.
When I finished, Maren read the pages. She read them twice before looking up at me.
"This is detailed," she said. "Very detailed. The kind of detail that comes from training or planning. Which one are you, Joseph? A fighter or a planner?"
"Neither."
"Then what?"
"A traveller."
She looked at me as though she didn’t believe that. Then something shifted in her expression. It wasn’t suspicion this time. It was something else. Something personal.
Interest, perhaps.
"You pay attention, you know things you shouldn’t, you take beatings for strangers, and you sit in gardens looking like a kicked dog," she said. "That’s either the most interesting person I’ve met in three years or the most dangerous."
"I’m completely harmless. I can assure you of that."
"Maybe you are."
She gathered the papers and tucked them into her coat. Then she paused at the door and glanced back.
"You should eat something, Joseph. You look terrible, and I’d hate for you to die of starvation before I figure you out."
She left.
I remained in the study, thinking about the way she’d said figure you out and the look she’d given me when she said it.
I hadn’t written that either.
Then again, I hadn’t written Maren at all.
Clara found me in the study that afternoon. She came in, sat across from me, and studied me the way she studied anything she was trying to understand.
"Maren told me what you wrote," she said. "About the attackers."
"Yeah. Is that a problem?"
"She said you were interesting."
"She was being polite."
"Maren is never polite." Clara said it with the certainty of someone who’d lived with her sister for eighteen years. "If she says you’re interesting, she means it. And if she means it, that’s a problem."
"For who?"
"For me."
The words slipped out before she could stop them. Her jaw tightened, as though she’d said more than she intended.
"I mean, for the household. You’re a guest, she’s a guest, and neither of you needs complications."
"Clara."
"I need to think. And I need you to stop being so available to my sister."
"I’m not available to anyone."
"Then stop spending your mornings with her."
She stood. She was angry, and I could see it in her hands, clenched into fists at her sides. This wasn’t about intelligence or the investigation. It was about Maren.
And, apparently, me.
"Get out. I need to think."
I got out.
I went upstairs to my room, sat on the bed, and looked through the window at the garden, the hill road, and the town beyond it.
Clara was jealous.
Clara Dale, who read rooms like her father, carried the weight of a town on her shoulders, and made decisions without apologising for them, was jealous of her own sister.
And Maren was interested in me. Maren, whom I’d never written, who’d been built by the story to fill a blank I’d left behind, was making decisions about me that I couldn’t predict because I had no outline for her.
They were both interested in me.
An extra with D-minus luck, cracked ribs, and nothing to offer anyone.
Well, nothing except my vast knowledge of their world. Except that knowledge was dwindling fast, too, so maybe I had nothing to offer them after all.
Well, except for this shit.
I let out a quiet laugh and leaned back against the wall.
Still, it was too soon. I had to play the long game.
I had two sisters, which meant two different kinds of attention. Clara’s was careful, measured, and political. The attention of a woman trying to decide what to do with feelings she didn’t fully understand. Maren’s was direct and unfiltered. She didn’t seem to care what she felt. She simply felt it and acted accordingly.
And I was caught in the middle of it.
I hadn’t written either of their current behaviour, and I had no outline for what would happen next. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the situation to my advantage.
I held my wrist and stared out the window, waiting for the story to show me what came next while quietly planning my own moves.
Because despite being the one who’d written this story, I was becoming a stranger to every new development.
And that was a problem I couldn’t afford to ignore.