Chapter Ten #2
They had known since the dock. Possibly before the dock. And she had known, on some level she hadn't let herself look at directly, since the word had come out of his mouth in the dark and her whole body had responded to it like something remembered.
She sat on the archive floor with her back against the cabinet and looked at the list and let herself understand it.
All of it, at once, the full shape of it — her father's silence, her mother's absence, the fake implants, the body that rejected everything engineered, the word that had hit her like a homecoming.
She let herself understand it the way she let herself understand everything that mattered, which was completely, without looking away, without the softening that came from wanting it to be smaller than it was.
It was not small.
She sat with it until her legs stopped feeling strange beneath her.
Then she stood up.
She put the list back in the envelope. She worked the dried adhesive back into something that would hold.
She returned the envelope to the narrow space behind the cabinet, exactly where she'd found it, and she straightened, and she replaced every folder in exactly the order she'd found it, and she pressed her recorder back into her inside pocket, and she put her journalist back on like a coat.
It fit. It always fit. That was what she had built it for.
She walked out of the archive with steady hands and a pleasant nod to Sorven and did not run until she was through the door.
On the pavement in the afternoon light, Edi-Veen stood, exactly where she'd left him, in the approximate posture of someone trying to look as though they weren't cataloguing threats.
He saw her face before she had a chance to arrange it.
"What happened?"
"Nothing." The word came out clipped and too fast and she knew he heard both things. "Walk with me."
He fell into step beside her without another word, which she was grateful for, because she was using most of her available concentration on appearing to be a person who had not just turned over a stone and found her own name underneath it.
They were half a block from the building when she spoke.
"How much do you know about case BPV-7741?"
She felt rather than heard the change in him. A stillness that was different from his usual stillness — sharper, more internal, the stillness of someone who has just been handed something unexpected and is deciding how to hold it.
"I cannot —"
"I know what you can't discuss." She kept her voice level and her pace steady and looked straight ahead. "I'm not asking you to confirm anything. I'm telling you what I found, and I'm asking you to tell me if I need to be more afraid than I already am."
Silence. Three steps. Four.
"Yes," he said quietly. "You need to be more afraid."
She nodded. She had expected that. She had been expecting it, she realized, since the dock — since the wave and the cold and the word she hadn't known and the way it had landed like something she'd been waiting to hear her whole life.
She had been expecting it and she had not let herself know that she was expecting it, because some doors were easier to stand in front of than to walk through.
"All right," she said.
"All right?"
"I have dinner with my father tomorrow night." She adjusted her direction toward the transport rank. "I have some questions to ask him."
Edi-Veen was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had a careful quality to it — not gentle exactly, but precise in the way of someone choosing not to be careless. "Are you certain you want to do that?"
"No," she said. "But I'm going to do it anyway."
He didn't argue. She was beginning to understand that this was one of the things she appreciated most about him — that he knew the difference between a decision and an invitation to debate.
She flagged a transport. They got in. She gave her address to the nav and sat back and watched the city slide past the window and thought about a list with five names on it and a question mark that had been sitting in an envelope behind a filing cabinet for thirty years, waiting for someone to find it.
She thought about her father's handwriting. Small and precise. The kind that cost money.
She thought about more data needed, always more data, and understood now what data he had been gathering, and why he had never been able to tell her he had it.
The transport hummed through the afternoon streets of Trevort and Coreni sat in it and let herself, carefully and in private, begin to grieve the version of her life she had believed in until this afternoon.
She was still looking at the window when she felt the seat beside her take his weight.
He had moved across without announcement, without asking, without any of the careful professional preamble she had come to expect from him when he was about to do something that crossed a line he'd been observing.
He simply sat down next to her, close enough that his arm was against hers, and looked at the city going past the same window she was looking at.
She didn't say anything.
He didn't say anything.
After a moment his hand came to rest over hers where it lay in her lap — not gripping, not demanding anything. Just the weight of it. Warm and still and present.
She looked down at it. His hand over hers. The size of the difference between them, which she had catalogued as tactical information since the dock and was now cataloguing as something else entirely.
She didn't move her hand.
The transport hummed through the afternoon streets of Trevort and she sat in it and thought about a list with five names on it and a question mark that had been sitting in an envelope behind a filing cabinet for thirty years, waiting for someone to find it.
She thought about her father's handwriting.
She thought about more data needed, always more data, and understood now what data he had been gathering and why he had never been able to tell her he had it.
It was a lot. It was, she thought, possibly too much for one afternoon, and she had been holding it upright through professional habit and the specific discipline of not falling apart in public, and the transport was not exactly public, and he was not exactly professional anymore — not right now, not with his hand over hers and the city going past and nobody watching.
She let out a breath she had been holding since the archive.
She turned her head and rested it against his shoulder.
He went still for a moment — not the professional stillness, the other kind, the kind that meant something was happening that he hadn't prepared for. Then something in him settled, and she felt it through the point of contact between them, and his thumb moved once across the back of her hand.
She closed her eyes.
She let the transport carry them. She let herself, carefully and in private, begin to grieve the version of her life she had believed in until this afternoon.
She let the solid, unhurried fact of him beside her be what it was, which was the most comforting thing in the world and also a complication she didn't have the space to examine right now.
Later. She had a whole filing system for later.
For now she kept her eyes closed and her head on his shoulder and let the city go past, and he kept his hand over hers and his shoulder exactly where it was and said nothing, because he understood — he had always understood, she was realizing — that there were things that didn't need words and that this was one of them.