Pell was not in the room when I got back.
This was normal. What was not normal was the window being open three inches when I had left it closed, the specific closed of someone who had noticed the latch was loose and compensated by pressing it flush before leaving. I pressed latches. It was a habit from an apartment in a city where the pigeons were bold and had opinions about unattended paper.
The window was open three inches.
I stood in the doorway for a moment doing nothing visible and everything internally, which is a skill that takes about a decade to develop and looks from the outside like a person who forgot why they walked into a room.
Nothing was moved. That was the first thing. Whoever had been here was good enough to put things back. My desk had the same configuration, syllabus still unread in the same position, the small stack of academy-issued texts arranged the way I'd left them which was badly, spine-out on two and face-down on one because I'd been looking at the course map and set it down without thinking.
The face-down book was now face-up.
One book. Replaced incorrectly. Everything else perfect.
Either they'd run out of time at the end, or they'd been careful for forty minutes and then sloppy for ten seconds, which meant something had interrupted them. A sound in the corridor. Someone's door. The particular acoustic event that makes people in the middle of something they shouldn't be doing suddenly move very fast and stop paying attention to detail.
I checked under the mattress. Checked the lining of my second pair of shoes. Checked the hollow space behind the loose board near the baseboard that I had found this morning because Environmental Reading was an extremely intrusive passive skill and I had spent breakfast cataloguing every structural irregularity in the room instead of eating.
Nothing had been taken. Nothing had been planted that I could find.
They were looking for something specific and hadn't found it.
The problem was I had no idea what.
Pell came back at six, dropped his bag on his desk, and looked at me sitting on my bed staring at the window.
"Why is the window open," he said.
"I wanted air."
"It's sixteen degrees outside."
"I run warm."
He closed the window. Latched it. Then stopped, hand still on the latch, and turned around with the expression of someone running a small internal calculation.
"You don't run warm," he said. "You were wearing two layers at lunch."
I said nothing.
Pell sat on his bed and looked at the window and then at me and then at the window again. He had a small cut on his right thumb I hadn't noticed this morning, fresh enough to still be raised, the kind of cut that came from paper and not from anything interesting.
"Did someone go through your things," he said. Not a question. Not quite.
"What makes you ask that."
"Because you've been sitting in the same position since before I came in and you have the face of someone doing arithmetic." He opened his bag and took out a bread roll, same bakery, this time without rosemary. Plain. He ate a piece. "Also the face-down book."
I looked at him.
"You put it down face-down when you were looking at the course map this morning," he said. "I noticed because it's bad for the spine of the book. My mother was a bookbinder."
He said the last sentence like it explained something, which it did, and also like it was something he hadn't intended to say, which it also was, because he went very slightly still after it came out and then resumed eating his bread with increased focus.
"You were here this morning when I was looking at the course map," I said.
"I was pretending to be asleep."
"Why."
"Because you looked like you needed to think and people think worse when they know they're being watched."
I had absolutely no response to that. I filed it under things to examine later and moved on.
"Did you see anyone in the corridor this afternoon," I asked.
"Between two and five I was in the north library." He paused. "Instructor Vael's archive section. It's restricted but the lock is a joke." Another pause, slightly longer. "I didn't see anyone near our room when I came back."
"What were you looking for in the restricted section."
The bread roll got another piece torn off. Eaten. He was thinking about how to answer, which meant the answer was either complicated or embarrassing or both.
"Pre-reform Ashford history," he said finally, and looked at me with the flat careful expression that I was beginning to understand was his version of extremely guarded. "Academic interest."
Pre-reform.
The symbol on the tree. Founding script, pre-reform dialect. The System had hit a restricted wall trying to cross-reference it. And Pell, my roommate who turned blank pages and had a mother who was a bookbinder and noticed which way I put down books, had been in a restricted archive section researching exactly that.
I needed to think about this slowly and not react to it and instead said: "Find anything useful."
"No." He finished the bread. "The relevant records have been removed. Physically removed, not just restricted. Someone took them out of the archive at some point and they haven't come back." He looked at his hands. "Which is interesting."
"Very," I said.
We sat in a silence that had layers to it.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
Alert: Unidentified party has accessed your room.
Purpose: Unknown.
Item of interest: They were specifically searching the area around your bed.
Update: Sable Vane reached the east forest scene at 4:47 PM.
Scene analysis time: 23 minutes.
Her current Profiling assessment of the scene: Two perpetrators, one primary.
She has correctly identified the second footprint set.
Infamy: 0 (Current)
Projected Infamy: 31 (Revised)
Thirty-one.
I looked at that number for a while.
Sable had been at the scene for twenty-three minutes and had already correctly identified two people were present. I had been a forensic psychologist for eleven years and it had taken me longer than that standing directly over the evidence.
She was better at this than I wanted her to be.
And someone had searched my room. Looking under my mattress, near my bed, in the spaces that people hide things. Looking for something they expected Harlan Voss to have. Something tied to four bodies and pre-reform founding script and maintenance tunnels and whatever the academy was trying to contain quietly enough that it hadn't made it into 340 chapters of the original story.
Pell was reading. His actual notebook this time, the one with writing in it, small and cramped and tilted left.
"Pell," I said.
"Mm."
"Does the name Sable Vane mean anything to you."
The writing stopped. Very briefly.
"Investigator's daughter," he said, without looking up. "Her father ran academy security about fifteen years ago. Before the reform." He paused. "Before whatever happened that required a reform."
He went back to writing.
I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the scratch of his pen and thought about a girl with a coming-apart braid and a four-case notebook and a father who used to run security for an institution with a history someone had physically removed from its own archive.
She wasn't a student.
She was a inheritance.
The window latch was loose again. I could hear it clicking faintly in the draft. I had pressed it flush before I left. Pell had latched it when he came in.
Someone had opened it again from outside.
I kept staring at the ceiling.
"Pell," I said.
"I heard it," he said.
Neither of us moved.