Chapter 10 - Viktor
The supply requisition was the problem.
Or rather, the supply requisition was a small, tedious, entirely solvable problem, which was why Viktor had been staring at it for eleven minutes without solving it.
Patrol rations for the eastern rotation—someone had ordered double the standard allocation for a unit half the standard size.
Transcription error, or someone on the eastern patrol was feeding people who shouldn’t have been there.
He needed the original intake form. It was in the east wing archives, where Olivia had been spending her mornings since the briefing, dismantling a filing system that had apparently offended her deeply enough to warrant a full rebuild.
He went himself.
She was cross-legged on the archive floor when he found her, surrounded by stacks that followed their own logic.
A pencil held her hair up, the kind of improvised solution that meant she’d been here long enough to stop caring how she looked and start caring only whether the records made sense. A ledger sat open across her knees.
“Intake forms,” he said from the doorway. “Eastern patrol, last quarter.”
Olivia didn’t look up. “Third stack from the left. I moved them out of the miscellaneous section, which is where someone had filed them, presumably because they’d surrendered the concept of alphabetical order entirely.”
Viktor retrieved the forms. She was right—third stack, tabbed with coloured markers she must have brought herself. The intake form showed the error immediately: a transposition, two digits swapped, doubling the count. Clerical. He made a note.
“The ration logs from this quarter cross-reference with the patrol assignments in the second drawer,” she said, still writing. “If you’re checking for irregularities in the eastern rotation, start there. Someone’s been filing the returns out of sequence, and it’s masking a pattern.”
He paused with the forms in his hand. “You noticed that.”
“I’ve been sitting in your filing system for three days. I’ve noticed everything.” She turned a page. “The returns for weeks six through nine are missing entirely. Either they were never filed, or someone removed them.”
He set the intake form down and crouched beside the second drawer. Pulled the ration logs, fanned them across the floor. The gap was clean—surgical, the kind of absence that looked like carelessness until you laid the surrounding data side by side.
“Weeks six through nine,” he said. “That’s the window around the ward recalibration.”
“I know.”
Their eyes met over the open drawer. Olivia was close enough that he could see the tooth marks on the pencil where she’d been chewing the end, a habit she’d deny if confronted. The bond tightened between them, and his pulse answered it before he could stop it.
For a long second, the room held only the two of them and the shared edges of a problem that locked their minds together with a fluency that caught him off guard—her instinct for pattern meeting his for implication, the gap between a question and its answer collapsing to nothing.
Then she looked away, back at the ledger, and the pencil went between her teeth.
“I’ll pull the access logs for the archive during that period,” he said, standing. “See who was in here.”
“Already started. There’s a list on the desk.”
He glanced over. A single sheet in her handwriting, seven names, three of them crossed out with annotations in the margin.
She’d been running her own investigation. He stood over the list and read her reasoning.
“We should compare notes,” he said.
“Tomorrow. I need to finish this section before someone decides to refile it by date, and I have to start over.”
He left. In the corridor, he stopped, turned, and came back to the doorway.
“The scheduling overlap you flagged at the briefing,” he said. “I ran the numbers this afternoon. You were right. The southern approach was exposed for twenty minutes every third rotation.”
She looked up. The pencil came out of her mouth. “I know I was right.”
“I’m telling you I confirmed it.”
“You’re telling me you double-checked my work.”
“I double-check everyone’s work.”
“And?”
“And you were right.”
The faintest shift at the corner of her mouth, suppressed before it reached anything that could be called a smile. “Noted.”
He left, and this time he kept walking.
That evening, he spread the cross-referenced files across the desk in their shared quarters and worked them by lamplight. Five names from the great hall. Seven from Olivia’s list. Three overlapped.
He was deep in Nadia Soren’s hiring file—hired during the post-battle reconstruction, vetted by a junior officer during a period when shortcuts were being made in the name of speed—when the main door opened, and Olivia came in.
She set a glass of water on the edge of his desk without comment and sat on the sofa with a book she’d taken from the shelf that morning. He could smell chamomile on her, faint, and the sharper scent of the archive—old paper, dust, the mineral tang of the stone basement.
They occupied the room in silence for twenty minutes. It was the first silence between them that hadn’t felt like a negotiation.
“You’re staring at the same page,” she said, without looking up from her own.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’ve been thinking at that page for ten minutes. Either it owes you money, or you’ve hit a wall.”
He set the file down. Rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Nadia Soren. Do you know her?”
Olivia closed her book on one finger. “Administrative support. Hired eight months ago. Quiet. Does her job. Doesn’t talk much at meals.” She paused. “Why?”
“Her background check has a gap. Six months unaccounted for between her last pack and Beaumont.”
“That’s not unusual. A lot of people displaced by the attack bounced between temporary placements before landing here.”
“It’s not unusual,” he agreed. “But it’s convenient. And I’m running out of patience with convenient.”
She studied him, and he let her. Turning away was the only other option, though he couldn’t manage that; for some reason, he was not eager to explore.
“Bring me in tomorrow,” she said. “On the investigation. Properly. People talk to me differently than they talk to you. I can get into rooms you can’t.”
“I was going to suggest the same thing.”
“No, you weren’t. You were going to keep working alone and share the results after you were certain. I’ve watched you operate for years, Viktor. I know how you run.”
She was right, and the accuracy of it landed somewhere between admiration and discomfort.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow.” She opened her book again. Read for a few minutes more, then stood and moved toward the bedroom. At the threshold, she paused.
“Viktor.”
He looked up.
“The gap in Nadia’s file. I noticed it too.” Her fingers rested on the door frame. “That’s why her name was on my list.”
She went through the door and closed it behind her. Viktor sat with the file open in front of him and the fading scent of chamomile in the air, and thought about the fact that she’d been three days ahead of him and hadn’t said a word until he caught up.
He turned off the lamp and settled into the chair.