14
Terese arrived after ninth bell. Toornan had drawn the classroom’s blinds and taken a seat in the padded teacher’s chair at the front of the room. Anyone happening upon him, with his thick Sumadan jersey turned up at the collar, would believe he’d come to be alone after a long day on patrol. Or simply to get away from his shared room.
Terese chose one of the many old, slowly cracking student seats, their metal legs flaking brown paint. The chairs were probably older than she was. The hinged wooden desk she leaned on looked even older. It looked exactly like any of Armer Stone’s classrooms. If not for the pictures of ancient Sumadan leaders and saints and the overlarge map of Polis Sumad on the wall, she might’ve been back home.
“We’re safe,” she said. It was much easier to clear her head in this room, far from people, noise, electric devices and residential vibration mechanisms.
Toornan exhaled, chest sagging onto the desk. “How are you?” he said.
“I go to work, get glared at by the other three heads, come home, check for letters from Pella, write to her, have dinner and go for a walk. Sometimes a whole day goes by and I don’t speak to anyone.”
“My roommate and his girlfriend encourage me to get out the apartment most nights so they can have it to themselves. Last night, I made a point of getting drunk and reading a book in my underwear in the main room.” He gave a self-deprecating smile. “It’s my little act of rebellion. I’m doing what I can on my end. Somehow, it’ll help you.”
Terese snorted with laughter. She hadn’t laughed in a long time. It felt good. “Every little bit helps, Toornan.”
He continued. “Daraam, Gember, Jools and I came here for some lectures on Sumadan history,” he said. “No one comes here after hours.”
“It was a good idea,” she said. “How’s your mentorship?”
“Pazga’s always cranky about something. Now she’s got me working on sensors. Tells me I’m too reliant on my eyes and that I’ll miss things if I rely on them and don’t analyze the metrics. It can’t hurt, I suppose.” He didn’t seem convinced.
Terese had always wanted to ask about his eyesight. “How are your eyes so good, anyway? How do you do it? You’ve the best eyesight of anyone I’ve ever worked with. No one even comes close.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I always saw everything. I was ten when I realized no one else could see as well as me. I’d be looking for something and I’d just… see it. Or I’d see the people I was looking for, or mechanisms, if I’d lost one. What I’m looking for sometimes jumps out, not like words on a page, but actual, real objects.”
Terese’s mind tripped back to the renegades, minutes after they’d been taken. Zalaran Morgenheth had hinted he’d seen her face through her helmet.
“Have you ever been able to see through anything?”
“What? No. How could I do that?”
“Never mind,” she said.
There was a lull, a space in which Toornan sat back and scratched at a splinter on his chair’s armrest. She rubbed a sore spot on her knee.
“I’ve been wondering,” he said finally. “I doubted you a bit, I admit.” He raised his hands. “No, I don’t mean you were paranoid, but more like you’d found something secret but not necessarily illegal. Then last week, right when you’d predicted, Jools’s complement left. It was like you said: they headed out the western gate, going west. Full plate, into the sunset with two electric wagons with massive water casks and boxes big as coffins.
“Jools said their missions were in the Hem Kader district, out west. So I was surprised when they disappeared after three miles.”
Terese’s fingers ceased their rubbing.
“I know. They were getting hard to track, but still I shouldn’t have lost them so easily.”
Out of anyone else’s mouth that would have been a joke, but to Toornan it was an admission of defeat. Even at twenty-six years, the man didn’t understand how remarkable his eyesight was.
“Five nights later, I was watching that space and they reappeared. They were trudging and, Gods, did they look tired. Whatever they were doing, they weren’t on holiday. But you know what I realized when they came in the gates?” He spread his hands. “Their plate was no dirtier than when they’d left, but the wagon they took was dustier. Terese, wherever they went, they weren’t in their plate.”
Terese felt a chill. “My team used a safe house to keep our plate, before heading on dark ops,” she said. “But our shifts lasted weeks, not five days. I can’t think of any purpose for a Seeker dark op that quick.”
Toornan bit his lip. “So, your old squad were on dark ops?” It wasn’t something officers were supposed to mention to one another, even between officers of the same rank. But at this point, old rules were irrelevant.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “Point is, there’s no deep immersion or dark ops that last only five days. Unless we believe a group of missionaries and heads have been reduced to performing simple recon.”
“Unlikely,” he agreed. “What about priority retrieval of mechanisms or artifacts, like you thought? That timeframe’s about right, then. And it would explain why they use the electric wagons with those great metal boxes.”
“No,” she said. “Retrievals aren’t scheduled. Jools’s excursions would be planned weeks in advance.”
“Ah.”
“The Hem Kader district,” she said. “What do you know of it?”
“Centuries ago, it was abandoned after a civil war wrecked it. There was no rush to repair or resettle it until the last few decades, when the Royals decided to revitalize it and gave out some permissions and currency to developers. It’s got a strange mix of economic, structural and infrastructural growth, depending on whatever corruption the developers are into. It’s not as bad as the Refugee Territories, but there are powerheads and ruins out there to coat any plate with dust.”
Terese pushed back
