Chapter 35 - Nobody Above Filed a Report

The corridor junction on Deck 11 was one they had been through a dozen times, a cross-section of four service passages that met at the base of a vertical access shaft, the shaft itself running dark and odorless with the pipes pulled to its walls. Nathaniel knew this junction by feel at this point: the slight temperature differential from the shaft's upward convection, the acoustic quality of four corridors meeting, sounds from all of them arriving at once but none of them cleanly. He had stood here with Eric in the early visits and not been able to identify which sound was which. Now he could parse them.

Leila was already there. Eric was a step behind Nathaniel, his cards in his jacket pocket, not yet out. He had the expression he carried when he was doing risk assessment on insufficient information, which was a look Nathaniel could identify at distance and in bad light.

They had not been told who Anastasia was. Leila had said: tomorrow, the junction, the time. Nothing else.

Nathaniel had tried to ask. Leila had already ended the conversation and left the room.

He had asked Jazmine afterward, in the corridor outside Leila's module. Jazmine had said: she's someone Leila trusts, which is a short list. He'd said: how short? Jazmine had given him a look that was warm and also drew a clear line around what she was going to tell him.

So: the junction. The time. Leila already there, already watching the passage where he and Eric arrived, confirming they were the right people at the right interval, processing this with the efficiency she processed everything.

She looked past them.

He turned.

She came from the corridor they hadn't been watching. Not the passage opposite them, not either of the two lateral corridors they had accounted for: the corridor they had ruled out because it dead-ended in the access panel housing, which was apparently not a dead end if you knew what Anastasia Petrov knew about the access points of this section.

She was tall. Five-eleven and angular and striking, not from any individual feature but from bearing: the quality of vertical, the certainty of her posture in a space that seemed to have been arranged for her rather than the other way around. Platinum-streaked dark hair pulled back at the neck. Steel-gray eyes moving across the junction with the efficiency of a system running diagnostics. Dark utilitarian jumpsuit, everything functional, a single metallic accent at the collar seam that caught the amber light and was the only nonoperational choice visible anywhere on her person.

She looked at Nathaniel first. Then Eric. Then back to Nathaniel.

Her assessment was complete before she spoke. He could feel when it completed, the slight shift in attention from incoming data to conclusion.

"This is Anastasia Petrov," Leila said. Four words, as if they were a junction number and a time.

---

Anastasia stood in the corridor and said nothing. She did not fill silences on other people's timelines. Nathaniel was aware, distantly, that he was doing the thing he had been told he did, which was processing someone's appearance with an attention he could not fully redirect. She was doing nothing to discourage this and also nothing to encourage it, which was its own kind of data.

Eric looked at the floor. Nathaniel noted this without having a useful thought about it.

"I know who you are," Anastasia said. To Nathaniel. Her voice was precise, every word placed where she intended it, no excess. "I knew before Leila told me."

He kept his face from doing the reflexive aristocratic-social smile, which took a small effort. "What do you know?"

She told him. His name. His father's family name and the council affiliation. The junction designation: J-7 Sub-2, the number Leila had told them and the number the SOD query had flagged. How often they had been using it. The rough pattern of their visit intervals over the past several weeks.

She said this without threat and without display: the way you read back a schematic, accurate and sequenced.

It should have been frightening. He sat with it for a moment. What he felt was closer to recognition than fear, which was interesting, and was possibly the response she had been measuring for.

"You have sources above," he said.

"I have sources," she said. She did not specify above or below.

Leila had not moved during any of this. She was watching Anastasia with the attention she brought to systems she had already modeled but was running a verification pass on. Something was operating between the two women, some ongoing calculation that the corridor space held without either of them stating its terms. He could see it but couldn't read it. The frequency was one he didn't have the equipment for.

Anastasia looked at Eric. The diagnostic quality sharpened: her attention narrowed on him, less survey and more focus.

"You're the one who models things," she said.

Eric, who had been looking at her with the expression of someone watching a system they understand structurally but haven't gotten their hands on: "Yes."

"Don't model me," she said. Not hostile. Informational. The warning that comes with a technical schematic: do not use this tool outside its specified parameters.

Eric said nothing. His hands were still, which for Eric meant he was thinking very hard.

Anastasia turned. She moved back toward the corridor she had come from, the dead-end passage that was not a dead end, her posture unchanged, her movement unhurried. At the passage entrance she stopped.

She looked at Nathaniel over her shoulder.

"Two upper-deckers went missing from Deck 2," she said. "Eight months ago." A beat, the accurate spacing she used for information she wanted to land separately from what followed it. "Nobody above filed a report."

Her accent surfaced on the last sentence, a trace of something older and further away, pressed down almost immediately, present only in the shaping of the vowels before her control reasserted. Then she was gone. The corridor held the echo of her footsteps and then held nothing.

Nathaniel looked at the passage entrance. The junction went back to being a junction, the four corridors and the vertical shaft and the amber light crossing the floor in its geometric sections. He looked at where she had been standing.

Eric looked at Nathaniel.

Neither of them said what they were thinking. The what they were thinking was the same thing, he was fairly certain, but it was also unspeakable in a Deck 11 corridor with the ship's systems running through the walls around them and nobody above filed a report still hanging in the air.

"Is she—" he started.

"Yes," Leila said.

She already knew the end of that sentence. She did not tell him what end she had known.

"Is she safe?" he asked.

Leila looked at him with the eyebrow in its elevation. "Define safe."

He did not have a definition for safe that would survive contact with Leila's scrutiny on the best day he had ever had, and this was not his best day. He looked at the passage entrance again.

Eric had his cards out. He was not writing yet. He was holding the deck in his hands and looking at the corridor Anastasia had come from, the supposed dead-end that wasn't, the route through Leila's sector that neither of them had been shown.

"She already knew about the junction," he said. Quiet, precise. The voice he used when a model had just failed at a structural level and he was beginning the revision from scratch. "How long has she known about the junction?"

Leila said nothing.

Which was, Nathaniel was learning, a specific kind of answer.