The search for a "different kind of expert" was a dead end in the official records. History, as Regina had said, was a closed ledger. The old ways of understanding water—as a spiritual force, a living entity, a holistic system—were erased, labeled superstition that impeded progress.
Their only lead was the path itself. The old flood tunnels. If they were built by those who understood the water as a whole, perhaps they held clues the Syndicate's engineers had missed.
During their surface shifts on Grand Avenue, they began mapping anomalies. A decorative fountain with a flow pattern that didn't align with its Syndicate-installed pump. A patch of vibrant, deep-rooted lichen in the shadow of a conduit where no supplemental Vitae was provided.
"Capillary action from below," Valentine noted, logging the lichen's coordinates. "There's a natural, upward hydrology they haven't completely severed."
It was slow, meticulous work under the watchful eye of the Spire. Roxana seemed to take a particular interest in their "diligence," often appearing to make a sarcastic comment about their attention to "weeds and puddles."
One evening, as Sage traced a seemingly decorative, spiraling groove in the granite base of a fountain, his scanner picked up a faint, pure resonance—different from both the stable Vitae and the corrupted entropy. It was a whisper, a harmonic.
The groove wasn't decoration. It was a channel, part of a larger pattern worn by a flow that had ceased long ago. A pattern that mirrored the spiral fracture in the Northern Tunnel, but perfect, intentional.
He showed Valentine. "It's a signature. But a healthy one. A… blueprint."
She studied it. "It's a vortex pattern. Designed to guide flow, not force it. To enhance a natural property through shape." Her practical mind seized it. "This is pre-Syndicate engineering. Based on synergy, not separation."
They had found their first clue to the old rule. Not in a person, but in stone