Chapter 46 THE LIST
POV: JOEY
The annex was cold at midnight.
It was always cold. The heating system in this part of the building had been broken since before Joey even enrolled. He suspected it wasn’t an accident, but he couldn’t prove it. A lot of things at Thornfield that weren’t accidents were made to look like maintenance problems.
He sat at the reading table with a folder open and added three names.
He used a pencil, not a pen. Pencil could be erased. Pen was a commitment, and he was careful about commitments in places that might be searched.
The three names weren’t confirmed. They were suspects. Two of them came from patterns he’d been tracking in enrollment records—the way some files had gaps others didn’t. Gaps shaped like information removed, not just missing. The third was instinct. He didn’t usually act on instinct without proof, but this time it had been building for three weeks. Instinct was information too, even if it wouldn’t hold up in any court he could imagine.
He wrote the third name.
Looked at the list.
Sixteen names now. Going back farther than he thought was possible. He’d found the oldest three months ago, buried in a 1987 alumni document misfiled in the periodicals section. There was a single sentence about a Society for the Maintenance of Excellence, crossed out by hand but still visible if you looked close.
He was always looking close.
Next to seven of the sixteen names, the word resolved appeared. He knew what it meant now—or was close enough to knowing that the difference didn’t matter. He’d found two of those seven in public records. Both left Thornfield under circumstances the school called voluntary. Neither showed any activity in public records for more than six months after their last day at Thornfield.
After six months, the records started again but under new names. New social security numbers. New addresses far from where they grew up.
He’d been sitting with that for a month.
He closed the folder.
His phone was in his pocket.
He pulled it out.
Opened a new message to Lena.
Typed: Don’t go to the ruins alone.
Looked at it.
Deleted it.
Typed: I need to tell you something. Not here. Not in writing.
Looked at it.
Deleted it.
The phone was monitored. He was almost certain. Not the calls—they were harder to track. But texts on the school network, messages sent through any part of campus systems? He’d assumed for two years that none of it was private. That meant any text he sent to Lena on this phone could also go to whoever ran the monitoring.
He didn’t know for sure who that was.
But he suspected.
He put the phone away.
Sat in the cold annex with the folder and the list and sixteen names and the growing certainty that something was moving faster than he was. The difference between his pace and its pace was the thing that would matter.
He’d gotten Lena to the ruins. Got her close enough to the question that she’d started asking it in the space behind her eyes, even while she was still playing the Garcia political heir. He could see it in how she held herself now—a tension that hadn’t been there at the start of the term. The tension of someone trying to go two ways at once.
That was progress.
It was also dangerous.
He put the folder away where it lived between the alumni newsletters. Pushed his chair back. Walked out of the annex and into the cold hallway and up the stairs and through the building until he reached his room.
The window faced east.
He stood there and looked out at the campus below. Security lights in yellow circles. Dark shapes of buildings. Windows lit here and there, other people awake for their own reasons at this hour.
One of those lit windows was Lena’s floor.
He didn’t know if hers was the one glowing.
He thought about texting her anyway. Taking the unmonitored risk. Because there were things she needed to know that he couldn’t say out loud in a place with cameras. She wouldn’t be safe not knowing for much longer.
He thought about it for a long time.
Then he went to bed.
Patience was the only tool he had that the machine hadn’t figured out how to break yet.
He was going to use it.
Even when it felt like it was going to take something from him he would never get back.