Behind me, flat and factual, the absolute last thing I expected:
"You smell like the mountain."
I stop walking.
He doesn't elaborate. The door closes.
***
The hall is quiet. I press my thumb against the area where the fourth bond mark flared, it’s gone already.
You smell like the mountain.
I've never been to the mountain. I don't know what it smells like. Whatever I carry that he recognized — it came from the bonds, probably from Gray. He walked through that door feral-edged and furious and asking for someone who isn't here, and his first piece of information about me was a scent.
Somewhere further out, in the way I always know where RJ is without meaning to, I can feel him — not a bond, the wanting that monitors without my permission.
And behind that closed door is a man who arrived in cuffs looking for someone who isn't here and told me I smell like a place I've never been.
Chapter four
The reclassification evaluation is in one of the smaller meeting rooms off the main corridor — a round table and its four identical chairs and its small window.
Dalton's already there, already still, the room already catalogued. The evaluator — Dr. Marsh, brought in from outside, the facility's way of performing objectivity — is setting up at the table. She gives me a professional smile. I sit down.
Dalton doesn't sit. He takes a position against the wall with his notepad and his pen, and for the next ninety minutes he writes things down.
I don't know what he's writing. That bothers me more than it should.
Dr. Marsh asks her questions. I answer them. The evaluation is methodical — not unpleasant. What I remember of the shift. What I felt before it.
I don't mean to keep looking at him. I do anyway.
He's standing against the wall with the notepad held at his side — not reading from it, writing in it, the pen moving in short economical strokes. Dark jacket, same as yesterday. The kind of still that isn't passive — active, chosen, a man who has decided exactly where to put his body and how much of the room to take up. His eyes move between Marsh and me at regular intervals, tracking, and every time they pass over me I feel it in the third arc before I feel it anywhere else.
I answer everything honestly. Mostly.
There are things I keep interior. The bond with Dalton, for instance, which is sitting in the room with me right now doing its level best to be a problem and which I am not going to describe to a woman with a clipboard and a camera.
Every time Marsh asks something that gets close to it, I feel Dalton's pen stop moving.
He doesn't look up. He doesn't do anything that could be described as reacting. His pen just — pauses. For exactly as long as the relevant question lasts. Then it starts again.
He's very good. I'm better at noticing things than he's accounted for.
***
Marsh wraps at ninety minutes. She thanks me, collects her materials, tells me the evaluation report will go to the review board within the week. I tell her that's great. She leaves.
Dalton starts to follow her.
"Hey," I say.
He stops.
"Close the door."
A pause. Not long. He closes it. Turns around.
