His fingers closed on the handle as the building's air flexed against the glass like a held breath learning how to be let out. The door rolled easy—hinges that had been paid on time—and cool took his face, precinct air dense with copier ozone, old coffee, and the faint copper of a floor scrubber that hadn't forgotten last night.
He let Stone take the first step through, then followed. Brooks kept half a pace off his shoulder, keys crushed in her fist like punctuation. Ms. Parker ghosted behind them, tote tight to hip.
The lobby did what lobbies do: bulletin boards with fliers that had outlived their events, a stack of plastic chairs pretending to be mercy, a security desk with a pager hum buried under a throat-clearing radio. Fluorescents washed everything to one color and then apologized for it.
[ENTRY CONFIRMED][ENVIRONMENT: PRECINCT LOBBY MOCKUP][CONDITION: MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL CONTROL OVER SPECIAL ITEM]
The rectangle rode his palm, ring turned inward, a quiet coin with teeth.
The front desk sergeant lifted his eyes and let everything he saw pass through the part of his brain that files for later. "Stone," he said. "You bring me gifts."
"Guest," Stone said. He didn't touch the counter. "We need the small room. Camera on, audio on, ceiling stupid."
"Copy," the sergeant said, and flicked his gaze to the camera bubble in the corner. "Ceiling, you hear him? Be stupid."
The bubble did not acknowledge humor. A hairline circle ghosted across its smoked dome, appetite learning manners.
Caleb lifted the card an inch and let the ring see the dome. The circle cooled like a thought corrected. The sergeant watched the nothing happen and didn't ask for a story.
Brooks pushed the inner door with her hip and led them down a corridor where walls learned to grow file cabinets and linoleum learned to be honest. The department smell concentrated—ink and policy and the thin soap you use when the budget likes a bargain.
A uniformed officer coming the other way read the room and became a witness with a clipboard. His mouth got as far as "Evidence—" before Stone shaved it down.
"Chain stays on him," Stone said. "Eyes on us."
"Copy," the officer said, and stepped aside to let the parade do its work.
The interview room waited where they always wait: a rectangle with one table, four chairs, a clock that owned a different time zone, and a pane of glass that pretended to be a window and was a mirror. The drop ceiling wore its grid like a net. The vent grille sat over the door like it had passed the exam.
Caleb paused in the doorway just enough to let his eyes find circles. One hid at the top corner of the mirror—faint, pencil-thin. Another lived in the vent's fasteners, so small you could call it a machining accident. A third tucked into the plastic ring of the clock's battery hatch, smug and patient.
He lifted the card so the ring could look where he was looking, one after the other, not pressing, not feeding. Each circle dimmed a degree, like etiquette remembered.
Stone took the chair with the best line to the door and the worst to the mirror. Brooks put her back to the corner and made herself into a hinge for the room. Ms. Parker slid into the take-notes chair, tote on her lap, pen already out, then put the pen away because habit fights policy.
Caleb didn't sit. He set the rectangle on the table in front of him, his palm still on it, and tested the table's edge with his knuckles—no ring hiding there. He ran his thumb along the underside of the chair seat and the chair pretended not to flinch.
The wall speaker clicked alive with the small electrical cough rooms make when they want to feel present. "Interview one online," a voice announced, disembodied and practical.
"Good," Stone said. "It stays online."
Brooks flicked the wall switch that turned the red RECORD light on over the door. "For the record," she said, "we're not idiots."
"On a good day," Stone said.
Caleb stood a second more because standing teaches rooms you don't accept the first offer. The card stayed cool. The ceiling remained ninety percent bored.
He sat. The chair said a small complaint about gravity. The mirror held its breath.
"We're going to do this the boring way," Stone said. "Name for the tape."
"Caleb White," he said, and listened to the tape eat it.
"Date of birth."
He answered. The card did not. Ms. Parker's pen wrote in the air, invisible.
Brooks: "For the tape, subject is in possession of an object we're not going to name because names are invitations. Subject maintains physical control."
"Subject prefers person," Caleb said, mild.
"Subject prefers person," Brooks amended, deadpan.
Stone drained a breath and set his palm flat on the table, far from the rectangle, fingers wide. "Walk me through the last ten minutes in that building," he said. "Brisk."
Caleb did. Elevator logic. Yes/No as grammar. Appetite in the ceiling. Deliveries without surrender. He kept to verbs. He didn't sell adjectives. Between sentences he let the ring touch air so the room could remember whose story it had to process.
The clock made its quarter-hour cough. The battery hatch's tiny circle blinked once like a child testing bedtime. He lifted the card and looked at it until it decided it had been asleep all along.
"Risk credits," Stone said, when Caleb ran down. "Explain."
"Tickets you buy questions with," Caleb said. "The room never gives change."
"So you owe me questions and I owe you more air," Stone said. "Fair."
The mirror made the microscopic creak two-way glass makes when a shoulder shifts behind it. The hairline circle at its top corner breathed wider, thin as a scratch, hungry as a habit.
Caleb raised the rectangle. Ring to appetite—no press. The circle cooled, chastened, then tried to pretend it had been a smudge. He set the card down again, palm still on matte.
Brooks watched the play without moving her head. "You need a coaster for that," she said.
"I need this room to stop auditioning," he said.
"Working on it," Stone said. He shifted his attention a degree and the room noticed. "Sergeant," he said, to the ceiling. "If anyone in Observation touches anything that looks like a circle, I will come in there and teach vocabulary."
A beat. Then: "Copy," through the speaker, deadpan.
The door opened without knocking. A tech leaned in—lab coat, badge lanyard, the posture of someone who enjoys procedures. He carried a clear evidence bag with a tamper ring white as milk.
"We'll need to secure the object," he said, polite and wrong.
"No," Stone said, every syllable in uniform.
"Policy—" the tech started.
"Chain of custody doesn't survive without custody," Stone said. "You can bag the table. Not the person."
The tech frowned like a man reading a joke he wasn't sure he could laugh at. "At minimum, a Faraday sleeve—"
The sleeve's seal wore a tiny ring in its corner, printed as a brand. Appetite with a barcode.
Caleb didn't bother looking at Stone. "If that touches it, you'll get a trick. Not the one you want."
The tech's mouth did bureaucracy. "So how do we—"
"Photograph from there," Stone said. "Record from there. You can swab the table. You don't get to be a noun."
Brooks's eyes didn't leave the ceiling. "And you stand in the doorway where he can see you."
The tech did the only thing good men do when they find themselves wrong and outnumbered by reality: he obeyed. He planted himself in the jamb, turned the bag over carefully, and started taking pictures with his phone as if phones were still honest.
The card warmed a degree under Caleb's palm—attention, not heat. The speaker clicked again. "Interview one," the PA said, bland. "Power fluctuation detected."
"Don't," Stone said to the room.
The fluorescent balasts didn't flicker; they sighed. The vent above the door learned a new conversation with the air and then forgot it. The clock's hand jumped a minute it hadn't earned and settled back like a guilty dog. The mirror's circle thought about waking and declined.
[ADVISORY: HOLD]
"Always," Caleb said, quiet.
Stone's gaze stayed level. "You're going to tell me something true," he said. "Not about rooms or rings. About you."
Caleb had a dozen nothings lined up that could pass for wit. He let them stand down. "I don't like being borrowed," he said. "I don't like being someone else's verb."
Stone nodded, as if that had been the right answer on a test no one had written down. "Good," he said. "Then we're aligned."
Ms. Parker's pen made a soft noise from inside her tote, where it had been dying to write. She didn't take it out. "What happens if you sleep," she asked, low.
"Rooms don't," he said. "So I don't."
"New policy," Stone said. "Nobody makes him try."
The speaker popped as if someone smacked it with an open hand. "Detective," the sergeant's voice. "We just had a weird— the front door did a thing. The air felt—"
"Stay at your desk," Stone said. "Eyes up. Hands down."
"Copy."
The tech at the jamb swallowed. "I'm getting a ripple in the feed," he said. "Like compression. Like the room's being— I don't have words."
"Find the plug and threaten it," Brooks said.
Caleb watched the ceiling because ceilings liked to be watched. The dime-sized circle didn't grow. The vent forgot courage. The mirror held its pretense with both hands. The card cooled in his palm to its normal, unhelpful calm.
The speaker clicked a third time. Not the sergeant. Not the PA. A different voice—clear, recorded, the tone you use when you're teaching computers to greet. It spoke from nowhere and everywhere at once, thread-thin.
[REQUEST: EXCHANGE 1 RISK CREDIT → OPEN QUERY WINDOW (1)][YES/NO]
Brooks's mouth flattened. "They're calling in here," she said.
Stone kept his eyes on Caleb. "You have a credit," he asked.
"I do," Caleb said, because the interim room had been generous in a mean way.
"You spend it with us in the room," Stone said. "Out loud. You don't put anything in a mouth that isn't yours. Understood."
"Understood," Caleb said.
He didn't touch YES. He lifted his left hand—empty—toward the mirror as if the room were polite enough to read gestures. "Open window," he said. "With witnesses."
The tape recorder ate the sentence like food it could identify. The room considered. The mirror's hairline circle brightened the width of a spider's leg and then closed again, sulky.
[QUERY WINDOW: OPEN—ONE (1)][TIMER: 00:30]
Stone inclined his chin a degree: proceed.
Caleb didn't waste the thirty on clever. "Define R," he said. "As in R-level."
For a heartbeat the letters didn't want to be letters. Then they learned.
[ANSWER: R = REGISTERED][STATUS: WORLDLINE REGISTRY PRESENT][PRIVILEGES: PERSISTENCE; ENTRY VECTORS; REQUEST AUTHORITY][LIABILITIES: CONTRACTS; COSTS; OBLIGATION]
"Costs to whom," Stone asked.
The timer bled. Caleb didn't look at it. "Specify costs," he said.
[DENIED: SCOPE]
"Worldline registry's not here, then," Brooks said. "So he's P. Provisional. They're window-shopping."
The timer gave up. The mirror cooled its tiny scar back out of existence.
[WINDOW CLOSED]
Stone didn't move. "Item stays with him," he said to the speaker as if the speaker were a clerk. "We're done for now."
"Copy," the sergeant said, though it wasn't his copy to give.
Caleb looked at the card and then at the rectangle's faint reflection in the glass. The mirror offered him a ghost of his own face—older than the morning, shoulders telling the truth.
The door handle clicked.
Not the tech's hand. The metal. The latch moved half a millimeter under no one's skin and then back again, like a throat trying on a syllable.
Brooks turned her head that fraction that means she will own the first step. Stone lifted his palm off the table and set it down again, caution made into ritual.
The handle ticked a second time. The hinge screws remembered circles. The vent made a very small, impolite decision about air.
The card cooled hard in his palm.
"Hands," Stone said softly, without looking away from the door. "Everybody keep theirs."