“When do I start?” My voice comes out firm. “The work. The reason I’m here.”
“When Vanya is ready for you. Soon.” Something that isn’t quite approval moves through his face. “She doesn’t waste time, and neither, I suspect, do you.”
“And my sister—”
“Is a thread I am pulling as quietly as I can. That doesn’t change today. It doesn’t change because you’re inside these walls.” He straightens. “Quarters are arranged. Secure wing for you. Decker, the contractors’ block. Marek will walk you both—”
“No.”
One word from the wall. Not loud. The room changes shape around it anyway.
Viktor looks at him a moment. “A word, Decker.” And to me, unhurried, as if nothing has happened: “Marek will take you as far as the anteroom.”
The escort walks me out, and the door shuts, and I stand in the anteroom with a stranger at my shoulder and a wall of glass with slat blinds between me and the office. The blinds are half open. I don’t get sound. All I can see is Decker’s back, his feet planted the way they plant when he’s decided about something, and Viktor on the other side of the desk, not moving at all. Decker’s jaw works. Viktor says something short. Decker’s hand opens and closes at his side, once.
It’s over in under a minute. Whatever it was, he’s not happy about it. It hasn’t taken me long to learn to speak “bear.”
He comes out tense and doesn’t explain, and I don’t ask in front of the escort. We walk.
The route to the secure wing crosses a corner of the yard, and a man is standing near the east wall, watching us come.
I know what he is before I know who he is. It’s in the size of him, and in the way he isn’t in a hurry about anything. Older, silver threaded through thick brown hair, hands like slabs.When he pushes off the wall and comes toward us, his tread is big and unhurried and familiar, and then I place it. It’s Decker’s walk. Another bear.
Beside me, Decker slows.
The old bear looks at me first. It’s the only look I’ve gotten all day with no suspicion behind it. He takes me in top to bottom, unhurried, and his nostrils move once. Something in his face shifts.
“Huh,” he says.
Decker has gone rigid beside me. Not the gate-tension. Something else.
“Torbjorn.”
“Decker.” The old bear’s eyes travel between us once, there and back, and whatever he finds seems to settle a question. He gives me a nod, grave and oddly courtly. “Ma’am.”
Then, to Decker, mild: “Come find me before I head north. You’ll have questions.” A beat. “Bears do, the first time.”
He moves off toward the ops wing with no hurry in his stride, and Decker watches him go with his jaw set and says nothing at all.
“Who was that?”
“Bear clan elder.” That’s the whole answer I get.
Something passed between them. I stood a foot away and felt it go by, and I couldn’t read a word of it.
The secure wing is a corridor I’ve never had clearance to enter—doors spaced wide, and quiet. He shouldn’t be allowed down it at all, I suspect, but nobody has the nerve to say so.
My room is small and clean. A bed, a chair, a window with wire in the glass, my old duffel from the communal lodgings already sitting on the blanket. Someone packed my things after they searched them. I try not to think about whose hands.
Decker goes through the room in about eight seconds. Window latch. The gap under the bed. The vent. He does it theway other men breathe, and when he’s done, some of the tension eases out of him. Not all.
“Marek stays at the end of the corridor,” he says. “Viktor’s pick. He’s solid.”
“And you’re in the contractors’ block.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what that was. In the office. You argued about it.”
