13. Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Jessica
The rescue block roster goes up in the lower hall on the coldest morning we've had, and Sophia finds it first.
"You're not in this rotation," Declan says.
"I'm invested." She reads down the column with her scarf still over her mouth. "Two nights out. Paired. God, they're going to make you carry each other."
"That's the entire idea."
"Renzo's with you."
"I know."
"Renzo."
"I requested him," Declan says, "because if it goes wrong I want the man who talks constantly. You can always find him."
Freya has her notebook against the wall and is copying the whole thing down, which is how Freya reads anything. Snow came in overnight and stopped, and the light through the high windows is flat white. The corridor smells like wet wool.
Behind us there's a knot of first-years at the noticeboard, and one of them is asking whether anybody has ever died on it, and whether it's true they take your boots.
I want to tell them to focus on the trial - they don’t even do the block first-year, but Renzo beats me to it.
"They take your boots," Renzo tells him gravely.
"Don't," Sophia says.
"They take one boot."
The first-year goes away looking worse than he arrived, and Renzo watches him go with something almost fond.
"That was us," he says.
"That was you," Freya says. "You worried about everything."
"We spent about six weeks terrified of one day," Renzo says.
Nobody answers that for a second, and then Sophia snorts.
"God, first year was adorable," she says. "Do you remember when the worst thing that had ever happened to us was Faris taking three marks off Jessica for being helpful?"
"I remember it vividly, thank you."
"A hundred merit marks and a rumor about wolves. That was the whole year." She hitches her bag up. "I'd go back tomorrow. I'd go back this morning."
I find my name in the column, and the pairing box beside it has a line through it and one word written in.
Pending.
"That's the panel," Freya says, without looking up. "Everything about your training goes through them now. The block faculty put you forward weeks ago. Voss told me it's been sitting upstairs since."
"Pending as in probably, or pending as in nobody's read it?"
"I don’t know."
I let myself want it for exactly the length of the corridor, and then try to put it out of my mind. Focus on what I can control.
Here's my week. Escort at 07:40. Leadership and Governance on the second floor of the history building. Legal office. Communications briefing. A security review I sit in and don't speak at. And a line that says TBC — Chancellor's office, which is the most frightening item on any list ever written.
Nobody asked me if I wanted a single one of them. Sophia read Leadership & Governance — Priority Recommendation off my advisory page in September and said they were training me to be a princess, and she said it as a joke, and then the whole year happened.
Search and Rescue isn't on my advisory page. It isn't recommended for me, wasn't suggested to me, doesn't suit my file. I went and found the block faculty in the second week of term and asked what it would take, and they told me, and I did it, in the evenings.
I sold headlamps for four years to people who were going up mountains. I hiked every ridge I could reach on a bus on my days off, alone, badly equipped, extremely happy.
Two nights in the Preserve carrying somebody who doesn't want to be carried is the only thing on my schedule that I want.
"You'll get it," Sophia says, at my shoulder. "The panel's just slow."
"Sure."
"Also Voss likes you. He's rude to you in a fond way."
Breakfast is in the suite, because it's been in the suite since I got back, and nobody has suggested going to the hall, and I haven't either.
Declan has the pan. Torres is at the desk with his boots on the second chair, doing the reading he was supposed to do last night.
Luke comes in with the good coffee under his arm and a sheet of Council correspondence he doesn't put down, and kisses the top of my head on the way past, and Ander arrives ten minutes later with nothing, and takes the chair beside mine, and takes my cup.
"That's mine."
"You weren't drinking it."
"You have a whole House. Get your own coffee."
"I have three Houses' worth of meetings and no coffee." He hands it back. "How’s your shoulder."
"It's cold."
He looks at me until I roll it, which I can do now. The groove across the top is pale pink and flat and it aches in the cold. Bergstrom says that's permanent.
Then Jon knocks.
He knocks on the frame rather than the door, and he stays in the doorway, because of the arrangement. Nobody has to like the arrangement. The arrangement is that he has no authority over one single thing that touches me, and he sticks to it.
"Jessica. Have you got twenty minutes?"
"Is this a class thing?"
"No."
Declan's spoon stops moving.
We use the small reading room on the second floor because it has a door and no one ever wants it. Jon puts a folder on the table and doesn't open it.
"Before anything else," he says. "This went to the Chancellor first. Forty minutes ago. It did not come to you first, and I want you to know that I brought to you as soon as I could."
"Okay."
It's an access history. One page, printed this morning, with a request number at the top.
The file listed at the top is my original archive approval. The first plan, before I was kidnapped. The one that said when I was going, which road we'd take, and what vehicle I'd be in.
"That approval was replaced," I say.
"It was. But the original file stayed in the system."
I look down the page.
There are two entries.
"Somebody opened it twice?"
"Yes."
The first date and time was eight days before the appointment. The second was four days ago.
"Who?"
"That's the problem." Jon taps the authorization column. "Both times, they used your student number."
I read it again. Six figures I've written in the top right corner of every piece of work I've handed in since my first year.
"I didn't open this."
"I know."
"I've never even seen it. Somebody read the original approval to me in an office."
"I know."
I point at the second entry. "Four days ago at that time I was in with Bergstrom, having my arm measured. She signs a sheet for every appointment."
"Which is why we know you weren't the person at the terminal."
"And the first one was before the archive trip."
"Yes."
"So somebody could have opened this, seen when I was going and which road we'd take—"
"Yes."
"That's how they knew where I'd be."
Jon pauses. "It's consistent with how they knew."
"Jon."
"I know. But that's as far as the record gets us. We know somebody used your student number to open the file. We don't know who, and we don't know whether that person passed the information to anyone else."
I stare at the page.
Freya comes in without knocking and closes the door behind her with her back.
"I'm going to need that flat on the table," she says.
Freya photographs the page with the request number visible.
I write the time down on a clean sheet with the date and what the page is and who was in the room, and Jon signs under it, and Freya signs under Jon, and nobody says anything the whole time except Freya asking twice whether the overhead light is throwing a shadow across the third line.
My hands are steady. I notice that and put it away to think about later.
"Where does the original go now?" I ask.
"The Chancellor has sealed the routing record. Nobody views that file again without two signatures and a reason."
"Four days late."
"Yes," Jon says.
I go back to change, because there's a thing at noon and I've got a sweater on that smells like Declan's cooking.
The suite is empty. There's a note on the table in Renzo's writing that says GONE TO VOSS. DO NOT EAT THE THING IN THE FRIDGE, IT IS SCIENCE.
My bedroom door is open, which it always is.
The drawer in my desk is open.
I stop in the doorway with my hand still on the frame.
That drawer doesn't close. It hasn't closed since I moved in, but I always close it as far as it will go. And now it is wide open. It holds a phone charger, and other crap.
Last year somebody came into my room in the Great House and opened that drawer and put a card in it with two lines on it, and then went away again, and left everything else in the room exactly where it was. And Ander stood in this doorway and said the room was the message.
I don't go in.
I get my phone out, and I photograph the doorway, and then I photograph the drawer from where I'm standing, and then I go and stand in the corridor and call Freya, and she says don't touch it before I've finished the sentence.
It only takes nineteen minutes for the room to fill.
Freya comes first with the case she's kept packed since last year — gloves and bags and the good camera and a folding ruler. Sophia arrives and starts moving people into the hall so its not so crowded. Renzo comes back with Voss, who still has arena chalk on his hands.
Voss looks at the drawer for a long time before he lets anyone touch it. He asks for the door log. He asks who has a key.
"Nothing else disturbed?" he says.
"Nothing I can see."
"Look properly. Take your time."
So I stand in my own bedroom and go around it slowly. Bed made badly. Two books. Soren's gray shirt over the chair. My notes for Faris on the desk in the stack I put them in.
"Nothing," I say.
Voss nods at Freya. Freya bends down and opens the drawer with two gloved fingers.
Charger. Sunglasses. Card.
And a watch, sitting on top of the card.
Steel. A stretched link band with three links closed up on the short side to fit a small wrist. The crystal is pale pink and has a scratch across the face from about four o'clock to the center, and the strap is stained dark along one edge.
Nobody says anything.
"That's Cassel's," I say.
Freya's hand doesn't move.
"Jessica—" Voss says.
"That's Cassel's watch. She wore it every day. I have seen that watch."
"I believe you," Voss says. "Now tell me the details you notice."