Page 76 of Legacy Ascended

I sold headlamps for four years to people who were going up mountains. I hiked every ridge I could reach on a bus on my days off, alone, badly equipped, extremely happy.

Two nights in the Preserve carrying somebody who doesn't want to be carried is the only thing on my schedule that I want.

"You'll get it," Sophia says, at my shoulder. "The panel's just slow."

"Sure."

"Also Voss likes you. He's rude to you in a fond way."

Breakfast is in the suite, because it's been in the suite since I got back, and nobody has suggested going to the hall, and I haven't either.

Declan has the pan. Torres is at the desk with his boots on the second chair, doing the reading he was supposed to do last night. Luke comes in with the good coffee under his arm and a sheet of Council correspondence he doesn't put down, and kisses the top of my head on the way past, and Ander arrives ten minutes later with nothing, and takes the chair beside mine, and takes my cup.

"That's mine."

"You weren't drinking it."

"You have a whole House. Get your own coffee."

"I have three Houses' worth of meetings and no coffee." He hands it back. "How’s your shoulder."

"It's cold."

He looks at me until I roll it, which I can do now. The groove across the top is pale pink and flat and it aches in the cold. Bergström says that's permanent.

Then Jon knocks.

He knocks on the frame rather than the door, and he stays in the doorway, because of the arrangement. Nobody has to like the arrangement. The arrangement is that he has no authority over one single thing that touches me, and he sticks to it.

"Jessica. Have you got twenty minutes?"

"Is this a class thing?"

"No."

Declan's spoon stops moving.

We use the small reading room on the second floor because it has a door and no one ever wants it. Jon puts a folder on the table and doesn't open it.

"Before anything else," he says. "This went to the Chancellor first. Forty minutes ago. It did not come to you first, and I want you to know that I brought to you as soon as I could."

"Okay."

It's an access history. One page, printed this morning, with a request number at the top.

The file listed at the top is my original archive approval. The first plan, before I was kidnapped. The one that said when I was going, which road we'd take, and what vehicle I'd be in.

"That approval was replaced," I say.

"It was. But the original file stayed in the system."

I look down the page.

There are two entries.

"Somebody opened it twice?"

"Yes."