Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Dr. Ferris didn't ask why a stranger was sitting in the reading room outside the conservation lab at nine in the morning.
He also didn't not-ask, which was somehow more unsettling, a slight too-long pause when Josie badged in, his eyes flicking past her to Declan settling into a chair by the door with the unhurried economy of a man used to waiting, and then Ferris simply went back to his own desk like the sight of a large, watchful stranger stationed outside his lab was a Tuesday-morning occurrence he'd been briefed on and told not to comment on.
He didn't even offer his usual good morning, just a short nod in Josie's direction before he bent back over whatever accession form currently held his attention.
Somebody had gotten to him first. Josie added the detail to the growing list in her head, one she was starting to suspect she'd need an actual notebook for soon, rather than just the crowded, unreliable space where she kept things she wasn't ready to examine yet.
She went to her station. The ledger page from last night sat where she'd left it, cockled along the repair line exactly as predicted, a faint wave running through paper that should have lain flat, and she pulled the humidification tent (a simple polyethylene sheet stretched over a wire frame, damp blotter paper beneath to raise the local humidity just enough to relax the paper fibers without soaking them) from the shelf where it lived and began setting it up over the affected corner.
The motion was automatic by now, three years of practice compressed into muscle memory, and she was grateful for it, grateful for anything today that didn't require conscious thought.
She had a system. Frame first, angled so the peak didn't touch the page directly.
Blotter beneath, pre-dampened to the exact saturation that took her four failed attempts in her first semester to calibrate by feel: too wet and the ink would bleed, too dry and the fibers wouldn't relax enough to reset.
Sheet last, sealed at the edges with binder clips that wouldn't leave marks, positioned with the specific care of someone who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how much damage careless hands could do to something that had already survived sixty years of neglect.
She had the frame in position and was reaching for the blotter paper when a hand moved into her peripheral vision and repositioned the frame two inches to the left.
"Don't touch that."
Declan straightened, unbothered, already three moves past the correction in his own head. "Draft's coming off the vent behind you. Frame that close to the edge of the table, it'll wick unevenly."
"I know where the vent is. I've worked this station for two years."
"Wasn't saying you didn't."
"You moved my equipment."
"By two inches."
"That's not the point. Josie set the frame back exactly where she'd had it, deliberate, meeting his eyes while she did it, daring him to move it again. "The point is you don't get to touch things in here. This isn't a room you get to have opinions in."
Something crossed his face. Not quite offense, closer to a man recalibrating a plan that had made sense to him five seconds ago and now clearly didn't. "Fair," he said, the same word he'd used outside the chapel, and she registered, with irritation, that some small part of her liked that he kept using it.
Kept conceding ground instead of defending it on principle, an instinct she hadn't expected from a man who'd stood in a four-hundred-year-old chapel accepting a ceremony that treated her like property.
She finished the setup without looking at him again. Blotter, sheet, clips, the small satisfying click of each one seating home, a rhythm that steadied her more than she wanted to admit in front of him.
"How long," she said, once the tent was sealed and the only thing left to do was wait, "is this going to happen. You. Sitting there."
"Until someone tells me otherwise."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the honest one. He'd found a spot against the wall that put the door in his sightline and the room's only window in his peripheral vision, she noticed, without deciding to notice it, some part of her cataloguing him the way she catalogued damaged bindings, structure first, meaning later.
"I don't know how long the assignment runs. Nobody's told me that either."
"Must be nice. Getting paid to sit in a chair."
"Not paid. He said it plainly, no edge to it, which somehow landed harder than if he'd been defensive. "Wardens don't take salary for Covenant duty. It's obligation, not employment."
That stopped her for a second: not the fact itself, but the flatness of how he'd offered it, like it hadn't occurred to him that she might find it strange he was standing guard over a stranger for free, on orders from a man with a four-hundred-year-old book, and calling it obligation instead of what it actually was, which was somebody else's decision made about both their lives without asking either of them anything at all.
"You could still say no," she said. "To all of it. Eventually."
"Could I."
"People can always say no. It just costs something."
Something shifted behind his eyes, brief, gone before she could name it. "What would it have cost you," he said. "Last night. If you'd said no in that chapel, in front of forty witnesses and a Provost who'd already decided the answer before he asked the question."
She didn't have a response to that, not one that didn't require admitting he'd landed exactly where she'd have landed if she'd let herself think it through past the anger.
She turned back to the humidity tent instead, checked the seal on the clips that didn't need checking, gave her hands something correct and useful to do while she decided not to answer, the silence stretching long enough that it might have felt like a victory to him if he'd been the kind of person who kept score.
"I have three more hours of shift," she said instead. "You're going to stand there the whole time."
"Or sit. Whichever bothers you less."
"Neither bothers me less. Both bother me exactly the same amount."
That earned the almost-smile again, the one that arrived and left before it had fully committed to existing.
He pulled the chair back out and sat, folder closed on his knee, and didn't say anything else for the next forty minutes, which Josie spent very deliberately not checking whether he was still watching her, and finding out anyway, three separate times, that he was: once when she reached for a fresh sheet of blotter paper, once when she adjusted the raking lamp's angle, once when she simply looked up for no reason she could name and caught him already looking, unhurried, unapologetic about it.
She worked through the rest of the intake queue methodically, a stack of nineteenth-century pamphlets that needed only surface cleaning, a soft brush and a vulcanized rubber eraser crumbled fine enough not to abrade the paper, small repetitive motions that gave her hands something to do while the rest of her mind circled the same unanswerable questions it had been circling since midnight.
Who submitted her name. What Kestrel actually wanted from her.
Why a Warden who could have made this arrangement considerably more unbearable had, instead, spent the morning quietly conceding ground every time she pushed back.
At eleven, Ferris came by with a new intake box and set it on the empty end of her table without comment, though his eyes cut once toward Declan and back, a small tell that told Josie the strangeness of this arrangement hadn't stopped registering with him either, just stopped being something he was willing to ask about out loud.
He lingered a beat longer than the delivery required, opened his mouth as if to say something, then apparently thought better of it and retreated to his own desk instead.
She opened the box. Old correspondence, unsorted, smelling of the particular dry mineral must that meant a basement storage room somewhere had finally been cleared out after decades: the specific scent she'd come to associate with discovery, with material nobody had properly catalogued in longer than she'd been alive.
She started sorting it into acid-free folders without looking up, and didn't notice (wouldn't have let herself notice, if she had) that for the first time all morning, some part of the tension along her shoulders had eased a fraction, the specific and unwelcome ease of being watched by someone who, whatever else was true about him, was actually paying attention, in a way that felt less like surveillance and more, disconcertingly, like company.
She hated that. She said nothing about it, and reached for the next folder in the intake box instead, another item on a desk already crowded with things she hadn't gotten around to opening yet.