Joan turned around.
She didn’t sit. She leaned back against the counter with her arms folded and looked at the table, and it was the same posture she’d used in a hundred rooms full of gray coats, and everyone in the kitchen understood that they’d just become one of those rooms.
"Before I start," Joan said, "I want to establish something about the mechanics."
"Joan."
"No, this matters." She nodded at the others. "Every person at this table has a system in her mouth. Yara has a bond. Selah has a bond. Maren has a bond. Dani has a bond. When any of them wants something, there’s a thread pulling, and an index, and a number that goes up."
"And you don’t," said Soren.
"I have never received a single notification in my life." Joan said it evenly. "No index. No tier. No ceiling. The system has never once told me what I feel about you, because the system can’t see me."
"That’s been true since the start."
"Yes," Joan said. "So understand what that makes everything I’m about to say."
◆◆◆◆
"The redacted clearance," she said.
Soren’s hands stayed on the table.
"It cleared at Bureau-top in the second week of spring term, first year," Joan said. "Your standing query. The one you and I have been chasing together for a year."
"And your transfer posted the same week."
"You knew."
"I found the dates in the migration window."
"And you didn’t say anything." A very small movement at the corner of her mouth. "God, you’re insufferable. How long have you been sitting on that?"
"Since the archive went soft."
"That’s months."
"I check things twice."
◆◆◆◆
"The clearance isn’t a document about me," Joan said. "It’s a document by me."
Maren’s ears came up.
"I wrote it," Joan said. "I drafted the request, I built the justification, I routed it through an office that owed me, and I got myself assigned to this academy with a monitoring brief and a master key. Before any of you had heard my name."
"You requested the posting," said Selah.
"I engineered the posting. There’s a difference and I’d like the credit."
"Why?"
Joan looked at Soren.
"Because in the winter before that," she said, "a file crossed my desk about a Class Z tamer who’d bonded a Tier-6 entity at a hundred percent compatibility, and the file was flagged for quiet handling, and I read it eleven times."
◆◆◆◆
"It was a file," Dani said.
"It was a file."
"You’d never met him."
"I’d never met him." Joan’s arms stayed folded. "I read a personnel file about a boy who told a goddess to sit down on the floor, and I put in a transfer request the same afternoon."
"That’s insane," said Maren.
"That’s the least insane thing at this table," Joan said. "You set yourself on fire. I filled out a form."
"You filled out a form to get into his building."
"Yes."
◆◆◆◆
"And the year," Soren said.
Joan straightened.
"Say the year."
"You want it all."
"You’ve had a whole morning to watch how this works."
Joan exhaled.
"Every lead I gave you was real," she said. "Procedurally sound. Worth the hours. That’s important to me and I’d like it on the record."
"And every one of them walked the search away from the author hash."
"Yes."
"For how long."
"A year." Joan’s voice didn’t change. "Fifty-odd nights at that desk with your coffee going cold, both of us working, and every single time I steered you one corridor further from the answer sitting in the room with you."
Selah made a small sound.
"That’s the one," Selah said. "That’s worse than mine."
"It’s worse than all of yours," Joan said. "Yara had a plan and three hundred years of practice. Dani had a routing queue. Maren had an instinct. I had a choice, every night, fifty times, with nothing pulling on me at all."
◆◆◆◆
"You almost told me," Soren said. "In the migration window."
"I did almost tell you."
"You said the paper only keeps the what, and then you stopped."
"I was going to say it never keeps the why." Joan finally looked away from him, at the window. "And then I understood that I’d have to say the why out loud, and the why is that I’ve wanted you since before I met you, and I built a Bureau clearance to get near you, and then I spent a year lying to your face at the desk where you trusted me most."
The kitchen was silent.
"So I said context instead," Joan said, "and I went and made coffee."
"You’ve made a lot of coffee this year."
"I’ve made an enormous amount of coffee this year."
"Was any of it about the coffee?"
"The first two months." Joan’s mouth moved. "After that it was a way to stand somewhere with my back to you while I decided not to say it. Fifty times. You can put that in Dani’s file under mechanism."
"Already did," said Dani.
◆◆◆◆
"One more thing," Joan said. "The monitoring seal on your bond, first year. The one that held Yara’s index in check."
"You put that on me."
"I put that on you in week two, and I logged it as standard containment." She folded her hands. "It wasn’t standard. It was me buying myself a reason to be in your room twice a week to check it."
Selah made a small disgusted sound.
"Yes," said Joan. "I’m aware."
Yara spoke for the first time in an hour.
"I want to say something," she said, "and I want everyone to understand I’m not being kind."
"Go," said Joan.
"You’re the only one of us who did it without help."
Joan’s jaw tightened.
"I had a door across the veil," Yara said. "Selah had a fusion. Maren had an instinct that doesn’t take no. Dani had a system that made her essential." Red eyes stayed on Joan. "You had a form and a pen and no notification telling you it was allowed. You did it cold."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It’s an identification," Yara said. "I’ve been calling myself the monster of this house since last night. I’d like it noted that I have competition and she makes the coffee."
Joan laughed once, without any humor in it.
"Fine," she said. "Fine."
◆◆◆◆
Soren stood up.
Everyone in the kitchen turned, because everyone in the kitchen had been waiting for it since nine that morning.
"Sit down, Joan."
"I’d rather stand."
"You’ve been standing at that counter for two hours because standing at a counter is how you leave a room without leaving it." He pulled the chair out. "Sit down. You don’t get to confess from the doorway."
Joan looked at the chair.
Then she came and sat in it, and it was the first thing all morning that carried the weight of a verdict.
"There," Soren said.
"That’s it?"
"That’s not it." He looked around the table. A goddess, an analyst, an ice-type, a fox, a mole, and an investigator who’d forged her way into his life with a fountain pen. "That’s the last confession. Now everybody shut up and let me think."
He picked up the folded page with Dani’s two columns on it.
"Give me an hour," Soren said. "Then I’ll tell you what happens to all of you."