Page 78 of Legacy Ascended

The drawer in my desk is open.

I stop in the doorway with my hand still on the frame.

That drawer doesn't close. It hasn't closed since I moved in, but I always close it as far as it will go. And now it is wide open. It holds a phone charger, and other crap.

Last year somebody came into my room in the Great House and opened that drawer and put a card in it with two lines on it, and then went away again, and left everything else in the room exactly where it was. And Ander stood in this doorway and said the room was the message.

I don't go in.

I get my phone out, and I photograph the doorway, and then I photograph the drawer from where I'm standing, and then I go and stand in the corridor and call Freya, and she says don't touch it before I've finished the sentence.

It only takes nineteen minutes for the room to fill.

Freya comes first with the case she's kept packed since last year — gloves and bags and the good camera and a folding ruler. Sophia arrives and starts moving people into the hall so its not so crowded. Renzo comes back with Voss, who still has arena chalk on his hands.

Voss looks at the drawer for a long time before he lets anyone touch it. He asks for the door log. He asks who has a key.

"Nothing else disturbed?" he says.

"Nothing I can see."

"Look properly. Take your time."

So I stand in my own bedroom and go around it slowly. Bed made badly. Two books. Soren's gray shirt over the chair. My notes for Faris on the desk in the stack I put them in.

"Nothing," I say.

Voss nods at Freya. Freya bends down and opens the drawer with two gloved fingers.

Charger. Sunglasses. Card.

And a watch, sitting on top of the card.

Steel. A stretched link band with three links closed up on the short side to fit a small wrist. The crystal is pale pink and has a scratch across the face from about four o'clock to the center, and the strap is stained dark along one edge.

Nobody says anything.

"That's Cassel's," I say.

Freya's hand doesn't move.

"Jessica—" Voss says.

"That's Cassel's watch. She wore it every day. I have seen that watch."

"I believe you," Voss says. "Now tell me the details you notice."

And I stand there with my hand on my own desk and understand what he's asking me for.

"It's a steel watch with a scratched pink crystal face," I say. "Stains on the band. Three links closed up. Consistent with property I've seen worn by the officer who ran my detail."

"Thank you."

"Where's the tag?"

"That's the question."

Because there isn't one. Freya lifts it with two fingers under the band and turns it, and where a property tag should be looped through the pin there's nothing, and on the underside of the case there's a rectangle of adhesive residue with a clean edge, and a corner of paper still stuck in it the size of a fingernail clipping.