The flashes of mechanical cameras clicked in rapid succession, spraying sharp white glare across the polished travertine dais of the Antiquities Board. Two hundred guild masters, municipal wardens, and press correspondents packed the gallery, their wool coats smelling of damp wool and sulfur coal from the rain-lashed avenue outside. Above them rose the high vaulted ceiling of the Grand Chamber, its ancient ribs patched with dark, gleaming compound. Polina stood at the primary lectern. She wore a tailored charcoal jacket Jarek had ordered delivered to her drafting table at midnight—sharp angles, clean lines, devoid of the shapeless wool frocks Zofia used to force upon her. There was no servile, bobbing smile on her mouth today. The manicured, giggling puppet her adoptive family cultivated had stayed behind in the Archive of Failures. "The primary load-bearing masonry of the 1842 annex relies on calcified shale and pozzolanic binder," Polina stated, her voice projecting through the bronze amplification horn mounted to the desk. She tapped the brass pointer against a massive architectural projection on the linen screen behind her. "For thirty years, Guild records attributed the chronic settling along the western buttress to seasonal subterranean moisture. Yet when our team drilled core samples through the sub-basement plinth last Tuesday, we recovered no pozzolanic binder at all." A stir moved through the front row of dignitaries. Guild Commissioner Bartos leaned forward, his spectacles glinting. "Instead," Polina continued, holding up a small glass cylinder filled with crumbling, chalky aggregate, "the core yielded unwashed river silt bound with low-fire hydraulic lime. Cheap. Expansive. A mixture that degrades after two decades of load stress, creating artificial preservation contracts on five-year cycles for whichever firm holds the maintenance tenure." Pavel Orlov sat in the center of the honor row, draped in the heavy crimson mantle of an Elder Restorer. His face was carved from granite, but his left knuckle tapped against his cane in an erratic rhythm. Near him, Katarzyna shifted, a sneer twisting her painted red lips. "The signatures on those original reinforcement certificates," Polina said, fixing her stare directly on Pavel, "belong to—" "That is quite enough theater from an unstable delinquent!" Katarzyna rose from the second row, cutting through the murmurs with the shrill clarity of snapping glass. She stepped into the center aisle, holding a leather folio above her head so the newspaper photographers swung their heavy lenses toward her in an instant scurry of tripods. "Guild Elders! Commissioner Bartos!" Katarzyna marched toward the stage, her heels striking the stone like iron spikes. "The Volkov Firm has fallen victim to an appalling deception. My family remained quiet out of tragic charity, hoping simple work might rehabilitate my sister's shattered mind. But we cannot allow the preservation of our capital's heritage to be held hostage by a girl whose psychological history is well documented across every civil asylum registry in this province!" Pavel did not stand, but he tilted his head back, wearing the heavy, sorrowful grimace of a long-suffering guardian. "Katarzyna, sit down," he said loudly enough for the front row to hear, pitching his voice with rehearsed grief. "We promised we would handle her delusions within the family." "No, Father! Not when she sabotages the very stone to validate her paranoia!" Katarzyna reached the edge of the stage, slapping the folio onto the projection table. She scattered sheets of parchment across the brass plate: laboratory logs, carbon manifests, and inventory tallies stamped with Polina's forged initials. "These are the procurement logs from three nights ago. Polina withdrew four sacks of low-grade river silt from the firm's private stores, broke into the annex core vaults, and replaced the genuine 1842 samples to fabricate an indictment against our elder's legacy! She has been sick since girlhood. Dr. Nemec's psychiatric warrants are signed and sealed right there. She belongs in the high ward at Verkhne, not on this stage!" The press corps surged forward. Notebooks fluttered. A reporter from the *Municipal Gazette* barked, "Is this true, Master Volkov? Has an uncertified apprentice compromised the grand hall's structural integrity?" Polina felt the old cold shadow reach for her ribs—the terrifying phantom of Zofia's locked pantry, the suffocating threat of being declared mad and dragged into an asylum van while Pavel took absolute ownership of Misha. Her grip on the brass pointer tightened until the metal bit into her palm. Then Jarek Volkov stepped to the edge of the dais. He moved without hurry, tall, broad-shouldered, the dark wool of his long coat brushing the podium. He didn't look at the crowd. He looked down at Katarzyna with an expression so vacant of human warmth it stopped her mid-gasp. "Step back from the projection desk, Katarzyna," Jarek said. His tone was level, carrying effortlessly to the highest tier of the gallery. "Jarek, you don't understand how she twists things—" Katarzyna began, extending a hand toward his arm. "Do not touch me," Jarek said flatly. "And do not speak of fabrications until you have heard your father's own ledger read back to him." Jarek reached inside his breast pocket, withdrew a small copper spool, and clicked it into the Ministry's archival gramophone projector mounted directly beside the podium's bronze horn. A stylus hissed against wax. Pavel stood up so violently his heavy cane clattered against the parquet floor. "Volkov! This is an official Guild assembly, not a venue for juvenile squabbles!" "Sit down, Pavel," Jarek replied. The horn crackled with static, and then a voice boomed across the chamber. It was Pavel Orlov's voice, unmistakable in its greasy, paternal confidence, recorded in Jarek's office barely forty-eight hours ago: *"...She has no legal footing, Jarek. Even if she dragged the 1842 foundation vouchers out of my private library, who believes an orphan girl when the Guild Board holds her mother's lunacy declarations? Katarzyna already has the requisition slips pre-dated. We plant the adulterated silt in Polina's locker tomorrow night. You fire her publicly, you declare the Ministry foundation compromised by her interference, and I sign off on the forty-million-ruble total reconstruction grant for your firm. Fifty-fifty split on the quarry kickbacks, just like the old Volkov master should have done thirty years ago before he took his foolish moral stance..."* Jarek's recorded voice answered over the horn: *"And the boy? Misha?"* *"The cripple stays locked in the east wing until the estate clears probate,"* Pavel’s voice chuckled, rich and dismissive. *"He doesn't have the lungs to survive three winters anyway. It settles everything cleanly."* The recording clicked off into absolute stillness. Not a pen scraped. Not a coat rustled. The air in the Grand Chamber curdled into sulfur and iron. Katarzyna's face lost every drop of blood, her open mouth trembling as she looked between the horn and the elder. "Father...?" Pavel was frozen. The veins on his temple stood out like thick blue cordage. His hands hovered at his sides, trembling with trapped, useless fury. "The documents presented by Katarzyna Orlova," Jarek said, his voice cutting through the vacuum like an axe through wet pine, "are verified forgeries produced under Pavel's direct instruction. The originals, along with fifteen years of fraudulent mortar kickbacks totaling over two hundred million rubles, were delivered to the High Inspectorate of Krovnia twenty minutes before this assembly convened." From the heavy rear doors of the chamber, four armed officers of the Civic Gendarmerie marched into the aisle, their brass helmets gleaming under the gas lamps. Polina stepped down from the podium. She walked directly up to Katarzyna, who stood paralyzed near the projection table, clutching her fraudulent papers like scraps of dead leaves. "You spent ten years telling me I was nothing," Polina said, low and steady, allowing no smile, no mask, only the pure, hard iron of the truth she had bled for. "You said no one would ever listen to me. Look around you, sister." A storm of flashes ignited simultaneously, blinding them in white phosphorus fire as the press corps surged past the ropes, shouting Pavel's name in a howling chorus of exposure, while the gendarmes closed around the Orlov row.

The Unveiling