My hands don’t shake again.
But I can still feel her shoulder.
And I know with the same certainty I’d apply to any tactical assessment that what happened in that doorframe wasn’t a test or provocation or play. It was Vi telling me, in the only language I understand, that I’m on her shitlist.
23
STING
I hear them that evening.
Vi’s room. The door is closed but not latched. I can tell because there’s a quarter-inch gap between the door and the frame, the gap that remains when someone pulls it shut without checking. It’s careless and not like Vi. Which means either she’s distracted or she doesn’t care who hears.
I’m walking the residential corridor on my way to check the second-floor access stairwell, which is a thing I do and have always done and has nothing to do with the fact that Vi’s room is on this corridor.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
Through the gap, voices. Low. Two of them. Vi and Mara, close together, a conversation you have when you’re leaning in and keeping your volume down.
I slow my pace. Don’t stop. Stopping in front of someone’s door is obvious, and obvious is something I don’t do. But I slow enough to catch fragments as I pass.
Vi: “…east wing, past the…”
Mara: “…how far beyond the…”
Vi: “…said it’s behind a maintenance hatch in the…”
Mara: “…and if someone’s there?”
Vi doesn’t answer that one. Or she does, but I’m past the door by then, and the words dissolve into the general murmur of the residential section—other conversations, other lives behind other doors, the ambient noise of people occupying space they’ve made habitable through stubbornness and salvage.
I don’t need to hear the rest. The fragments are enough.
East wing. Maintenance hatch. The question of what happens if someone’s there. They’re not reminiscing. They’re not catching up on lost time or doing any of the things two reunited friends might reasonably do on a relaxing evening. They’re planning. Specifically, they’re planning a trip into the section of the Rot I told Vi she couldn’t go to.
Goddammit.
I should intervene. I have the authority. I have the justification. I’ve already told Vi no, and no means no. If she’s circumventing that decision by planning an unauthorized excursion into contested territory with her untrained civilian best friend, then it’s my right to step in. It’s my responsibility, as well. But I keep walking.
I keep walking because intervening means knocking on that door and dealing with Vi, and every recent engagement with her has left me worse off than the one before. The standoff in the Skylight Room. The corridor where I almost kissed her. The supply closet where she looked through me with those steady, knowing eyes and brushed me with her shoulder.
Each time, I go in with my logic intact and come out with less of it. She’s eroding me, and she knows exactly where those cracks are.
If I walk into that room and tell her no again, she’ll look at me. She’ll hold my gaze. And whatever she sees in my face willgive her information about me that I don’t want her to have. So I keep walking.
I reach the stairwell and check yet another access point. The door is solid, the lock is functional, the hinge needs oil, but that’s been true for weeks and isn’t a priority. Everything’s in order. Everything’s where it should be.
I sit on the top step.
This is unusual for me. I don’t sit when there’s no reason to sit. I stand, I walk, I lean against walls when a conversation requires a casual posture. Sitting without purpose suggests idle time, and idle time is where unwanted thoughts live.
But I sit anyway and the unwanted thoughts come whether I give them a chair or not.
I think back to the email I saw in the pile of papers Alice provided, an email from an oversight committee denying Vi’s father’s audit request, dated three weeks before the city council session where the request was supposed to have been first raised.
A denial that predates the ask. A door closed before anyone officially knocked on it. How can a request that has not yet been made, already be denied?
I stored that detail away. Told myself it was an anomaly. Bureaucratic misfiling, backdated correspondence, one of a dozen explanations that would render it a simple clerical error.
