Page 26

“They’re agitated.” Victor didn’t look up, smoke can idle in one hand, movements slower and more careful than anything else about him ever got. “Been building since morning.”

“Weather.”

“Maybe.” His shoulders dropped half an inch — the only outward sign this hour belonged to anything other than the job. “Bees know things before people do. Pressure. Predators moving somewhere new. I’ve got opinions about today’s opinion. Keeping them to myself.”

“Not comforting.”

“Wasn’t trying to be.” Victor checked a frame, slid it home, in no rush, like the world outside this landing had no real claim on his attention right now. “Nine years I’ve done this job. You want to know why I still climb up here on my own time instead of doing literally anything else with an hour of daylight?”

“Why.”

“Because everything else about this job means assuming the worst about people until they prove otherwise. Bees don’t lie to me. Bees just tell me the truth about the weather.” He straightened, brushed pollen off his sleeve. “You want to talk about Tarek, or you want five more minutes pretending you came up here for the coffee.”

“The coffee’s terrible.”

“Yup. Keeps people from lingering.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face and left before it committed. “Five more minutes, then. Bees don’t mind an audience if the audience stays quiet.”

Norden stayed quiet. It cost him nothing, and it bought him a kind of stillness he hadn’t expected to need — twenty floors up, no phone ringing, no folder waiting, the low industry of six boxes going about their business without asking his opinion on any of it. He watched Victor’s hands move, slow and sure, checking each frame like it deserved the same attention as a threat assessment, and understood, distantly, that this was the only version of Victor that ever fully stopped working.

“You ever think about what happens if the weather’s wrong,” Norden said. “If the bees are agitated over nothing.”

“Then I lose an hour I didn’t need to spend up here.” Victor closed the box, latched it. “Cheap insurance, if it’s nothing. Considerably more expensive if it isn’t. Same principle applies to whatever you’re about to do about Tarek, if you want my opinion, which you didn’t ask for.”

“Give it anyway.”

“Assume the worst. Act like it’s already happening. If you’re wrong, you’ve lost nothing but a few sleepless nights. If you’re right, you’ve bought her time she wouldn’t have had otherwise.” Victor picked up his cold coffee, drank it anyway. “Cheap insurance.”

Norden didn’t examine too hard why six boxes of quiet, ordinary industry against a parapet wall did more to settle the thing behind his ribs than four floors of executive suite had managed all week. There was a lesson in that, probably, about the difference between running a building and simply tending it. He set the thought aside for a version of himself with more time to spend on it.

Victor came back after dark, and the stillness he always carried had gone sharp enough to cut.

“Tarek’s people aren’t just watching her anymore. They’re studying the work — not the installation, the material itself. What it does.” He set the tablet down, screen dark, like he didn’t want to look at it again either. “Chatter in circles I don’t move in publicly. Someone over there understands what her glass is capable of. Has for a while.”

“Define capable.”

“Energy-adjacent. Compatible with dragon presence in a way normal glass isn’t. Nobody’s given me the full mechanism yet, but the pattern’s consistent enough to trust it.” Victor’s voice stayed level — the register he used when he already knew the news was going to land badly no matter how carefully he delivered it. “Whatever she’s making, it’s not decorative to them. It’s an asset. And assets get acquired.”

“How long has he known.”

“Longer than us. Maybe longer than her.” Victor let the tablet sit dark between them. “A man who wants a hotel installation doesn’t spend two years building a case to acquire someone’s talent like a patent. Tarek’s not knocking on a studio door with a contract.”

“Then he’s not getting the chance to.”

“What’s the plan.”

“There isn’t one yet. There’s a decision. The plan comes after.” Norden crossed to the window, city lights scattering below in every direction, none of them anywhere near the one address that mattered. “Whatever he built, he built it assuming nobody was watching him.”

“He’s not wrong about that. Not yet, anyway.”

“He will be by tomorrow.” Norden turned from the window. “I want everything you have on his properties by morning. Staffing, security contracts, the names of anyone who’s left his employment in the last two years and might be willing to talk about why.”

“That’s a lot to compile by morning.”

“Then don’t sleep. I won’t be.”

Victor didn’t argue with that either. He simply nodded once, the economy of someone who understood when a conversation was over, and pocketed the tablet without asking the question they both already had the answer to.

A cold stillness settled behind Norden’s ribs — the kind that came directly before it stopped being still. He crossed to the bar cart instead of pouring anything from it, hands braced on the edge, watching the city through the glass do nothing about any of it.