The gate rolls, and we drive through, and Jericho is waiting in the yard.
He’s a wall of a man on a normal day. Today he’s a wall between us and the two guards trailing him, and he uses it. He opens my door himself, which no one has ever done in this place, and says, “Walk with me,” in the voice that ends discussions.
The guards fall back. Decker comes around the truck and walks on the other side of me, close.
Jericho doesn’t speak until we’re moving. Then, low, without turning his head: “For the record. I never bought it.”
My throat closes. I keep walking.
“I’ve been in your shoes,” he says. “I know how it feels.” A pause. “You’ve got people on your side in this building. More than it’s going to look like today.”
That’s all. He doesn’t ask a single question about where I’ve been, and he doesn’t tell me it will be all right. Both of those things are why I’ve always trusted him. He walks us to the main doors, nods once to Decker, and peels off toward the ops wing as if this were a normal escort on a normal day.
The doors close behind us, and the building goes quiet.
I spent months making myself invisible in these corridors. It turns out I’m not the only one who can vanish. The tech who steps back into a doorway he’d just come out of. The two women whose conversation dies at ten feet and restarts at twenty, in lower voices. The man from the comms room who stares too long, and the woman beside him who won’t look at all. I canread every one of them, and I would give a year of my life to be invisible again.
I keep my chin level and my hands loose and I walk.
Decker has changed since the gate.
I can’t name how at first. Then I can. In the den he filled the space and let it be. In here, he’s wound tight. He walks half a step closer than the corridor needs. When we pass an open door, he’s somehow between me and it without ever seeming to move. At the corner by the briefing room, he stops us for no reason I can see, waits a breath, and moves on. His face is flat, but his eyes never stop working the hallway. Doors, corners, vents.
He doesn’t trust this place. That’s what I tell myself at first. It doesn’t quite cover it—there’s something under the caution.
And then someone shrieks my name.
“Grace!”
Kaylin comes down the corridor at a dead run, past a guard who puts a hand up and then thinks better of losing it, and hits me at full speed. Her arms go around my neck. She’s so small that catching her is a whole-body job, and I hold her, and for a second the corridor and every eye in it stops existing.
“You’re okay,” she says into my shoulder. “You’re okay, you’re okay. I told them. I told everyone they were idiots.”
“Kaylin—”
“Idiots.” She says it louder, for the corridor’s benefit, and I feel more than see the guard behind her wince. Then she pulls back to arm’s length and looks at me properly, and something crosses her face. A pause. A small tilt of the head.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” She’s still looking. “You’re different.”
“I’ve been sleeping in a cave.”
“That’s not it.” Her nose wrinkles, and for a heartbeat she’s somewhere else with it, working on something. Then she lets it go the way she lets things go, all at once, and squeezes myhands. “Doesn’t matter. You’re back. Come find me when they’re done doing whatever this is.” Her eyes flick to the guards, to Decker, back to me. She doesn’t ask about him either. She just leans forward, kisses my cheek, and lets the guard herd her off, complaining the whole way.
The warmth of her stays on me for half a corridor. Then the tension dissolves it.
Viktor is standing behind his desk when they bring us in.
“Grace.” He nods to the chair across from him. “Sit if you want. This won’t take long.”
I sit. Decker doesn’t. He takes up a spot to my right, against the wall where he can see the door, and Viktor notes it without comment.
“You’re here under my roof and under my protection,” Viktor says. “I want that said plainly, because nothing else you hear today is going to sound like it.” He rests his fingertips on the desk. “On paper, nothing has changed. The council has its decision. They still believe the contents of the intel file. Inside this building, you are a suspect I brought in, not a woman I cleared. People will believe that, and I need them to. You know why.”
I do know why. I heard it on a cold slope this morning. It’s different, hearing it in this room, in his level voice, with the yard outside the window where I used to push a cart and be nobody.
“So here is what your protection looks like. A room in the secure wing. Someone on your corridor at all hours. You don’t move through this building without an escort, you don’t touch a phone, and you don’t answer questions from anyone whose name I haven’t given you. Meals come to you, or you’re walked to them.” He watches me take each one. “None of that means I doubt you. All of it is theater, and the audience is one person. But you’ll be the one it affects most, so I won’t hide that from you.”
