“—is being investigated. She’s running some kind of money-laundering scheme, though the details are confusing. She’s been seen trading spheres for ones of lesser value, a practice that would end with her bankrupt, if she didn’t have another income scheme. The report says she takes money from criminal enterprises as donations, then secretly transfers them to other groups, after taking a cut, to help confuse the trail of spheres. There’s more too. In any case, the children are a front to keep attention away from her practices.”

“I told you,” Lift said, snatching the paper. “You should arrest her and spend all her money on soup. Give me half, for tellin’ you where to look, and I won’t tell nobody.”

The guard raised her eyebrows.

“We can write down that we did it, if you want,” Lift said. “That’ll make it official.”

“I’ll ignore the suggestions of bribery, coercion, extortion, and state embezzlement,” the captain said. “As for the orphanage, I don’t have jurisdiction over it, but I assure you my colleagues will be moving against this … Stump soon.”

“Good enough,” Lift said, climbing back up on the desk before her legion of scribes. “So what have you found? Anybody glowing, like they’re some stormin’ benevolent force for good or some such crem?”

“This is too large a project to spring on us without warning!” the fat scribe complained. “Mistress, this is the sort of research we normally have months to work on. Give us three weeks, and we can prepare a detailed report!”

“We ain’t got three weeks. We barely got three hours.”

It didn’t matter. Over the next few hours, she tried cajoling, threatening, dancing, bribing, and—as a last-ditch, crazy option—remaining perfectly quiet and letting them read. As the time slipped away, they found nothing and everything at the same time. There were tons of vague oddities in the guard reports: stories of a man surviving a fall from too high, a complaint of strange noises outside a woman’s window, spren acting odd every morning outside a woman’s house unless she left out a bowl of sugar water. Yet none of them had more than one witness, and in each case the guard had found nothing specifically strange other than hearsay.

Each time a weirdness came up, Lift itched to scramble out the door, squeeze through a window, and go running to find the person involved. Each time, Wyndle cautioned patience. If all these reports were true, then basically every person in the city would have been a Surgebinder. What if she ran off chasing one of the hundred reports that were due to ordinary superstition? She’d spend hours and find nothing.

Which was exactly what she felt like she was doing. She was annoyed, impatient, and out of pancakes.