🌁 chapter sixteen: who watches the watchmen? [let me be your ghost]

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who will guard the guards themselves?” -Juvenal, Satires

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who will guard the guards themselves?”

-Juvenal, Satires

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen

The night terror found me in the new room, two doors from his.

They always know when I’ve moved. Some old superstitious part of me believes they check the locks first, like anything else that hunts. This one was the usual repertoire with new staging—the office in New Haven, the brass owl, the desk corner—and I surfaced from it the way I always do, all at once, rigid, soaked, a scream held in my teeth like a bit.

The light under my door changed. A knock, one knuckle, soft.

“Lola.”

I hadn’t screamed. I was sure I hadn’t screamed. But the floor outside my door had a man on it who apparently didn’t sleep either, and when I opened it he stood there in a T-shirt and soft grey sweatpants with his hair wrecked, taking in the state of me—the shaking, the sweat, the blanket I’d dragged off the bed and wrapped around my shoulders like armor.

His eyes went past me. To the floor by the window, where I’d laid the duvet and one pillow in a neat rectangle, the way I had every night since I moved in.

“You sleep on the floor,” he said.

“The bed’s too soft.” It came out smaller than I meant it to. “Beds are—I don’t sleep in beds. It’s a whole thing.”

Eze looked at the sad rectangle of bedding for a long moment, and then at me, and something in his face went so gentle it was almost unbearable, and he said, “No. That’s not happening. Come on.”

He walked to me, a hand outstretched. I took it, stumbling, my legs giving out on me. Without hesitation, he swept his other arm behind my knees, lifting me with ease and holding me close to his strong, hard body. I let out a little squeak of surprise as he carried me out of the guest room…

…and into his room next door. He put me down at the entrance, stepping away to give me space I didn’t know I needed. His room smelled like him—eucalyptus, cedar, clean cotton—and his bed was the size of a small nation, and I stood at the edge of it in my oversized Yale T-shirt with my arms crossed, ready to fight.

“I don’t sleep in beds, Eze.”

“You don’t sleep alone in beds.” He pulled back the covers on one side, then walked around and got in the other, staying deliberate, staying slow, a man approaching something feral he had no intention of spooking. “Hypothesis. We’re testing it. Get in.”

I could throw a fit. Run back to my room, or all the way back to my lighthouse. But something was unfurling in my mind. Something curious and weak and I couldn’t find a reason to deny myself what I wanted in that moment.

I got in. The mattress was a betrayal of everything I stood for. He didn’t reach for me—just lay on his back, one arm up under his head, and started talking, low and even, about nothing. The lake in Hokkaido. The fog on it. The canoe his father tipped and blamed on him for fifteen years. His voice moved through the dark like the lighthouse beam, sweeping, regular, and somewhere in the third or fourth pass my body made a decision without consulting me and crossed the last foot of neutral territory.

He gathered me in like this was established procedure. My cheek on his chest. His heart under it, slow and enormous. His hand at the back of my head, in my hair, still.

“The dream,” he said. “Tell me or don’t.”

“Don’t,” I whispered.

“Okay.” His lips landed in my hair. Then, after a while, “I meant it, you know. Two doors is a stupid number. It should be zero.”

I laughed into his warm chest. And there in the dark, in the arms of the man I was betraying to the government of the United States, I slept the whole night through for the first time in nine years.

…

I woke at four, because I had planned to wake at four, even before the night terror rearranged the evening.

For a long minute I lay there in the gray dark with his heartbeat under my ear, and I let myself pretend—one minute exactly, timed on his breathing—that I was the woman he thought was in his arms. Then I did the worst thing I have ever done in a career of doing things like it. I slipped out of Ezekiel Crane’s bed while he slept, moved through his sleeping house with the chip I’d cut out of a woman who trusted a glass of wine, and went to rob his father’s archive.

I borrowed a different car this time—Xavier always kept the keys on top of the front left tires, not suspecting anyone on the property would run off with them—one of the three black Escalades that the staff used for routine errands.

As I drove through the early dark, I felt nausea roll in my stomach, and it wasn’t from the switchbacks.

The tower of Crane Industries never slept, but at four in the morning it dozed, and I had spent six weeks learning the rhythm of its breathing.

I drove myself in and rode up with the tail of the graveyard shift change, when the lobby arch processed a stream of blue jumpsuits and the bug-eyed guard was midway through his rounds. My cover, if I needed one, was thin but real—the insomniac ghostwriter, notorious by now among the night staff, coming in to use the archive room Hayden had badged me into a dozen daylight times. Nobody looked twice at me anymore. That was the whole strategy of my life, and tonight it had a borrowed chip riding in a gauze wrap around my palm like a blister pad.

Hayden’s chip worked at the parking level door.

It worked at the executive elevator.

It worked—and here my heart performed its entire percussion catalogue—at the smooth sandstone wall behind Hayden’s empty desk, the one Eze disappeared through on the nights he thought I’d gone home, the seam I was never badged for and had mapped anyway, because mapping the doors I’m not allowed through is the last hobby I have left.

The wall exhaled open. Full executive clearance, six years in the making. Thank you, Hayden.

Inside was a room I’d never seen and instantly understood—the archive under the archive. No windows, air gone cold and dustless, racks of cold storage humming in the dark like a hive wintering—and one terminal, old, air-gapped, physical media only, a machine built by a man who trusted nothing that touched a network. Magnus Crane’s memory palace. The place where the machine kept what the machine wasn’t supposed to have.

The drawers were indexed in his cramped handwriting. I’d been reading that handwriting for six weeks. I could follow it drunk, in the dark. GVA—the airport code did the confessing—GVA 11.14, a drawer of black cartridges, and one cartridge alone at the front, unlabeled except for a strip of red tape.

Forty minutes that didn’t exist. Everyone had told me so—the police, the papers, Eze himself—the logs have a gap, nothing survived—and I fed the cartridge into the terminal with hands I had to speak to, and the screen woke, and the gap opened up and let me in.

A hotel suite in Geneva, timestamped. High corner angle—Magnus’s personal security feed, the one that watched his own rooms, because of course the paranoid king watched himself—the only privacy he believed in was other people’s lack of it.

On the screen, I watched Magnus Crane alive. Observing the footage hit strangely—the man whose margins I lived in, whose handwriting I could forge by now, moving through the frame in a hotel robe, seventy and iron-straight, drinking his two fingers of whiskey. Reading a speech aloud to an empty room. I couldn’t hear it. The file carried no audio. But I could see the pages in his hand, the cramped ink, and I watched a dead man rehearse the keynote that Kira said would open a window into everything, pacing, cutting lines with a pen, a man editing himself toward Monday.

The door of the suite opened at 11:52 p.m., and my whole body went to glass.

Eze.

Not the Eze of the press line. Younger-looking somehow in the bad hotel light, in a sweater, carrying a folder—summoned, his posture said, the particular spine of a son called in past midnight. And for nine minutes I watched a silent argument I would have traded fingers to hear—Magnus stabbing the speech with one finger, Eze’s hands opening—slow down, think—Magnus slicing the air, imperial. The folder thrown on the bed. A word from the son that rocked the father back a half-step. Two men with one profile shouting at each other in a soundproof past.

As I stared at the screen, the revelation tumbled over me like a bag of bricks.

Eze was there. The night before the death, in the room, fighting with him. He lied to the police. He lied to the papers. He lied to me, fireside, with his sleeves rolled, with his eyes down—we never had that conversation—he told me they never spoke—

And then the timestamp rolled past midnight, and the argument broke off mid-gesture, because Magnus Crane’s hand went to his own chest like a man checking for his wallet.

The horror ran in two directions at once. I watched an old man lower himself onto a hotel bed the careful way people do when the pain arrives, and I watched his son cross the frame faster than any camera of mine had ever seen him move—catching him, lowering him, tearing the phone from the nightstand, shouting into it, shouting at the door. And then—while he still could, while his son knelt over him tearing at his own collar to start compressions—Magnus pulled Eze down by the shirt. The old man’s mouth moved against his son’s ear. Four seconds, maybe five. The last spending of a whole life, the ritual’s final installment, one true thing. I watched Eze go still to receive it, and then the old man’s grip let go, and everything after that was fighting.

Compressions. Real ones, sleeves shoved up, his whole weight through locked arms, thirty and two, thirty and two, a man doing CPR on his own father with the folder’s pages scattered under both of them like shot birds—for one minute, three, five—where was help, the finest hotel in Geneva, where was help—and the timestamp crawled and no one came and no one came and no one came, and I stood in a cold room with both hands over my mouth, watching the delay do its work, understanding at last what a made gap was for.

At 12:09, Magnus Crane stopped being anyone.

Help arrived at 12:14. Five minutes after it mattered. Twenty-two after the first call.

I played it again. I don’t know what that says about me and no longer much care—I played it again, watching Eze this time and not the death—the compressions, the shouting, the receiving—and I was leaning toward the screen in the dark, close enough to fog it, trying to read a dead man’s lips through tears I hadn’t noticed starting, when the lights came up.

“The word was Babylon,” Eze said, from the doorway. “Since you’re trying to read it.”

I didn’t move. There was no move to make. The cartridge turned, the screen glowed, the evidence of my evidence was everywhere—Hayden’s gauze on my palm, the drawer open, the dead emperor mid-frame—and Ezekiel Crane stood in the entrance to his father’s memory palace in a dark navy sweater and jeans, absolutely still, and I couldn’t read his face at all.

“Eze—”

“The question you rehearsed on the drive over,” he said, level, terrible, “was what did your father tell you before he died. So before you ask it, I want to know who it’s for.” He came forward one step, and the archive hummed around us, and his eyes in the terminal light were the coldest green on earth. “Is that you asking? Or your handler?”

The floor of my life opened neatly, like a page.

He knew. Not suspected—knew, and the knowledge was like a gun, loaded with handler, a word with a case file behind it, and I stood in the wreckage of nine years of cover doing the only math left—how long. The bookstore? The race? Had every fireside hour been him interviewing me?