She’s selling something again.
Message to anyone watching:collected. Compliant. Not a threat. Feel free to underestimate.
Message to me, specifically, if I’m arrogant enough to assume she knows I’m here:I’m not done.
Her shoulders rest easy. Chin tipped up. Eyes forward.
Her hands?
In her lap. Relaxed. No tremor.
Interesting.
I rewind six minutes and isolate a subclip. There’s a gap in footage between when she left the bed and when she returned from the bathroom that pings me. Not because she left frame — she didn’t. She stayed on camera, careful girl, never moving out of the corner view long enough to risk being accused of tampering.
But she did turn her back fully to the dresser for thirty-one seconds.
Thirty-one seconds is long in this context.
People under surveillance avoid giving their back unless they’re building an internal map of blind spots. Or hiding something.
She knelt on the floor out of full line-of-sight, facing the bottom drawer. Head bent, hair curtain down over her face and hands. Shoulders tense, then looser. Then she stood again.
When she stands, she looks… calmer. More anchored.
Self-soothing? Maybe. Breathing technique? Possible. A stash?
No, that’s stupid, Lysander. Don’t let want make you neat. You know damn well we gutted that room before she ever saw it. Wraith and I tore the place down to screws. Under the mattress. Behind baseboards. Inside vents. She didn’t have her drive on her when she came in — I verified that. We scanned every seam of her clothes, every lining. If she’d had anything, she doesn’t now. If she had a blade, I’d have bled already.
So what did you do, Red?
You hid something from yourself? Recentered on it? Touched a contingency?
Or you just needed thirty-one seconds where nobody could read your face.
That last one.
Yes. That. That’s something I know.
People who’ve had to compartmentalize for too long sometimes create rituals to hold the compartment together. Little loops of motion. Anchor points. You see it in soldiers who come home wrong. You see it in undercover kids who were never trained how to come back.
You also see it in burnouts — assets left too long in the field, handlers gone, protocol fraying. They start talking to walls. Walls start talking back.
Burnout phases have tells. Shaking hands. Measured breathing. Talking to themselves in short, directive sentences. (“Get it together.” / “No shaking.” / “You’re fine.”)
I rewind again, focus audio.
Turn up gain.
There. Faint. Her voice, almost under breath: “Get it together. No shaking. No slipping.”
Hm. Not a junkie mantra. A maintenance order.
That’s interesting.
A door upstairs slams. Footsteps follow. Heavy. Annoyed. Familiar.
I don’t bother lifting my eyes from the monitors when Vale comes in. The energy of the room shifts immediately when he does — goes less controlled, more edged. Vale carries heat like a pocket knife. Quick. Intimate. Messy. He doesn’t walk into a space, he bleeds into it.
