Back in the relative safety of the Gearhouse archive, the four of them stared at the name Liam had recovered.
"Elias Vance," Cain said, cross-referencing it with the public records he had access to. "There's no one by that name in the city census. No birth record, no death certificate. It's a ghost name."
"No, it's not," Liam said, his expression grim. He remembered the forged report from the Atheneum. The name of the disgraced Chief Engineer. "They made a mistake. They changed his first name in the official report to 'Alaric.' They must have thought erasing him from every other ledger would be enough."
Ronan's eyes widened in understanding. "So the story everyone knows… the incompetent Chief Engineer Alaric Vance who caused the disaster… that's the lie. The 'corrected text'."
"And Elias Vance is the truth they tried to bury," Zara—wait, Zara's not here yet—Isolde whispered, the pieces clicking into place.
"They didn't just disgrace him," Liam said, a chilling realization dawning on him. "They erased him. They took his name, his history, his very existence. They left behind a fabricated ghost to take the blame."
The room was silent. They had found more than just a clue. They had found the entire motive for a decade-long cover-up. The Pumping Station disaster wasn't an accident caused by incompetence. It was something the Blank Page Legion had orchestrated, and Elias Vance was the man they had erased to hide their involvement.
Liam felt a cold dread creep up his spine. The Legion's methods… erasing a person's entire history, leaving their loved ones with a corrupted, false memory… it was a larger, more systematic version of exactly what had happened to Elara.
He finally understood the nature of his enemy.
Their next step was clear. They had to find out what really happened at the Pumping Station ten years ago, and why the Blank Page Legion wanted it buried so deep it never existed. The hunt for the Redactor had just become a hunt for the truth of the city's darkest secret.