Chapter 26 Callum's Anger

Chapter 26 Callum's Anger
POV: Wren

I called him from the kitchen because the bedroom felt compromised now and the kitchen was the furthest point from the window.
He picked up on the second ring. I told him plainly, the way I told him everything, in order, without editorializing. The drive plugged in. The eleven minutes. The wipe. The window latch turned from the outside.
He was quiet when I finished.
Not the thinking quiet or the processing quiet. A different kind, with a specific texture to it, the kind that happened when someone was going through a list in their head of everything they wanted to say and removing items from it one by one before they opened their mouth.
"Are you okay," he said.
"Yes."
A pause. "Are you actually okay or are you Wren okay."
I stood in the kitchen and looked at the wall and thought about the difference between those two things and didn't have a clean answer for either version.
"I wiped the drive," I said. "Everything is offsite. They got nothing."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know."
He was quiet again for three seconds. Then: "I'm coming over."
He hung up before I could tell him he didn't need to.
I put the phone on the counter and looked at Priya, who was sitting at the kitchen table with both hands around a mug, watching me with the careful attention she used when she was deciding whether to push or wait. She waited. Good call.
Twenty-two minutes later, not twenty, Callum knocked.
He came in with Dex behind him and the first thing I registered was his face, not the composed version, not the easy public version or even the controlled private version I had gotten used to across three weeks of close contact. This was something underneath all of those, stripped back, and it was very still in the way that things were still when the stillness was doing serious structural work.
He looked at me first. Just looked, a quick full assessment, the kind that checked for something specific and then moved on once it confirmed what it needed.
Then he looked at the bedroom door.
"Show me the window," he said.
We went in. He stood at the desk and looked at the latch without touching it. Dex stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his eyes moving around the room in a systematic way that said he was looking for something specific and hadn't found it yet.
Callum crouched down and looked at the ledge outside through the glass. Stood back up. Looked at the latch again.
"The ledge connects to the building maintenance access on the east side," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes," I said. "Third floor walkway."
He stepped back from the window. Turned to face me and the stillness in his face had the quality of someone who had made a decision about how to hold something very heavy and was now simply holding it.
"This stops," he said.
"I know."
"Not the story. The access. Whatever they are using to get into your spaces, your mail, your building, your room, it stops."
"I know," I said again. "I don't have the mechanism yet."
"We find the mechanism."
Neither of us said how because how was the part we didn't fully have yet and saying it out loud without having it was just noise. We both knew that. We stood in my bedroom with the wiped drive in the drawer and the wrongly latched window between us and didn't fill the space with noise.
Priya appeared in the doorway behind Dex with two more mugs and handed them through without coming in, which was Priya understanding the room without being asked to understand it.
Dex took a mug. Looked at the window. Looked at the latch.
He had been quiet since he arrived, which for Dex was its own kind of signal. Dex filled spaces. It was what he did, naturally and without effort, the social reflex of someone who had learned early that being the loudest person in a room was the safest way to control what the room focused on. Quiet Dex meant Dex was thinking hard about something he hadn't said yet.
Callum looked at him. "What."
Dex turned the mug in his hands. Looked at me, then at Callum, then back at me. "The maintenance access on the east side," he said slowly. "The third floor walkway."
"What about it," I said.
"It's keycard access. Not a master key, a specific maintenance keycard. The university issues them to facilities staff and to anyone with a contracted maintenance role in the building." He paused. "I know someone with that card."
The room was very quiet.
"Graduate student," Dex said. "Lives in my building. He started working facilities management at the start of this semester. I noticed him because he had no money in September and by October he had a new laptop and replaced all his furniture." He looked at his mug. "I noticed because I notice things like that. When someone's financial situation changes fast and there's no obvious reason."
Callum was very still.
"I didn't put it together until now," Dex said. "The timing. He got the facilities job right around when." He stopped. Looked at me directly. "Right around when you and Callum went public."
The latch on the window. Turned from the outside. Third floor maintenance walkway requiring a specific keycard.
A graduate student whose financial situation changed fast at the start of semester.
"His name," I said.
Dex looked at me with something that was close to an apology in advance. "Aaron Briggs," he said. "But Wren, that's not the part that's been sitting wrong with me since I walked in here."
He put the mug down on the desk.
"Aaron doesn't work for Marcus directly," he said. "Marcus doesn't know this campus well enough to have someone embedded in facilities management before any of this started." He looked at both of us. "Whoever is running Aaron, it is not Marcus. It is someone who has been on this campus for a long time. Someone who knew which building you lived in before Marcus ever landed."