His fingers closed on the passenger handle; the chrome was hot enough to warn. The latch rolled under his thumb with a neat, familiar click. Stone watched him over the roofline, chin lifted the way men do when they're braced for a thing that might be science or might be faith.
Caleb slid into the seat and pulled the door to with his hip. The cabin's conditioned air met the sun's leftover heat and lost politely. Brooks had the engine turning over steady; her hands sat at ten and two, wedding band glinting once then behaving. Ms. Parker's face hung in the backseat glass until it remembered about reflections and resolved: shoulders forward, tote anchored between her shoes, mouth already shaping his name and thinking better.
"Seatbelt," Stone said, not unkind.
He brought the belt across his chest, felt the diagonal snug into place, and set both palms on his thighs for Stone's benefit. The card lay quiet against his pocket seam like a coin that refused to pay anyone's bills.
"Status?" Brooks asked, eyes on the mirrors, voice where sanity lives.
"Clear here. Deliveries did what it promised," Caleb said.
Stone nodded once. "Then we go downtown and try English." He rapped the dash twice with his knuckles and set his hand flat again, open, visible.
Brooks eased the sedan from the hydrant and tucked into traffic with the authority of a woman who had earned a thousand uncomplicated merges. The plaza slid into shade; the bus groaned at the light; a bicycle courier blew the crosswalk and collected three bitter honks like beads on a string.
Ms. Parker leaned forward just enough that her voice could survive the air. "You're okay."
"For certain values," he said, and let his head rest against the seat because posture announces things to uniforms you might not want announced.
"Explain certain values," Stone said.
"I'm still me. The day keeps trying to disagree." He watched a pair of students drift by on the sidewalk, maps on their screens, each of them thinking the other one knew which building was which.
Brooks took them around a delivery truck and back, rhythm clean, speed law-abiding because nothing smelled worse than a pretext.
Caleb said, "You'll want chain of custody on the card. Here's my procedure: I keep it. You watch me keep it. You get answers while my wrist remains attached."
"Compromise accepted," Stone said. "I say please and you don't take it personally."
"Everybody wins."
A block later, campus glass gave way to brick that remembered when it was new. A billboard promised that undergraduates would change the world for the low price of an interest rate. Ms. Parker's tote made a soft zipper noise as her hand found something inside and found it unnecessary.
Brooks said, "Timer?"
"Nothing on the board yet," Caleb said. He meant it. The day felt ordinary in exactly the way it did moments before it felt otherwise.
Stone studied his profile the way you study a map someone drew while running. "What did floor twenty-three ask you to deliver."
"Something that looked like nothing," Caleb said. "Delivered it without giving it me."
"Gold star," Stone said. "Do you get a receipt."
He slipped his left hand toward his pocket, slow, visible, careful with Stone's shoulders. He fished out the square slip and held it two-fingered so the car and the city could see it didn't weigh anything. Stone glanced at the tidy type and then at him.
"Put it away," Stone said. "We'll photograph it somewhere that doesn't get edited by gods."
Caleb slid it back behind the rectangle and let the two argue quietly.
A siren rose half a mile ahead, elastic and uninterested in them. The light at the next intersection went red and then redder. Brooks braked the kind of brake that makes supervisors proud.
"Talk me through the yes/no again," Stone said. "Like I'm slow."
"It's a grammar. The card's ring is punctuation. Say yes to the wrong sentence, you sign up for a different story."
"And no?"
"Buys time. Buys verification. Sometimes buys a second question."
Ms. Parker made a note without a pen: the little crease at the top of her nose that meant she was filing something where it wouldn't cut her later. "Is there ever a maybe," she asked.
"There's a hold," he said. "That's as close as we get."
The light swapped to green; Brooks didn't jump. She let the pedestrian finish discovering the existence of crosswalks, then rolled forward.
At the corner, four boys in last year's football shirts did the choreography of crossing without admitting choreography exists. One saw Stone's face and straightened on instinct; another saw Brooks's hand near the wheel and decided this was not the afternoon to practice swagger. They passed, intact, ordinary men in ordinary heat.
A pressure pricked Caleb's ears. Subtle. Like when someone opens a freezer at the far end of a quiet house.
He said, "Heads up," and laid his palms flat again.
Brooks didn't look away from the road. "Timer?"
"Not yet," he said, and the very not-yetness of it was the tell.
Stone spread his fingers on the dash again, an inch higher, as if at that elevation the room would be kinder. "Rules," he said.
"No hands," Caleb said. "No seatbelt heroics. If the ceiling learns manners, you let it be rude without trying to teach it."
"Understood."
A cool draft threaded the vents without asking HVAC. The seam where the windshield met sky made a private decision about geometry. Ms. Parker's tote strap creaked like leather remembering other rooms.
"Talk," Stone said softly.
"Elevator bank had three," Caleb said. "Agents at the threshold, appetite in the ceiling. In the car earlier, the ceiling tried the same trick. If something reaches down for me here, it isn't a hand you can persuade."
"Copy," Brooks said. Her shoulders settled an imperceptible degree lower, the kind of poise you go buy if nobody gives it to you.
Caleb breathed shallow and even, because breath teaches pulse to behave. He kept his eyes on the triangle where lane paint converged ahead and said, "There."
Brooks eased into the left lane without blinker because she wasn't asking permission from anyone who wasn't watching. "Direction?"
"Up," he said.
The cabin's light dimmed by the smallest unit a room can dim without being accused. The headliner above the passenger seat learned a seam and then forgot it had ever been whole. A ring no bigger than a dime ghosted through the fabric's surface, appetite thin and patient.
"Ceiling," Stone said, voice neutral only because he'd disciplined it to be.
"Don't touch," Caleb said. He raised the card until its ring saw the idea in the cloth. He didn't press, didn't feed; he let recognition do the politeness.
The ring in the headliner cooled like a thought reconsidered. The seam held its breath. The car rode over a shallow manhole and reported it to ankles, not hands.
Ms. Parker's inhale counted four and out seven, because the body obeys good advice even when the mind is busy. "Are they learning," she asked.
"They remember," he said. "I don't know if that's the same thing."
The seam tried again, less hunger this time, more etiquette. He showed it ring a second time, firm as a stamp without being fools about it. The fabric stayed fabric.
Brooks took them through the split toward the river, trading campus brick for city brick, then the river's bad perfume for a line of poplars that looked like they'd just remembered they were trees. A patrol cruiser idled two blocks ahead. Stone raised his hand the way men practice in mirrors; the cruiser did that microscopic nod that is both hello and keep your day out of my day.
The air pressure equalized like a room giving up on an argument. Caleb let his hands relax a degree and set the card back to his thigh, not pocketing it, not presenting it.
"Clock?" Stone asked.
"Quiet," Caleb said.
Brooks said, "Then we'll make the left on Alder and take the bridge. Station's five out."
Ms. Parker said nothing. She pressed her lips together the way you do when you've already used up your allowance of questions and still have three.
Stone allowed himself a small breath. "All right," he said, tone slotted into that space cops use when they're trying to decide whether to be fathers or teachers. "When we get there—"
The world decided it had been too polite.
The light ahead of them blinked green then blanked to black in a single, bored flutter. Cross traffic hesitated and then remembered bad habits. A delivery van rolled through its red like a man checking a door he knows is locked. Brooks brake-tapped, read the angles, and threaded between a sedan and a bus so cleanly the bus never knew it had been a variable.
"Power glitch," Stone said, not buying his own sentence.
"Or preference," Caleb said.
They cleared the intersection. The blocks compressed in that way you only notice if you count them—buildings scooting nearer by the width of an alley, the sky lowering by a pane. The seam at the headliner woke again, a little bolder, appetite remembering it had a job.
He put the ring under it a third time. The seam cooled like a child being looked at with the correct expression.
"Atta boy," Stone said, so quietly it was barely language.
Traffic thinned near the bridge. The river threw light up into faces that hadn't requested it. A jogger in a neon shirt performed pain with dignity and refused to make room.
"Two minutes," Brooks said.
"Make them boring," Caleb said.
The seam didn't agree.
Without preamble, the dime-sized circle in the headliner inked itself true and the fabric depressed as if a finger had pushed from the wrong side of cloth. The movement had weight now. The ring came down slow, patient, like an IV drip that had opinions.
"Brooks," Stone said, warning and reassurance both.
"I have it," she said, and bled speed just enough that velocity wouldn't get a vote if the room chose badly.
Caleb lifted the card and met the ring in the fabric a hair sooner than the fabric wanted him to. Matte kissed absence through woven cloth. Cold licked his palm.
"Not yours," he said evenly, because sometimes you spend a word to remind your spine who's authorized.
The ring held for two beats like a tug-of-war where only one side admits to rope. He kept angle, elbow tight, shoulder quiet, and waited for the grammar to catch up with itself. The ring in the headliner lost nerve, went thin, then away.
Ms. Parker's breath left on a sharp on-three as if her lungs had been counting too. "Why ceilings," she asked, half to herself. "It's always ceilings."
"Because they're doors nobody guards," Caleb said.
Stone's mouth did a fraction that might have been a smile in another life. "You quoting yourself?" he asked.
"Somebody should," Caleb said.
The bridge took them, steel painting the windshield with a latticework that turned the river into small movies. Boats moved under them—tourists pointing at their own pointing, a man in a scull chasing peace and almost catching it.
The seam stayed seam. The air stopped performing. The card warmed back toward indifferent.
"Station," Brooks said, and the word landed like cool water on a burn.
The precinct rose ahead with its familiar errors: flaking paint at the lintel, the flagpole's halyard slapping a rhythm, two smokers in the lee of the loading bay pretending they weren't asking to be photographed by policy. Brooks nosed them into the inner lot without letting the barrier arm be dramatic about it.
"Before we go inside," Stone said, one hand still in the air as if calming a horse that had listened too closely, "rules."
"Same as the car," Caleb said. "No hands. No ceiling favors."
"You'll get a room with four walls and a window that thinks it's helpful," Stone said. "We keep the window stupid. We keep the ceiling bored."
Brooks slid them into a space with the precision of habit and set the engine to still. The parking lot heat tried to come through the firewall and found it was no longer the boss. She killed the lights and breathed once, the kind of breath that unhooks a body from machinery.
"Ready," she said.
Caleb thumbed the belt release. The buckle let go with that small, prim click he'd already come to distrust. He palmed the card and kept it visible as he opened the door and stepped into the lot's heat, which had done no tests and owed nobody explanations.
Stone stood with him before closing his own door. He kept his palms out in that small, respectful shape that admits fear without apologizing. "We walk in at a normal pace," he said. "Everyone keeps eyes. If the room tries a trick, we don't get clever, we get literal."
"Literal I can do," Caleb said.
Brooks rounded the hood, keys in her fist, chin pointing at the door with the stubborn courtesy of public buildings. Ms. Parker climbed out of the rear and shouldered the tote as if it weighed an argument.
They crossed the painted stripes. The smokers saw them and stamped their cigarettes out on the concrete with the guilty speed of men who remembered their own signatures on their own briefings. The precinct's glass double doors showed the lot back to itself in cheap reflection. In the top right corner of the nearer pane, a hairline circle tried to be shy.
Caleb lifted the card just enough that the ring could have a look at that shyness.
"Save it for inside," Stone murmured.
"Agreed," he said, and reached for the handle as the building's air flexed against the glass like a held breath learning how to be let out.