He doesn’t answer, which is an answer. There’s a charge coming off him that has nowhere to go, and I want to put my hands flat on his chest, but I’m aware of the open door and the man at the end of the corridor, and so is he. The space between us has rules in it now. We both feel them arrive.
“Lock it behind me,” he says.
“Decker.”
He stops in the doorway.
“This morning I sensed that there’s more.” I keep my voice down and my eyes on him. “I didn’t push, because we had a mountain to get off. We’re off it.”
He glances down the corridor, and for a second I think I’m going to get it, whatever it is, right here in a doorway in the secure wing.
“Not in this building,” he says. “Not tonight.”
Then he’s gone, and his footsteps fade down the corridor. I lock the door like he told me to and stand with my hand on the bolt.
Through the wire-glass window, later, I watch the yard lights come on. I see him once, crossing the open ground toward the contractors’ block. He doesn’t walk like a man going to bed. He walks the fence line first. All of it. Then the block swallows him, and I get into a bed that doesn’t smell like anything at all. I lie there missing a stone cave, because it was a home.
The building settles around me with the low hum of activity it’s always had. Strange, after days of water and wind outside.Somewhere down the corridor, Marek shifts his weight, and my ears have gotten good enough to hear it.
That’s how I catch the other sound, deep in the night. A tread in the corridor, too heavy for Marek, too even to be anyone in a hurry. It comes down the hall, and it stops outside my door.
I sit up in the dark.
The bolt is a foot from my hand. I don’t reach for it. I wait, listening to him breathe on the other side of two inches of wood, close enough that the pull under my ribs wakes up and leans toward him.
Decker.
He doesn’t knock.
The tread moves on, and the corridor goes quiet. I sit there in a locked room in the building that convicted me, with his scent still in my hair and him still out there walking the halls.
Tomorrow I start earning my name back.
Tonight I can’t stop wondering what he’s guarding me from that he won’t say out loud.
Chapter 31
Decker
I didn’t sleep much. I walked. By the time they knocked on my door in the contractors’ block, I’d already been up an hour, sitting on the edge of a bed that smelled like nobody, waiting for the building to need me.
Viktor picks a briefing room with no windows. Small table, six chairs, a screen on the wall. Jericho comes in with a folder he doesn’t open. He looks like a man who’s been awake as long as I have. Nadia follows him, sets a laptop on the table, and gives me a nod that’s warmer than anything else this building has offered. The screen on the wall comes alive, and a woman looks out of it. Dark hair, sharp eyes, a room behind her I don’t recognize.
“Mara,” Viktor says. “You’re on?”
“I’m here.”
Viktor stays standing at the head of the table. “For Decker’s benefit. Mara worked the case when Jericho was set up. She got closer to whoever did it than anyone. The night the convoyturned, I called her.” He looks around the room. “Everyone here knows why we haven’t officially dropped the charges against Grace. Nobody outside this room does. Keep it that way.”
Then Marek brings her in. Grace comes through the door with her chin level, the way she walked through the building yesterday, knowing everyone was watching. Her eyes find me first. Just for a second. Then she takes the chair Viktor points to, at the middle of the table, where everyone can see her.
The bear doesn’t like it. The second every head in the room turns toward her, he comes up under my skin and stays. Four people looking at her, and one of them a screen, and he wants me between her and all of it. I stay against my wall and hold still.
“Grace,” Viktor says. “You know Jericho. Nadia. On the screen is Mara. She’s cleared for everything said in this room.” He pauses. “Vanya’s not here. She has her own work. She’ll get what she needs from what you give us.”
Grace nods. Her hands are folded on the table. I watch her make them stay there.
“Start with the voice,” Viktor says.
