Page 80 of Legacy Ascended

He stands in the doorway of the suite and looks at the room I'm sitting in — at the corridor door, at the two windows and the catch on the second one, at the stairs beyond the landing, at the residence desk you can see from here if you lean. Then he looks at the corridor behind him for a while.

"Do you want to see it?" I say. "The photographs."

"No."

"It's her watch."

"I know." He puts his coat over the back of the chair without sitting down. "How many people can sign out of that storage?"

"I don't know."

"I'm going to find out."

"Voss is going to find out officially."

"Yes." He's already turning. "I'm going to find out tonight."

He's gone for five hours. He doesn't tell me where he goes, and I don't ask, and I am absolutely waiting up for him when he gets back.

He comes in and tells me the number of authorized people.

It isn't a long number.

"Where did you get that?"

"My uncle."

"Ander—"

"He gave me the number and nothing attached to it, and he told me not to ask him a second time." He doesn’t take off his coat, because he isn't staying. "That's everyone with a key, a signature, and a reason to be in the building. It doesn't include whoever empties the garbage."

I look at my hands for a while.

Here's the thing I keep arriving at, and I can't stop.

Everybody wants me to be frightened about the drawer. The drawer is horrible but the drawer isn't the problem. The drawer took one person and one open door and one afternoon.

Getting a woman's watch out of a sealed box in a Council storage room in a city took somebody with a key, and somebody who knew which box, and somebody willing to unpick a property tag, and somebody who could carry it all the way here and hand it to a person who walks into this residence without being stopped.

You could call that four people.

You could also call it one, if it's the right one.

"Ander."

"Yes."

"Nobody says Ardent. Not in this room, not tomorrow, not to Falken."

He's quiet for a second.

"Agreed."

"That's it?"

"You don't have evidence."

"No."