CHAPTER 9 #2
I had not mentioned it because I could not verify it. There is no weather in that room. No window in the place opens, and I had decided while dressing that a guess about rain was the one sentence available to me that could get me killed. The decision was correct. The decision was the tell.
“I am going to give you something now,” he said.
“You are not going to enjoy where it leaves you.” He waited until I looked into the lens.
“The people who closed Wesley’s complaint are on the list Wesley was complaining about.
I am telling you because you would find it anyway, and I would rather be the one who told you. ”
That took the last clean door off its hinges.
The Bureau had been a door. The oversight chain had been a door.
He had explained to me, kindly and at his own expense, that both opened into his house, and for half a second I was grateful to him, and he watched me be it.
He did not gloat, and the absence of gloating was worse.
I came while he was still talking. It went through me with nowhere at all to go: no sound, no breath out of its rhythm, nothing above the collarbones but a face doing its job.
My left hand cramped shut on brass hard enough to leave the print of the primer in my palm.
My right stayed flat on the desk under the torn nail.
My pulse went off under my jaw like something knocking to be let out, and none of it crossed the lens.
“Do you have questions for us, Ms. Verdugo?” the counsel said.
“I have several, and I am going to put them all in writing,” I said. “A written question is the only kind anybody answers twice.”
“Get some rest, Ms. Verdugo,” Thorne said, and his tile went dark before the others did. “I will try to be a great deal less unannounced next time.”
I said the correct closing thing in the correct voice. Then I shut the tablet’s cover myself, before anybody could do it for me, and the room came back all at once.
Luca came out from under the desk with his mouth wet and his hair wrong for the first time since I have known him. I reached for his belt, for his cock, because I wanted the ledger square.
He caught my wrist gently and did not let go of it.
“You are shaking, and I am not going to let you turn this into a favor you owe me.”
He sat on the floor with his back to the wall and put me against the desk with a plate between us. Bread torn rather than cut. An orange opened with his thumbnail. A glass of water he held for me, because my left hand had not finished opening.
“You are going to eat something out of my hand now, and then you may break anything in this room that you like.”
He fed me and I let him. His hands were shaking and mine were not, and neither of us remarked on it. He put a section of orange against my mouth and waited until I opened it, and then again, and again, and did not hurry.
“Tell me what word you chose,” I said. “You wrote it on my leg.” He stopped with his hand halfway to the plate. “Tell me why you chose that one and not another one.”
“I chose grateful,” he said. “Gratitude is the sound a person makes when they are not asking for anything more.” He turned a section of orange over and did not eat it. “A man like that wants to be thanked where there are witnesses. I thought I was handing you a door.”
“It was the wrong word.”
“It was the wrong word.” He did not argue or decorate it, and the charm came off him like a coat off a peg. “You have never thanked him, and he keeps a ledger of who has. I had one word and I chose the one that felt good.”
He looked at his own hands for a while. “I have been wrong about a word before,” he said. “Once. It cost considerably more than a video call.” Then he straightened his cuff and asked whether I wanted the rest of the orange, and I watched him put the door back on.
I stood up without touching the desk, because I do not lean on furniture.
I picked the tablet up in both hands and carried it down the corridor into my room.
The center of this building is concrete, but the partitions are board on steel stud, which Luca told me himself on the first walk-through, in the voice of a man showing off a house.
The tablet went through the plasterboard and stopped against the wire behind it. It came back out of the hole and landed on the floor with one flat report and no ring at all. All four of them were in the doorway before it had finished moving.
“I want a phone,” I said. “I am not going to call my mother or the Bureau.” Nobody moved. “I want a handset in my hand, and I want to put it down myself.”
“You are not getting one,” Cassian said. “Any handset in this unit is a beacon with a battery.” He did not step into the room. “The man you were just talking to buys people who look for beacons.”
“Then give me the true version,” I said. “I am not to be trusted with a phone, and every sentence that comes after that one is furniture.”
“I would rather you hated me in here than were safe nowhere,” he said. “I am not going to dress it up better than that.”
Rian took up the whole doorframe and did not come through it. “You did that call better than anybody in this room could have,” he said. “It still went wrong. That part is not yours to carry.”
Matteo said nothing at all. He stayed at the far end of the corridor and looked at the hole in my wall the way other people look at a measurement.
I did not eat that night. Luca came at seven with a plate, and I told him to put it on the chest and go, and he put it on the chest and went, and in the morning the plate was where he had left it and so was I.
They tried again in the morning, in the glassed gallery, all four at once, which told me they had held a meeting first. I stood at the sill with both hands on it. Quartz composite, colder than the glass above it, chipped at one end, and that chip is the only unmanaged thing here.
Beyond it the day was the clearest of the whole run, hard blue from the water out to the far edge of everything. I could not have described one honest hour of it to anybody in a way that would have kept me alive.
Luca held out bread. That was the part that mattered, and he knew it, and he did it anyway, palm up, his eyes level with mine.
“Eat this,” he said. “You are allowed to be furious with me and eat at the same time.” He did not move his hand. “Furious and empty is only tired, and I have watched people make that mistake in worse rooms.”
“I am not eating out of your hand this morning,” I said. “Yesterday I did, and yesterday you fed me right after you put a word in my mouth.” The bread stayed where it was between us. “I have been thinking about the order of those two things ever since.”
He took the bread back. He said nothing clever, which from him is an enormous concession, and the four of them let the quiet be as bad as it was.
I turned round and put my back against the cold sill and looked at all of them. I have sat in rooms with people who wanted me finished and never shaken in one of them, and I could not make my hands be still.
“He did not threaten me once, and I would like one of you to explain to me why I am still shaking.”