Three minutes.
That is how long Pell and I stayed completely still while the window latch clicked. I know it was three minutes because I counted, which is something I do when I need my brain occupied with a task small enough that the rest of it can think, and what the rest of it was thinking was: a person who opens a window from the outside while two people are visibly inside either does not know we are here, or does not care.
Neither option was comfortable.
Pell's pen had stopped moving. He was sitting at his desk with his back to the window and not turning around, which I respected as a strategy even though it was also completely useless.
The clicking stopped.
Silence for eleven seconds.
Then something small dropped onto the windowsill from outside. A sound like a pebble or a coin or a knuckle bone, which was a specific comparison my brain offered and then immediately tried to retract.
I got up.
Pell said, very quietly: "I would not do that."
I did it anyway because I have a documented history of doing things that people with better instincts advise against. I crossed the room, unlatched the window properly this time, and pushed it open the full way.
The ledge outside was empty.
Four stories down, the courtyard was dark and also empty except for the fountain and the pigeons, who were apparently crepuscular, which I had not expected. The wall below the window was smooth stone. No handholds. No drainage pipe within reaching distance. No person climbing away in any direction I could see.
On the windowsill, where the sound had landed, was a small folded piece of paper.
I picked it up.
Pell finally turned around.
The paper had one line on it, written in the same small precise hand I recognized from a notebook cover in a history classroom two days ago.
Stop going to the forest. The second set of prints is not yours to find.
I read it twice. Then I read it a third time because the second read had made me annoyed and I wanted to confirm the annoyance was justified.
It was.
Sable Vane had been at the scene for twenty-three minutes. Had correctly identified two perpetrators. Had then apparently identified which footprints were mine, tracked them back to the dormitory building, climbed to the fourth floor window of a room she had no official reason to know was mine, and delivered a note telling me to stay out of her investigation.
Without knocking.
Without using the door.
Without, as far as I could tell, using any conventional form of building access.
"What does it say," Pell asked.
"Someone wants me to mind my own business."
"Are you going to."
I folded the paper back up. "Obviously not."
Pell turned back to his notebook. "Obviously," he agreed, in the tone of a person updating a prediction they had already made.
I did not sleep again.
This was becoming a pattern that the body was going to object to eventually in ways that would be inconvenient. But I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about the mechanics of the note delivery, which required either a grappling system, a very specific knowledge of the building's exterior architecture, or something arcane that I had not yet catalogued in this world's power structure because I had spent most of my time here thinking about dead people instead of attending classes.
The System had not told me what Harlan Voss's arcane discipline was. I had a feeling this was deliberate. The System told me things on a need-to-know basis that was calibrated entirely around what it wanted me to do rather than what I needed to know, which was a management style I had encountered before in consulting and had hated then too.
At 2 AM I got up, took the syllabus from my desk, and read it.
This is what I found out about Harlan Voss.
Undeclared discipline. Prior institution: Belwick Institute for Arcane Studies, which according to the academy's introductory materials was a school in the northern territories that specialized in what was described as "applied interpretive arts," which was either a euphemism or a genuine academic field and I had no way to know which. Transfer reason: listed as administrative. Which was the reason you listed when the real reason was something the receiving institution had agreed not to ask about.
Harlan Voss had been transferred under a quiet arrangement.
Wonderful. The body had a history and the history had been swept under something.
In the morning I found Instructor Vael.
Not because the System told me to. Because he was the person who had restricted archive access and Pell had gotten in anyway and the records were physically missing and I needed to know what question to ask before I could figure out who to ask it to.
Vael's office was in the west wing, which smelled like the administrative corridor but worse, a top note of candle wax over everything. He was a small man, older, with the particular posture of someone who had been apologizing for their height for so long it had become architectural. He was grading papers when I knocked and he did not look up immediately.
"Voss," he said, which meant he knew who I was before looking, which meant he had been told to expect me or had been paying attention.
"Instructor."
"You missed my class twice." He made a mark on a paper. Red ink, heavy hand. "Sit."
I sat. The chair across from his desk had one leg slightly shorter than the others. I noticed this in the first two seconds and spent the next thirty seconds trying not to notice it and failed.
"Belwick transfers have a grace period of one week," he said. "You have four days left. I would use them."
"I wanted to ask about the pre-reform curriculum," I said.
The red pen stopped.
It stopped the way things stop when a person is controlling the stopping, not because the stopping happened naturally. He finished the mark he was making, set the pen down, and looked at me for the first time.
Vael had the kind of face that had practiced being neutral for so long that the neutrality had calcified. But around his left eye, very faint, a muscle did a small involuntary thing.
"That curriculum was discontinued," he said.
"I know. I was curious about why."
"Curriculum decisions are administrative."
"The records are missing from the archive."
A pause. Not long. Three seconds, maybe four. But deliberate in the way that silences are deliberate when someone is choosing between two different lies.
"Archives are reorganized periodically," he said. "Records are misplaced."
"Physically removed is different from misplaced."
He looked at me with the calcified neutral face and I looked back with the face I used across interview tables when I wanted someone to know I wasn't convinced without giving them anything to push against.
"How is your head," he said.
It was such a specific left turn that I almost missed what it was.
"Fine," I said carefully.
"Belwick students sometimes experience disorientation after transfer. The arcane adjustment period." He picked up the red pen again. "If you find yourself confused about what you remember versus what you know, my door is open."
What I remember versus what I know.
I stood up. "Thank you for your time."
"Four days, Voss."
I left.
In the corridor I stopped walking and stood next to the constipated portrait and thought about the specific thing Vael had just done, which was not warn me off and not answer my question and not threaten me, but instead reach across the desk and tap directly on the fault line between Harlan Voss's original memories and mine.
He knew the transfer was not standard.
He knew something about Belwick.
He had looked at me like he was checking whether the person behind my eyes was the person he expected.
I kept walking.
The System notification came thirty seconds later.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
Composure check passed.
Alert: Instructor Vael has filed an internal report.
Report contents: Restricted.
Note: Vael was a faculty member during the pre-reform period.
He was present for whatever required a reform.
Narrative Weight: Increasing.
Current Narrative Weight: LOW-MEDIUM.
The plot is starting to notice you.