Chapter 31
Decker
I didn’t sleep much. I walked. By the time they knocked on my door in the contractors’ block, I’d already been up an hour, sitting on the edge of a bed that smelled like nobody, waiting for the building to need me.
Viktor picks a briefing room with no windows.
Small table, six chairs, a screen on the wall.
Jericho comes in with a folder he doesn’t open.
He looks like a man who’s been awake as long as I have.
Nadia follows him, sets a laptop on the table, and gives me a nod that’s warmer than anything else this building has offered.
The screen on the wall comes alive, and a woman looks out of it.
Dark hair, sharp eyes, a room behind her I don’t recognize.
“Mara,” Viktor says. “You’re on?”
“I’m here.”
Viktor stays standing at the head of the table.
“For Decker’s benefit. Mara worked the case when Jericho was set up.
She got closer to whoever did it than anyone.
The night the convoy turned, I called her.
” He looks around the room. “Everyone here knows why we haven’t officially dropped the charges against Grace.
Nobody outside this room does. Keep it that way. ”
Then Marek brings her in. Grace comes through the door with her chin level, the way she walked through the building yesterday, knowing everyone was watching. Her eyes find me first. Just for a second. Then she takes the chair Viktor points to, at the middle of the table, where everyone can see her.
The bear doesn’t like it. The second every head in the room turns toward her, he comes up under my skin and stays. Four people looking at her, and one of them a screen, and he wants me between her and all of it. I stay against my wall and hold still.
“Grace,” Viktor says. “You know Jericho. Nadia. On the screen is Mara. She’s cleared for everything said in this room.” He pauses. “Vanya’s not here. She has her own work. She’ll get what she needs from what you give us.”
Grace nods. Her hands are folded on the table. I watch her make them stay there.
“Start with the voice,” Viktor says.
“A woman.” Grace doesn’t hesitate. “Always the same one. Calm. Not friendly—level. She never raised her voice. Not even when she was threatening my sister.” Her jaw tightens and lets go. “Somehow that made it worse.”
“Accent? Age?”
“No accent I could place. Not young. Not old.”
Mara leans closer to her camera. “When did she call?”
“Night. Always night, always late. Except once.” Grace’s eyes go somewhere else for a second. “One call in the middle of the day, near the end. She said we were changing how it worked. That was the meeting. That’s the day everything went wrong.”
“And the drops. What did you leave?”
“Small things. Pages I tore out of a diary. A report about an excursion that was already old news. I checked everything to make sure it couldn’t hurt anyone.” She says it flat, no excuses. “It went behind the hardware store in town. She’d tell me when. I never saw who picked it up.”
“What did she ask you for?”
“Who was in the building. Whether people seemed worried. What the mood was like after a raid. Whether anyone new had come in.” Grace shrugs, one shoulder. “Small talk, almost. Gossip.”
Mara’s voice changes. Slower. “Did she ever ask you for routes? Schedules?”
“Yes.” She looks around. “I never gave them. Never. Not once.”
“But she pushed?”
“Yes.” She frowns as she says that, as if mulling it over. “But she couldn’t have pushed harder. It was only at the end that I felt real pressure. That was when she wanted me to meet her.”
The room is quiet. Mara sits back and goes still, and I’ve watched enough people find the thing they came for to know the look.
“That’s it,” she says. “They never pushed you for the good stuff, Grace, because they already had it. Someone was feeding them critical information the whole time you were feeding useless intel.” She lets that sit, then says it plainly.
“They weren’t running you for information.
They were keeping you on the hook. You were the one they’d blame when someone got close. ”
Grace doesn’t move. Then her hands clench on the table as it sinks in.
Months of it. Months of drops she stripped down to nothing, months of hating herself for every scrap…
and it was never even about the scraps. I want to cross the room.
The bear wants it worse. I put my shoulders harder into the wall.
“This is how they work.” Her eyes move, finding Jericho from her screen. “It’s how they set you up. Same playbook. The planted trail, the timing, everything too complete. Remember, Jericho?”
Jericho’s hands are flat on the table. He looks at them, not at anyone. “I know,” he says. “I remember.”
“So it’s the same person,” Nadia says. “Not a new leak. The same one. Inside since before Samien died.”
“Yup,” Mara says.
Nadia opens the laptop. “Then let’s see what we have.
They were here before Samien. They have restricted-wing access—real access, not a badge story like the one they hung on Grace.
They saw the bridge plan, or the paperwork around it.
And they knew exactly where Grace slept, and how to access her cubicle. That narrows it down.”
“That’s still a list,” Viktor says.
“It’s shorter than it was yesterday.”
“It’s not short enough.” His voice doesn’t change, but the room hears the frustration in it anyway.
“We watch. Nobody pulls records in a way that shows. Nobody changes their habits. This is a long game. It may not finish this fight now, or even this year. I’d rather take them late than tip them early and lose them for good. ”
I’ve hunted things most of my life. You don’t walk toward this kind of animal. You wait downwind until it forgets you exist.
The problem is what we’re using for bait.
“The convoy net came off the Court’s lane maps,” Jericho says. “Faine’s people are still watching those roads. Crowe sends word when anything moves. If our leak burns another op out there, we’ll hear about it from their side before we hear it from ours.”
“Good,” Viktor says. “Keep that channel exactly as it is.”
Grace has been quiet through all of it. Now she leans forward.
“If this person’s working with the one who was handling me,” she says, “then they know about Serenity. They might know things about where she—”
“No.” Viktor doesn’t raise his voice, and he doesn’t dress it up. “Your sister’s search is separate. I keep it that way on purpose. It doesn’t come into this room.”
“She’s the reason I did any of this.”
“I know she is. The answer is still no.”
“Viktor—”
“Grace.” He looks at her straight. “The more people who know about this, the faster it travels. That’s true in here the same as everywhere.
What I’m doing for your sister works because almost nobody knows it’s happening.
I’m not going to widen it. Vanya handles your sister’s case.
I’ll share this with her, but what she does with it is up to her. ”
She sits back. Her face pulls in and holds flat, and I’ve slept beside her long enough to know what’s underneath it. The one thing she wants most in the world, and she’s not given access.
I could give her more than Viktor’s giving her. Towers. A direction. A corridor with her sister’s blood moving down it. The words are right there, and I keep my mouth shut and my face empty, and it has never cost me more to do either.
The bear has been climbing this whole time. Her in the middle of the room. A framer maybe two doors down. Now her hurting, and me adding to it by sitting on what I know. He doesn’t like it.
Nadia looks up from the laptop. “One more thing that doesn’t fit. The dragon.” She turns to Viktor. “They sent a tracker dragon after her in broad daylight. Nobody spends a dragon on a courier they’re done with. Why did they want her back that badly?”
“It was there to kill me,” says Grace, before anyone can respond.
“If that dragon wanted to kill you, you would be dead,” says Nadia.
The room looks at Grace. Grace looks at me.
One second. Maybe two. I keep my eyes on Nadia and my mouth shut. Grace’s eyes hold on me a beat too long—the question right there behind them—then she looks away.
“Park it,” Viktor says, too fast. “We’re tying up loose ends, nothing more.”
Nadia lets it go. Grace doesn’t, not all the way.
I watch her set the moment aside somewhere she can find it again, and I want to tell her the truth so badly it hurts.
Viktor moves the room on to schedules: when Grace works, who’s in the building when she does, how her days will run. I hear about half of it.
The session ends the way these things end, with Viktor collecting his folder and everyone standing at once. Marek appears in the doorway for Grace. She goes to him without being told.
At the door she stops and looks back at me. Whatever that conversation did to her, it isn’t on her face now. What’s there is steadier. She got through her first day of it, and she knows she did.
“You did good today,” I tell her, because it’s true, and because it’s all I’m allowed to hand her in a room full of people.
“I know,” she says. The corner of her mouth moves. Then she’s gone down the corridor with Marek, and the small warmth of it stays after the door shuts.
The room empties around me. Jericho is the last out, and he pauses at the door like he might say something, then doesn’t. I stand alone with the dead screen and the empty chairs. The bear’s not happy.
I wanted her cleared. I got what I wanted.
I just wish I could feel better about it.