I try it again, because the first time is instinct and the second time is information.
Still locked. The stairwell is narrow and cold and the light coming through the single small window near the ceiling is the gray-white of stone filtered through stone. I can hear nothing from the other side of the door. Not footsteps, not voices, not the ambient hum of a building with people in it.
I sit on the bottom step and think through my options, which takes about thirty seconds because there aren't many. I can wait. I can try to force the handle, which will fail because it's not a lock I can manage without tools. I can try to use whatever is sitting behind my ribs, which has been unpredictable enough that I don't trust it in an enclosed space without knowing what it will do.
I wait.
An hour and a half later, a maintenance worker opens the door from the other side, presumably to access whatever is stored down here, and finds me sitting on the step reading a chapter ofwarding theory from memory because I had nothing else to do with my hands.
"How'd you get in here?" he asks.
"Took a wrong turn," I say, which is true enough.
I am forty-five minutes late to the one afternoon class I have, which earns me a note from the instructor, which earns me a summons to Ryder Ashford's office before dinner, which is how I end up sitting across from him at a desk covered in papers and the particular cold weight of his attention.
"You were absent from Advanced Theory this afternoon," he says, without looking up from what he's writing.
"I was locked in the basement."
He finishes his sentence before he lifts his eyes. "Voluntarily?"
"No."
"Then you were somewhere you shouldn't have been."
"I was following a map to the records office. The door locked behind me." I keep my voice level. "Someone set that up."
"Someone," he repeats.
"I have a strong guess, if you'd like it."
"What I'd like," he says, "is for students to attend their scheduled classes. What I have is a student who missed class and a report to file." He sets down his pen and regards me with the expression of someone who has made a decision and is waiting to see how you'll receive it. "Detention. Tonight. Bone Chapel, nine o'clock."
"The Bone Chapel," I say.
"The chapel in the north wing. You'll find it easily enough." He picks up his pen again. "Don't be late. In this context, late means absent, and absent earns you a second session."
I stand up. "Will there be a specific task, or should I bring something to read?"
"You'll catalog the consecration records stored in the east alcove. They haven't been indexed in three years." He doesn't look up. "And Fairmont. Nine o'clock. Not nine-oh-one."
The Bone Chapel earns its name.
The walls are inlaid with carved bone panels, old and yellowed, fitted together in repeating patterns that are decorative if you don't look closely and deeply unpleasant if you do. The ceiling vaults high above a row of stone pews, and the light comes from a handful of wall sconces that produce a cold, blue-tinted flame that moves in air currents I can't feel. The consecration records are stacked in the east alcove in a state that suggests the last person assigned to them gave up halfway through and left in a hurry.
I'm on the third stack when Ryder arrives.
He doesn't announce himself. His footsteps are quiet enough that I only know he's there because the air changes, that particular cold weight that precedes him like a dropped temperature. He stops at the edge of the alcove and watches me work for a moment without speaking.
"These are sorted by warden name, not date," I say, without turning around. "Whoever did this last had a different system."
"Or no system at all." He moves into the alcove and picks up one of the loose records from the pile I haven't reached yet. He reads it, sets it down in the correct stack. Picks up another. "Cross-reference by date first. Names can be secondary."
"That's what I'm doing."
"Then you don't need the instruction."
"No," I say. "I don't."
