Page 56 of Legacy Elite

"Before I knew any of this existed," I say. "Before I knew wolves existed. There's a form with my name on it and his signature at the bottom and it's dated three weeks before I met him."

Freya considers this.

"Ask him what sources he used," she says. "If he was verifying you before contact, he saw something. It might be nothing. It might be a document I don't have."

"You want me to go and ask Professor Matthias what he found out about my family."

"Yes."

"Right now."

"He has office hours until seven," Freya says, and goes back to her labels.

His office light is on.

It's a small room, third floor, one window, and it looks exactly the way you'd expect: too many books for the shelving, a coat on the back of the door, a mug on the desk that I recognize from a lecture hall.

"Jessica." He puts down his pen. "Come in."

I put the form on his desk.

He looks at it and then he says, "Ah."

"You had a file on me."

"I had a form on you."

"There's a difference?"

"About four hundred pages," Jon says. "That's a contact report. It's what we file when the academy asks someone to go and verify a candidate."

I sit down without being asked. "So verify what?"

"Whether you existed." He turns the form around and reads it upside down, which is a skill I resent. "I was given your name. That's all I was given, and I don't decide who's on the list — I've never decided who's on the list. My part is confirming a candidate is real, and reachable, and then going to reach them."

"So you turned up in England because someone handed you a piece of paper with Jessica Miller on it."

"Yes."

"And what did you do with it?"

"What anyone would." He shrugs slightly. "I confirmed you were where the name said you were. I found out enough to know I'd be knocking on the right door and not frightening a stranger. Where you worked. That you'd moved over from the States. That you were over twenty and not fifteen, which matters a great deal." He pushes the form back to me. "That's the whole of it, Jessica. I wasn't tracing your ancestry. Nobody asked me to and there was no reason to. If I'd tried, I'd have got precisely as far as your parents, and I'd have thought it was ordinary, because it is ordinary."

"Okay," I say.

"I'm sorry you were worried enough to come and find me."

"No, it's — okay. That's fine. I just need to find all of the answers."

And then I don't leave.

I sit in his office chair with a form in my hand and I don't leave, and the room goes quiet.

Jon sets the pen down again.

"Was there something else?" he says.

Of course there fucking is.