"For many years."
She thought about all the times she'd been here. All the conversations she'd had six meters above an entire civilization without knowing it. The thought was vertiginous in a way that had nothing to do with depth. "Does anyone else know? About the entrance?"
"Those who need to."
She accepted that with the patience of someone cataloguing information for later use. "Right. I'll be fine from here. I know where I am."
She moved toward the door.
It didn't open.
She pressed the panel. Nothing. She pressed it again, with more intention, and the door sat in its frame like it had forgotten how to be a door and wasn't particularly troubled by this.
"I would not do that just yet," Edi-Veen said from behind her.
She turned around slowly. He hadn't moved from the transport circle. His expression was what she was beginning to understand was his default — attentive, contained, giving away exactly as much as he intended to give away and nothing more.
"Did you just —" She looked at the door. Looked back at him. "Are you holding that shut?"
"Yes."
"With your mind."
"Yes."
She considered this. The Fraluma's telepathic capabilities were documented, in the vague way that classified things were documented — officially acknowledged, details undisclosed. She'd written two pieces that touched on it and both had been edited down to almost nothing before publication. Seeing it applied to a door in a building she'd used for journalist meetings was somehow more unsettling than the underwater city.
"I was assigned to see you home," he said. "Not to the door of the building you're currently in."
"I'm aware of the distinction."
"Then you understand why the door is staying where it is."
She looked at him for a moment. He looked back, unhurried, as if he had all the patience in the world and was prepared to deploy every bit of it on this particular door.
"Fine," she said. "But you're going to need to look less like yourself."
He had fake implants. She hadn't expected that.
He produced them from somewhere in the folds of his clothing — two pieces, low-profile, the kind that suggested minor augmentation rather than extensive modification — and she watched what happened next with the particular attention she reserved for things that reframed other things.
He didn't use a mirror. Didn't look for one, didn't reach for his comm screen, didn't pause to check his reflection in the warehouse's dark windows. He applied them by feel alone — one at his left temple, fingertips pressing in with a precise rolling motion that seated the adhesive evenly, no bubbles, no lift at the edges. Then one along his jaw, a slightly more difficult placement, the kind where the skin moved and you had to compensate, and he compensated without thinking about it, his fingers finding the angle the way her fingers found the recorder's remote on her belt in the dark.
The whole thing took thirty seconds.
She had been pressing her own fake implant above her eye since she was sixteen years old and she still checked a mirror every time.
She revised several assumptions. Quietly. Without letting it reach her face.
"You've gone undercover before," she said.
"My work required it, on occasion."
"Your work was protecting the Chancellor."
"Yes."
She thought about what that meant — a Fraluma moving through civilian spaces undetected, gathering information the government didn't know was being gathered, learning to press a false piece of metal against his own skin until the gesture cost him nothing — and filed it under things to think about when she wasn't standing in a warehouse at what felt like the middle of the night.
