12. Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
J essica
"You're smiling."
"I'm not."
"Jessica, you've been smiling since the bottom of the stairs."
"I'm cold. My face has gone into a spasm."
"That is not a spasm , that's a—" Sophia stops on the landing and points at me with an entire arm. "That's a development. Freya, look at her face."
Freya, who is coming up behind us with an armful of photocopies she's spent the afternoon labeling, does not look at my face.
"She was at shift training," Freya says.
"With who? "
"You know with who."
"I want her to say it—"
"With Soren," I say, "because Voss assigned him, and if you say one word about it I'll tell the entire dining hall about the boy in your Monday seminar."
Sophia gasps.
"You swore. "
"I lied."
I am absolutely not telling her the rest of it. Not tonight, not next week, not on my deathbed. Some things go in a box and the box goes in the ground.
Although — I did do it. I fucking shifted! Nobody was drowning. Nothing was on fire. I stood in a wet field and decided, and it happened, and Soren was proud of me.
My emotions have never gone from total mortification to pleased that quickly.
I drop my bag by the door and kick my shoes off, and Sophia goes straight for the couch and Freya starts squaring her photocopies on my coffee table, and I go through to my room to get my sweats.
And I stop.
My desk drawer is open about two inches. That's it. A drawer, not quite shut, in a room that has been mine for eight weeks.
I stand there.
I don't leave that drawer open. I never leave it open — it sticks, that's the entire reason I know it, it needs a shove and I always shove it.
Housekeeping. It'll be housekeeping. Or Torres looking for a charger. Or Sophia, who has no boundaries and has definitely been in my desk before.
And then I look at my bed.
There's a card lying on it.
Not an envelope. Just a card, heavy stock, about the size of a postcard, sitting square in the middle of my duvet.
It's got a border printed round the edge in burnt orange.
Inside the border, in the center, there's a shape — a rough panel, a recessed circle, the sort of thing you'd draw if you'd stood in a wood and looked at a boundary stone with the crest chiseled off it.
And through the middle of it, somebody's put a single hard line.
Underneath, in plain block capitals:
LEAVE IT BURIED.
I don't scream. I don't move. I stand in the middle of my bedroom in my socks and look at a piece of card on my bed, and the thing that arrives first isn't fear at all.
It's rage.
Because somebody stood here.
In this room. Where I sleep. Where I keep my things and leave my drawer stuck and put my head down at night in a building I didn't want to move into, in housing they gave me because it was safer , with a desk downstairs and a person sitting at it.
Somebody walked in here and looked around and put that on my bed and walked out again.
"Jessica?" Sophia calls from the other room. "Do you have any of the—"
"Freya."
I don't say it loudly, but something in my voice must carry because I hear footsteps almost immediately.
"What?"
She appears in the doorway just as I reach for the card.
Her eyes go from me to the bed.
"Don't touch it."
My hand stops.
Freya crosses the room and looks down at the card without getting any closer than she has to.
For a second, neither of us says anything.
Then everything in her face closes down.
"Sophia," she says, not loudly. "Go get Declan and Renzo. Don't run and don't tell anyone in the corridor. Then find security."
Sophia appears behind her. "What's—"
"Now, Sophia."
She sees my face, then Freya's, and goes.
I look back at the card.
The next twenty minutes are the strangest of my life.
Freya doesn't let anyone past the doorway, which is how I end up standing in my own sitting room while people examine my bedroom.
She's got a page out of her notebook and she's writing down times: when I left this morning.
When I got back. Who's been in the room since.
What I touched. What I noticed and in what order.
"The drawer," she says. "Say it again."
"It sticks. I shove it. I've shoved it every day for eight weeks."
"So it was shut this morning."
"It's always shut."
She writes that down.
Declan comes back from checking the bathroom and the little bedroom and the wardrobe with his jaw set, and says, "Nothing," and Renzo is going round the sitting room touching nothing and looking at everything.
"Your laptop's here," Renzo says. "There's cash in the bowl by the door — is that yours?"
"Yeah."
"How much?"
"Forty? Thirty?"
"It's forty." He steps back. "So they didn't take anything."
"Why does that matter?"
"Because if they'd taken something," Renzo says, "it would be a burglary."
The door opens. Torres comes in fast, because Sophia's obviously found him, and he crosses the room to me and puts both hands on my arms and looks at my face first — checks me, the way he did in a cottage in April — and only when he's satisfied does he look past me at the bedroom door.
He goes to look.
And then Torres goes completely, absolutely still.
That's what scares me. Not shouting. He doesn't say a word for about four seconds, standing in my bedroom doorway with his back to me, and every line of him has gone quiet in a way I have never seen and don't like at all.
"Who was in here," he says.
"We don't know."
"Who has keys?"
"Security, presumably—"
"That's not what I asked." He turns around. "Who has keys, Jess. Not who's supposed to. Housekeeping? Maintenance? Does the desk have a master? Is there a spare in an office somewhere in a box with everyone's name on it?"
I don't know.
"Right," Torres says.
He goes out into the corridor. I hear him at the far end, then the stairwell door, then nothing, and he comes back three minutes later and says, "The fire door on the north stair doesn't latch. You can pull it open from outside if you know to lift it."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I checked it the day I moved in," he says.
Falken arrives with two of the academy security staff and Voss about ten minutes later.
They're good. I'll give them that. They're careful with the room, they photograph everything before anyone touches it, the card goes into a sleeve, and one of them starts on the access records on a tablet while the other walks the corridor with Torres, who has apparently appointed himself.
The findings, over the next hour, are almost entirely negative.
No forced entry to my room. The lock's fine. The frame's fine.
No sign anybody went through anything except that one drawer, which had, when it was finally opened by someone with gloves on, a phone charger, a broken pair of sunglasses, and a Christmas card from my aunt.
The building's access records show the residents who live here, in and out, all day, doing nothing surprising. The desk was staffed from seven until six with one twenty-minute gap at lunch, which they are extremely unhappy about and which I now understand will end somebody's employment.
And the north stairwell fire door does not latch, and has not latched, apparently for some time.
"So that's how they got in," I say.
"That's how somebody could get in," the security officer says. "There's nothing on that door to say anyone did. It's a hole in the building. I can't tell you it's the hole they used."
"How many holes are there?"
He doesn't answer that, which is an answer.
"Whoever it was knew which room," he says instead. "And knew you'd be out."
"I was at training. I'm at training every day at four."
Voss, who has been standing against the wall saying nothing this entire time, speaks for the first time.
"Every day at four," he repeats.
"Yeah."
"Since October."
"Yeah."
He and Falken look at each other and neither of them says the obvious thing out loud, so I say it for them.
"Everybody knows where I am at four o'clock."
Luke arrives, and the room changes.
He comes in already knowing — Sophia texted, or the bond, or both — and he crosses to me and puts a hand on my face for about a second and a half, and then he goes and looks at the card in its sleeve.
And I watch Luke Draeven turn into somebody else.
He gets calmer. His voice comes down about a third and every single sentence out of him becomes an instruction, and he starts issuing them to a room containing the Chancellor of this academy and two security professionals, and the terrible thing is that they all start answering him.
"She's not sleeping here. I want the north stair secured tonight, not tomorrow — put someone on it until the latch is replaced, and then have someone walk every other door in this building and tell me how many more of those there are.
I want every key that opens this corridor accounted for by morning.
Every one, including whatever's in a drawer in your office.
I want the desk covered continuously with no gap at lunch.
I'll have my father's office notify Council security tonight, which will be faster than going through—"
"Luke."
"—the academy channel, and until we know how they knew her schedule, she doesn't keep a fixed one. Training moves. Times change daily. Nothing published—"
" Luke. "
He stops. Looks at me.
"You don't get to decide where I'm sleeping," I say.
"Someone got into your bedroom."
"I noticed."
"Then you understand why—"
"I understand exactly why." I fold my arms. "That's not the part I'm objecting to and you know it isn't."
There's a silence in which approximately six adults become extremely interested in their own shoes. And I watch it arrive on Luke's face — the thing I said to him three weeks ago in his sitting room, coming back around and landing.
He closes his eyes for a second.
"Right," he says.
"Yeah."
"I'm doing it again."
"You are."
"It's been ninety seconds."
"You were extremely efficient."
Luke exhales through his nose. And then he does something I don't expect at all, which is turn to Falken and say, "Ignore about half of that. She's in the room. Ask her."