Chapter 18: Five

|HER POV|

Sunday passed. Monday arrived without asking.

I walked into morning seminar at eight fifty-seven. He was already there — dark coat, fitted turtleneck, no glasses, which meant he hadn't been sleeping properly either. The glasses were what he wore when he needed something to look at other than me.

I noticed that. Why do I notice that.

I sat two rows ahead. Standard position. The same seat I'd been in since September, which he had apparently been noting with the patient accuracy of someone keeping detailed records of a variable they had decided mattered.

I opened my notebook. The professor started talking. I took notes and the back of my neck did the specific thing it always did when he was in the room behind me, which was a problem I had been pretending didn't exist since week three.

Five days.

At the break I went to the east corridor for coffee from the machine that had been broken since October and was somehow still producing liquid. I leaned against the wall, pulled my coat tighter, and breathed.

"Your hand," said a voice.

I looked up. Morrow stood a few feet away in a dark coat, expression careful, approaching the topic sideways the way he always did.

"What about it," I said flatly.

"Ink. You were writing in the margin during the break. Not notes." He nodded at my notebook, which I was still holding. "You do that when you're running something."

I looked at my hand. He wasn't wrong. I'd been writing something that wasn't seminar content and hadn't noticed doing it.

I closed the notebook. "What do you want, Morrow."

He was quiet for a moment, glancing down the corridor, then back at me. "The intermediary contacted me this morning," he said, keeping his voice low and even. "The network is moving before end of term. Not a direct action. Something political — an administrative inquiry. They're going to use what they know about Vire's identity to leverage the university."

I absorbed this. Kept my face neutral. "Against who specifically."

"The university. And by extension—" He stopped, mouth pressing flat.

"And by extension me," I said. I watched his expression confirm it without him having to say it out loud. "Timeline."

"End of term. Before he leaves." He met my eyes steadily. "They've done the same calculation you have."

Five days. The network had five days too.

"Tell your intermediary that the inquiry will not find what they're looking for," I said, pushing off the wall.

"Can you guarantee that," he asked, and his voice had a careful edge to it — not a challenge, a real question.

"No," I said honestly, looking at him directly. "But whoever they think they're leveraging has been managing information in this institution since before either of us arrived. An administrative inquiry is going to be considerably less useful to them than they've assumed." I held his gaze. "Pass it on."

He studied me for a moment with the expression of someone updating an assessment. Then he nodded, once, and straightened his coat. "I'll pass it on," he said quietly, and left.

I stood in the corridor with the cold coffee and the specific weight of a clock that had just gotten shorter. Five days had just become uncomfortable in a new way.

That evening I found him at the library table at six and dropped my bag, sat down, and pushed my open notebook across the table so he could read what I'd written inside the front cover during the break.

Morrow. Network moving before end of term. Administrative inquiry. Official channels.

He read it. His expression didn't shift. He picked up his pen and wrote beneath it, angling the notebook toward me:

I know. Vaelindor flagged it this morning.

I looked at that for a moment. "Of course he did," I said quietly.

"The administrative contact they're approaching doesn't have access to the relevant files," he said, his voice low and even, eyes still on the notebook. "The channel was closed three years ago."

"Closed by who," I said, watching his face.

A pause. He looked up and met my eyes, and his expression was doing the contained work it always did — everything managed, everything held, but underneath it something that had been getting harder to miss since the formal. "By whoever arranged the scholarship access," he said.

I held his gaze for a long moment. "How many things in this institution have you arranged, Kae."

The silence lasted four seconds. He didn't look away.

"Several," he said.

I nodded. Turned back to my notebook. "Five days," I said.

"Five," he confirmed, watching me pick up my pen.

We worked in silence after that. The lamp threw its circle. The rain came down outside. At nine I packed up and stood, pulling on my coat. He watched me do it with the full attention he gave everything that involved me, and I noticed — too late to pretend I hadn't — that at some point during the evening I'd moved my chair three inches closer to his side of the table.

He'd noticed before I had. Of course he had.

I left without looking back, walked out into the December cold, and told myself four more days was manageable.

I almost believed it.

~~~