12. Chapter 12 #2
Soren's arrived at some point during that. He's in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame and he hasn't said anything and I don't know how long he's been there.
He doesn't tell anybody anything.
He looks at me and says, "Where do you want to sleep tonight?"
And it's such a simple question that for a second I can't answer it.
Because that's the first person, with a room full of people arranging my life, that is the first person who has asked me what I want to do.
"I haven't decided," I say.
"Then decide," Soren says.
Ander comes in at the end.
I assume — genuinely, right up until the second it happens — that he's here because Soren's here, and that within about a minute he'll say something about how a card is not a knife and I should stop treating a piece of stationery like an assassination attempt.
He doesn't say anything at all for a while. He looks at the card through the sleeve. He looks at it for much longer than anyone else has.
Then, "Who found it?"
"I did."
"Where?"
"On my bed."
"On the bed. Not the desk, not under the door." His head comes up. "How long were you out?"
"Since eight this morning."
"Who touched it?"
"Nobody. Freya stopped me."
He glances at Freya, approvingly.
"Was anything taken?"
"No."
"Anything moved?"
"A drawer."
"Which drawer?"
"The desk."
"Was there anything in it worth having?"
"A charger and a Christmas card."
Ander stands very still for a second.
Then he says, "This isn't about the House."
The whole room looks at him.
"It says leave it buried ," Luke says.
"I can read." Ander doesn't take his eyes off the sleeve.
"That's what it's about. That isn't what it's for.
" He looks up. "If you want somebody to stop investigating a bloodline, you send a letter.
You send it to her mail. You send it to the Chancellor.
You put it somewhere she'll open it and be frightened by the words.
" A pause. "You don't need to be standing in her bedroom to say leave it buried. "
Nobody answers him.
"They opened a drawer with nothing in it," Ander says.
"They took nothing. They damaged nothing.
They came in, they walked around, and they put it in the middle of the bed where she'd have to stand next to it to read it.
" He turns to Falken. "The words are decoration, Chancellor. The message is the room."
Falken's face has gone very careful.
"It's a warning about access," Ander says.
Oh.
Oh, that's what's wrong with my stomach.
I've been standing here being furious about somebody being in my space, and I've been treating that as the insult part and the card as the threat part, and it's the other way round.
Somebody wanted me to know they can get to where I sleep. The words were just what they wrote on the receipt.
"Apparently my fan club's expanding," I say.
"Don't," Ander says.
Not angrily. Sharply, and fast, and he's already looking at me when I turn.
"Don't make it smaller because you don't want to be frightened of it."
And I have absolutely nothing to say to that, from him, of all the people in this building.
"She's not staying here," Torres says.
"I am literally standing right here."
"He's right," Ander says.
I look between the two of them.
"Fantastic. Hell's frozen over and apparently it's my bedroom."
"Jessica—"
"You can tell me why you think it's unsafe," I say. "You can lay it all out and I'll listen, because you're both probably right. You don't get a vote."
Freya, from the coffee table, says, "Staying here tonight would be stupid."
"Thank you, Freya."
"I didn't say they get to choose where you go."
God, I love her.
"You can stay with us," Sophia says. "There's the floor. There's my floor, specifically, which I'm told is very comfortable if you're a coat."
And that's it. That's the thing that makes the decision for me, standing in a room full of people with security clearances.
"I'm staying in the second-year block," I say.
Luke's head comes round.
"That building has a code lock on the front door and about a hundred and forty students in it."
"Yep."
"Jessica, that's considerably less secure than—"
"Than the residence somebody walked into this afternoon?" I say.
His jaw goes tight.
I watch him have the entire argument. I watch him have it fast and completely and know how it comes out, and I watch him decide not to have it out loud.
"All right," Luke says.
I go back into my room at about eleven, with a security officer standing in the doorway, to get clothes and my toothbrush and the charger out of the drawer they went through.
The card's gone into evidence. The photographs are done. It's just my room again — my sweater on the chair, my books, the window catch Soren told me to report and I never reported.
And there's a shallow dent in the duvet, where the card sat.
That gets me.
I stand there holding a toothbrush and look at a dent in a bedspread, and my hands start doing the thing they did in Jon's cottage after the trial.
Somebody stood on this carpet. Somebody had a look around.
"Hey."
Torres, in the doorway. The security officer has gone somewhere else, which I suspect Torres arranged.
He doesn't ask if I'm okay. Obviously I'm not okay. He comes and stands next to me and doesn't touch me and doesn't say anything for a bit.
"I hate this," I say.
"I know."
And he does. He doesn't ask which part. Because it isn't the card, or not only — it's the guards, and the schedule that isn't going to be mine any more, and the meeting there'll be about me tomorrow that I won't be in, and the fact that at some point this year I stopped being a person and became a situation , and now the situation has a security file.
Torres just stands there and lets me hate it.
Then he says, "You're not going to stop, are you?"
I look at him.
"Were you seriously asking?"
"No," he says.
The second-year block smells like instant noodles and wet coats and I have never been so pleased to be anywhere.
Sophia's got a nest built on her floor out of what appears to be every soft object in the building.
Declan's dragged a mattress into the corridor outside, which nobody asked him to do and nobody is going to talk him out of.
Renzo's arguing with Freya about whether the fire door means anything.
There are two academy security staff downstairs and one at the end of the corridor, and Torres has gone to talk to them, and I already know he'll still be talking to them in an hour.
I come out of the bathroom at twelve.
Ander's in the corridor.
He's got a chair — a genuinely terrible plastic chair he's taken from somewhere — set against the wall about eight feet from Sophia's door, and he's sitting in it with his coat still on and his phone face-down on his knee.
I stop.
"You're actually staying."
He looks up.
"Apparently."
"There are guards. There are three of them. One of them is on this floor. "
I stand there in the corridor of a second-year student block at midnight, looking at Ander Ardent, heir of a Great House, sitting on a plastic chair outside a room with a poster of a Greek island Blu-tacked to the door.
This is the man who can't be in a room with me for four minutes without turning into an absolute bastard about it.
"Why?" I say.
He looks at me for a moment.
"Because someone got in once," he says.
I wait.
"They don't get to do it twice."