Chapter 65 Nadia Comes Home

Chapter 65 Nadia Comes Home

POV: Calla Voss

I heard she was on campus before I saw her, the way you heard most things at Blackthorn, through Petra, who had been near the east gate when the council vehicle arrived and had sent me three words: she is here.

I put down the book I had not been reading and went to the scholarship common room because that was where Maren Solde's coordinator had said they would bring her, neutral ground, not an office, not a hearing room, somewhere that had chairs and a window and no formal furniture arrangement implying a power structure.

I got there before Nadia did.

The room was empty and I stood near the window and thought about what you said to someone who had been in a sealed facility for two years because a program you were also a target of had put her there, and I did not reach any conclusion before the door opened.

She walked in under her own power.

That was the first thing I noted and the most important thing, the way she moved through the doorway without assistance, her weight on her own feet, her posture upright, the specific quality of someone whose body was doing what she asked it to even if the asking required more than it once had.

She was twenty-three and she looked like someone who had spent two years inside a space that had not been designed for long-term habitation and had organized herself against that fact every day because the alternative was not organizing.

She looked around the room.

Not quickly. She took her time with it, moving her gaze across the chairs and the window and the bookshelves and the table and the unremarkable institutional fixtures of a place that was simply a room, and her expression while she did it was the one I did not have a clean word for, the expression of someone relearning the texture of ordinary things, what they looked like when they were just themselves and not a controlled environment.

She looked at me.

"You are Calla Voss," she said.

"Yes," I said.

She sat down in the nearest chair, not the one closest to the door, the one that required her to walk further into the room, which was its own kind of statement about where she had decided to put herself.

"The recording," she said. "Maren Solde's coordinator described it to me on the drive. Seventeen minutes."

"Yes," I said.

"The monitoring system was running the whole time," she said.

"From before I walked in," I said. "Silas confirmed it was active before the security officers brought me down."

She nodded slowly. Not processing this as new information. Integrating it into something she had already been thinking about, fitting a piece she had not had into a space she had been holding open for it.

"I tried to get to the monitoring interface when they brought me into the chamber," she said. "Two years ago. I knew about the pre-council system. I had found the documentation in the archive six weeks into my term, the same architectural reference your person found." She looked at her hands in her lap. "I did not have time. They moved too fast."

I sat down across from her.

We were quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortably. The specific quiet of two people who had been in the same situation at different points in time and did not need to explain that to each other.

"The facility," I said. "Are you all right."

She looked at me with an expression that was precise rather than defended. "I am better than I was six months ago," she said. "Better than I was a year ago. The process they ran did not complete, which your recording also documents and which means whatever damage it caused is the incomplete version rather than the full version." She stopped. "I understand what the incomplete version did to your mother. I am managing a smaller degree of the same thing."

I looked at the window.

My mother had managed it for eight years. Nadia had been managing it for two and had more years ahead than my mother had been given, and the research record that the full investigation would produce might eventually produce something that could address what the incomplete process had left behind.

Might. Eventually. I held those two words at the distance they deserved.

"The other two students in the facility," I said. "From the other academies."

"Lena and Faris," she said. "Lena was there when I arrived. Faris came eight months later. They are being brought back to their respective institutions through the regional council contacts." She paused. "They are not the same as they were. None of us are."

She said it without self-pity, just as information, a fact about what the program produced beyond the extraction records and the transfer documents.

"There are three more," I said. "From before. Prior intakes listed as transferred."

"I know," she said. "I saw the same records the coordinator showed you. The transfer destinations are not named in the facility documents." She looked at her hands again. "I asked Maren Solde this morning. She said the transfer investigation is active."

"Active means not resolved," I said.

"Yes," she said.

We sat with that.

The door opened at twenty past eleven and I knew before I looked up because the bond registered the approach the way it always did, the orientation shifting, north finding itself.

Remy stood in the doorway.

He had not known she would be here yet. I could see that in the first half-second, the way his movement stopped before he had decided to stop it, the body making the decision before the mind had processed what it was looking at.

Nadia looked up from her hands.

She looked at him.

The expression on her face did not move through surprise or relief or any of the things I might have expected from someone seeing for the first time the person who had spent two years building a case around the gap where her name should have been.

She was very still and she looked at him with something that was not any of those things but was its own category, something that had been held for a long time in a sealed room and had not been allowed to become anything specific while it was being held.

"You stayed," she said.

His voice when he answered was the controlled one, the one doing more work than it looked like it was doing. "Yes."

"It took two years," she said.

"Yes," he said.

There was no blame in it. That was what made the room go so quiet, the complete absence of blame in her voice, the way she stated the two years as a fact rather than a charge, and the fact landed in the room with a weight that blame would not have had because blame could be argued with and a fact stated without blame could not.

His jaw moved once.

He looked at her the way he looked at things that he was not allowing himself to manage yet, openly, before the organization arrived.

I looked at the window.

My phone buzzed.

The new number.

"The lower archive. Now. I found the Dast connection to your mother's second term enrollment. The negotiated arrangement she made to come back. It was not with the council. Calla, your mother made a deal with the Dast family. You need to understand what she agreed to."