Page 16 of Winterveil

“Socialist tripe,” Dr. Iver had said, and clearly plenty of others agreed—after public outcry, the author was temporarily detained by the gendarmerie for harboring Soviet sympathies.

Nadiya’s gaze skimmed briefly over the books and then rose to the framed degrees above Dr. Iver’s desk. The MPhil in neuroscience from Cambridge, the doctorate from Columbia. She remembered once asking Dr. Iver what neuroscience meant.

“It means I study everything that goes on between here,” he had replied, touching her left earlobe, “and here.” With his other hand he tapped her right. It had tickled and made Nadiya giggle, and then she’d forgotten the rest of her questions.

Now, when Dr. Iver saw her, he rose from his desk. He walked around it and dropped into one of the armchairs, beckoning Nadiya to do the same.

Nadiya settled into the chair beside him. “You interrupted my breakfast.”

“Apologies, my dear. It was urgent. I can have something brought here, if you’d like.”

“No,” said Nadiya, tucking her hands into the folds of her jacket before he could notice the burns. She couldn’t stomach another lecture. “It’s all right.”

Dr. Iver raised a tufty white brow but didn’t argue. “You were at the range this morning. I saw you checked out the Luster rifle.”

“It’s new. I wanted to try it.”

That was one of the benefits of the reciprocal relationship between Valeran and the Pentagon. Weapons in development—carbines, grenades, combat knives—were sent to Valeran for the students to test. Among the combat tacticians, the arrival of a Pentagon truck was greeted with all the gleeful anticipation of Christmas morning.

Recently, Auric had been expanding into weapons manufacturing. Luster was their inaugural brand of pistols, assault rifles, and submachine guns. Given how friendly Auric’s CEO was with the DOD, Nadiya suspected he was trying to get the military to swap out the current crew-served weapons for his products.

Unlikely. After testing the rifle, Nadiya wasn’t especially impressed.

“Your friend was with you,” Dr. Iver said.

Security cameras monitored every room of Valeran, with a feed directly to Dr. Iver’s tablet. But he didn’t need to look at the camera feed. He would have seen that both Nadiya and Matteo had scanned their cuffs to enter the shooting range—information that was fed directly to his tablet, too.

“He’s a good friend,” Nadiya replied, somewhat uneasily. Even after so many years, she still sometimes found Dr. Iver difficult to read. She’d never quite been able to tell how he felt about Matteo. The careful, removed tone that he used now made Nadiya wonder if he worried about what Matteo would uncover, if he and Nadiya grew too close.

“It seems that way,” said Dr. Iver. “But I was wondering if I might prevail upon you to make a new friend.”

Nadiya frowned. “What do you mean? Matteo . . .”

“No, I’m not suggesting you discard him. Of course not. I only meant that there’s someone else at Valeran who would be well-served by having your company.”

Nadiya pressed her lips together. She didn’t like when Dr. Iver was so vague; she didn’t like feeling the way the rest of the students did—puzzled and frustrated by his enigmatic manner.

“Who?” she asked at last.

“Giselle Buckley.”

Immediately Nadiya tensed, though more out of surprise than resistance. “The new girl? Why?”

“I saw her in the dining hall this morning. She looked lonely.” Dr. Iver smiled thinly. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

“You couldn’t have really expected her to fit in here,” said Nadiya. “She doesn’t seem like Valeran material.”

Nadiya wasn’t even sure if she meant it. Mostly she was hoping that she could bait Dr. Iver into revealing something. He had been particularly cryptic about the whole affair, even more so than usual. When he had called her into his office that day, he had merely asked her if she was in the mood for a trip out. It wasn’t until they were in the car, halfway down the mountain, that he explained they were picking up a new student.

“She’s in our neck of the woods,” Dr. Iver said. “Relatively speaking.”

“How relatively?” Nadiya asked.

Dr. Iver had merely smiled at her, that same inscrutable smile. Then he had ordered the driver to stop for ice cream on the way to Belle. It was one of their traditions.

“She does seem rather unimpressive at first, doesn’t she?” Dr. Iver leaned forward, and Nadiya mirrored him, drawing their faces close. “But it wasn’t subterfuge, what I told her in the jail. We are in desperate need of someone with her unique talents.”

“And what,” Nadiya said carefully, “are those?”