13. Chapter 13 #2
And I stand there with my hand on my own desk and understand what he's asking me for.
"It's a steel watch with a scratched pink crystal face," I say. "Stains on the band. Three links closed up. Consistent with property I've seen worn by the officer who ran my detail."
"Thank you."
"Where's the tag?"
"That's the question."
Because there isn't one. Freya lifts it with two fingers under the band and turns it, and where a property tag should be looped through the pin there's nothing, and on the underside of the case there's a rectangle of adhesive residue with a clean edge, and a corner of paper still stuck in it the size of a fingernail clipping.
"It was tagged," Freya says. "Somebody took the tag off."
Voss looks at it for a moment longer.
"Bag it," he says. "Both of you sign the seal."
They take it away, and then they take my bedroom for the afternoon, and I sit in the kitchen of my own suite like a visitor.
I call Cassel at four.
It rings long enough that I start putting the phone down, and then she has it, and her voice comes through with more air in it than it used to have.
"Miller."
"Hi."
"You're calling me, so somebody's done something."
"How are you?"
"I have a hole in me that whistles when I laugh and a physical therapist who has never liked anybody. Ask me the real question."
So I ask her.
I tell her about the drawer and the watch and the residue where a tag was. I don't tell her it's hers. I describe it and I let her say it.
She's quiet for a while. There's a television on somewhere behind her, and somebody walks past her and says something about a door.
"Three links out," she says. "Scratch across the glass. That sounds like mine."
"I think so too."
"It came off me in the road. They took it off me and somebody put it in a bag. It's supposed to be in a box with my coat and my boots and everything else that got cut off me, in the Council storage." A breath that catches on something.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't do that."
"Cassel—"
"Don't. I'm not the one it was left for." The television goes off. "Miller, listen to me. Whoever put that in your room wants you to think about that day.”
The notice goes out to the whole academy at six.
Practical placements suspended, all cohorts, pending review.
Renzo reads it off his phone twice, and then out loud a third time for the room, and Sophia says a word that makes Declan laugh into his sleeve.
"Two nights out," Renzo says. "I was going to be so good at it. I had a system."
"You had a bag of sweets."
"That was the system."
Declan takes the phone and reads it himself, and then he looks over at me across the table, and he doesn't say any of the unkind things he's thinking.
For one evening, at least, I'm not the only one missing something. Everybody's grounded, and everybody's annoyed.
Ander comes in the evening and doesn't look at my bedroom.
He stands in the doorway of the suite and looks at the room I'm sitting in — at the corridor door, at the two windows and the catch on the second one, at the stairs beyond the landing, at the residence desk you can see from here if you lean. Then he looks at the corridor behind him for a while.
"Do you want to see it?" I say. "The photographs."
"No."
"It's her watch."
"I know." He puts his coat over the back of the chair without sitting down. "How many people can sign out of that storage?"
"I don't know."
"I'm going to find out."
"Voss is going to find out officially."
"Yes." He's already turning. "I'm going to find out tonight."
He's gone for five hours. He doesn't tell me where he goes, and I don't ask, and I am absolutely waiting up for him when he gets back.
He comes in and tells me the number of authorized people.
It isn't a long number.
"Where did you get that?"
"My uncle."
"Ander—"
"He gave me the number and nothing attached to it, and he told me not to ask him a second time." He doesn’t take off his coat, because he isn't staying. "That's everyone with a key, a signature, and a reason to be in the building. It doesn't include whoever empties the garbage."
I look at my hands for a while.
Here's the thing I keep arriving at, and I can't stop.
Everybody wants me to be frightened about the drawer. The drawer is horrible but the drawer isn't the problem. The drawer took one person and one open door and one afternoon.
Getting a woman's watch out of a sealed box in a Council storage room in a city took somebody with a key, and somebody who knew which box, and somebody willing to unpick a property tag, and somebody who could carry it all the way here and hand it to a person who walks into this residence without being stopped.
You could call that four people.
You could also call it one, if it's the right one.
"Ander."
"Yes."
"Nobody says Ardent. Not in this room, not tomorrow, not to Falken."
He's quiet for a second.
"Agreed."
"That's it?"
"You don't have evidence."
"No."
"Then neither do I."
The snow starts again a little after midnight.
I watch it come down past the window with Soren's shirt on and my shoulder aching.
Nobody even discussed whether I was sleeping alone tonight.
Torres is warm against my back, and somewhere beyond the bedroom door I can hear one of the others moving around the suite.
Sophia's right. First year was adorable. We were terrified of a number on a board and an afternoon in the Preserve.
I miss having problems that small.
They didn't leave a note this time.
They didn't need one.