Page 95 of Legacy Elite

"You can tell me why you think it's unsafe," I say. "You can lay it all out and I'll listen, because you're both probably right. You don't get a vote."

Freya, from the coffee table, says, "Staying here tonight would be stupid."

"Thank you, Freya."

"I didn't say they get to choose where you go."

God, I love her.

"You can stay with us," Sophia says. "There's the floor. There's my floor, specifically, which I'm told is very comfortable if you're a coat."

And that's it. That's the thing that makes the decision for me, standing in a room full of people with security clearances.

"I'm staying in the second-year block," I say.

Luke's head comes round.

"That building has a code lock on the front door and about a hundred and forty students in it."

"Yep."

"Jessica, that's considerably less secure than—"

"Than the residence somebody walked into this afternoon?" I say.

His jaw goes tight.

I watch him have the entire argument. I watch him have it fast and completely and know how it comes out, and I watch him decide not to have it out loud.

"All right," Luke says.

I go back into my room at about eleven, with a security officer standing in the doorway, to get clothes and my toothbrush and the charger out of the drawer they went through.

The card's gone into evidence. The photographs are done. It's just my room again — my sweater on the chair, my books, the window catch Soren told me to report and I never reported.

And there's a shallow dent in the duvet, where the card sat.

That gets me.

I stand there holding a toothbrush and look at a dent in a bedspread, and my hands start doing the thing they did in Jon's cottage after the trial.

Somebody stood on this carpet. Somebody had a look around.

"Hey."

Torres, in the doorway. The security officer has gone somewhere else, which I suspect Torres arranged.

He doesn't ask if I'm okay. Obviously I'm not okay. He comes and stands next to me and doesn't touch me and doesn't say anything for a bit.

"I hate this," I say.

"I know."

And he does. He doesn't ask which part. Because it isn't the card, or not only — it's the guards, and the schedule that isn't going to be mine any more, and the meeting there'll be about me tomorrow that I won't be in, and the fact that at some point this year I stopped being a person and became a situation, and now the situation has a security file.

Torres just stands there and lets me hate it.

Then he says, "You're not going to stop, are you?"