"Next time," she said, keeping her voice even, "you tell me in the first minute."
He considered this. "Understood."
"Good." She picked up her bag. "We're leaving."
"The party —"
"Is over for us." She was already moving toward the door, her mind working through the image of the man on the terrace — the deliberate eye contact, the unhurried exit. That wasn't curiosity. That wasn't coincidence. That was someone making sure she knew she'd been seen.
The Chancellor was looking for women.
Coreni was beginning to think he might have found one.
She didn't sleep.
This was not, in itself, unusual. She had never been a reliable sleeper — her brain had a habit of treating the dark as an invitation to finish conversations she hadn't started yet, to follow threads she'd set down during the day when other things required her attention. She had learned, over the years, to work with it rather than against it. Some of her better stories had been built in the hours between the moons rising and the first sun.
Tonight the thread was: a man on a terrace who had made certain she knew he saw her.
She lay in the dark and pulled it apart the way she pulled everything apart — methodically, without flinching, starting from what she knew and working toward what she didn't. He had been there when they arrived, which meant he had known where she was going before she got there, which meant either her comm had been accessed or someone in her network had talked or she was being watched closely enough that her movements were predictable. None of those options were good. The middle one was the worst.
She thought about Amir, which she always eventually did when things went badly on a story, and she thought about what the Chancellor's people would offer someone like him, and she thought about the look on the man's face — not threatening, not aggressive, just deliberate. I see you. I want you to know I see you. That was a message, not an action. Which meant she wasn't in immediate danger.
Which meant they weren't ready to move yet.
Which meant she had a window, and the question was how wide.
From the other room, nothing. Not a sound, not a shift of weight. She had checked twice since she'd come to bed and both times she could hear only the building's ambient noise — the climate system, the particular creak of the third floorboard near the kitchen that she had long since stopped hearing as anything but background. No sound of breathing, no sound of movement. If she hadn't known he was there she wouldn't have known he was there.
She knew he was there.
It was not discomforting, which was the part she kept arriving at and not knowing what to do with. She had lived alone for four years, and she had been fine alone, had in fact been better than fine — had preferred it, the specific quality of a space that was entirely hers to fill or not fill as she chose. She had expected a Fraluma warrior on her couch to disrupt that in ways that were obvious and several ways that weren't. It had disrupted it, but not the way she'd expected. What she felt in the apartment now was not claustrophobia.
It was closer to the opposite.
She turned over, pulling her blanket with her, and stared at the wall.
When we find the women, we will find the key.
Which women. She was back at the beginning of the thread, which meant she had run it as far as it would go for tonight and her brain was starting to loop. She recognized that too — the particular feeling of a story that had more shape than she could yet see, where the edges didn't connect yet because she was missing something in the middle.
She needed the archives. She needed the physical records, the ones that hadn't been cleaned the way the public files had been cleaned. She needed to get into the press building and find what someone had decided not to digitize, which was always where the useful things were.
She needed, more immediately, to sleep.
She did not sleep.
The first sun came up gray and quiet through her window and she watched it from where she lay, not moving yet, listening to the city decide to wake up. At some point she heard him in the kitchen — not clumsily, barely audible, but there — and the specific small sounds of her caffe maker being figured out.
He had made her caffe.
She was going to have to think about what that meant. Later. Along with all the other things she was storing there.
She pushed herself up, pulled her hair back, and went to the desk before she could talk herself into another hour of lying in the dark not sleeping.
Chapter Eight
Coreni
