Page 77

I get to work.

I don’t know what I’m looking for.

William pulls up the staff systems on his laptop without anybody asking him to: the work queue, the door logs, the payroll accounts. Tav takes the maintenance binders off the shelf above the filing cabinet, six of them, fat and gray, one for each year. Merek takes the schedule, because he knows every person who works in this building and which of them was really where they were supposed to be. Lenart stands by the ledgers with his hands behind his back.

I take the filing cabinet.

It’s mostly vendor contracts. Linen service. Ice delivery. A wine importer in Lyon. I’m halfway through the second drawer when my hand closes on a folder, and my palm goes silver.

I drop the folder.

It hits the floor and fans open. My hand is still glowing, a soft, bright silver in the creases of my palm, the same light I saw on the Solstice, the same light that runs into the ward stone every night at midnight.

“Lenart.”

He’s already beside me. He crouches and picks up the folder, and looks at it, and then at my hand.

“Member agreement,” he says. “Gorrin’s. From 1971. He keeps a copy here because he lost his own twice.” He holds it out. “Touch it again.”

I do. Through the paper, under my palm, I feel it: a pressure, faint and steady, like putting my hand against a door with the wind leaning on the other side. My palm brightens.

“It’s like the ward stone,” I say. “Smaller.”

“It’s the same thing. Smaller.” He stands, and picks up a second folder from the open drawer, and puts it in front of me. “Now this one.”

It’s the linen contract. I put my hand on it.

Nothing. Paper. My palm stays the color of my palm.

“That’s an agreement,” Lenart says. “Signed and enforceable. If the linen service breaks it, we sue them. That’s all.” He sets Gorrin’s folder beside it. “This is an oath. Gorrin swore it. The wards are holding it. You’re feeling them hold it.”

“Can I tell if he meant it?”

“No.”

“Can I tell if somebody’s lying to me?”

“No. You can tell the difference between a promise and a vow.” He moves behind me, close, and puts his hands over mine, one on each folder. His skin is cool, cold after a night next to Merek, and it goes through me like a drink of ice water on a hot day. “Close your eyes.”

“Is this a lesson or a seduction?”

“Yes,” he says. “Close your eyes.”

I close them. He slides the folders around under my hands, back and forth, three or four times, until I don’t know which is which.

“Now,” he says, and lets go.

I put my palms flat on the two folders. Left: nothing. Right: the pressure, the door in the wind, and the warmth of the silver rising in my hand.

“Right,” I say.

I open my eyes. Gorrin’s folder is under my right hand.

Lenart doesn’t smile, but his eyes do. “Dez took a month to learn that.”

“Dez didn’t have you breathing on his neck.”

“I don’t breathe,” he says.