Page 101 of Legacy Ascended

"First. The intrusion into Miss Miller's room. Somebody entered the residence, opened one drawer, left an object, and left. No forced entry, nothing else disturbed, no useful marks. Twelve people hold a key to that residence and every one of them accounts for their afternoon. I can't establish whether one of those accounts is false or whether access was obtained another way."

Somebody on the screen writes that down.

"Second. The object. It's a wristwatch, cut from the arm of an officer on the road, logged as property recovered at the scene, and held in a Council storage with two signatures on the sheet. The officer identified it herself." A pause. "The property tag has been removed. The store's own log shows no entry that shouldn't be there. Nobody signed it out."

"Then how did it get here?" one of the security men asks.

"I don't know," Voss says. "A log that shows nothing isn't the same as nothing happening. It means whoever moved it didn't need to write anything down, which narrows the question and doesn't answer it."

"Can you establish a route?"

"No."

"Can you establish intent?"

"I can establish that somebody wanted her to recognize it," Voss says. "Which is the only thing about this I'd put in front of a court, and it's the part that worries me most."

I keep my hands on the arms of the chair and I don't look at the screen.

"Third," Voss says. "The records access. Miss Miller's superseded archive approval was opened twice under an authorization that resolves to her student record. She wasn't at either terminal. The academy has retired that number. A new one will be issued this week and the old one goes dead."

My student number. Six figures I've written in the top right corner of everything I've handed in since the first hour of my first year, in the box, in the order they want it. It's on the essay Faris marked me down for. It's on the sheet I filled in the morning I was told I'd qualified with a hundred and eight.

"Understood," I say, because somebody has to say something.

Then they give everything back.

That's the part I wasn't expecting.

Practical placements resume across all four cohorts. The Preserve reopens with two changes to the reporting procedure and one to the kit list. Search and Rescue goes out in the morning with an added faculty presence. The whole thing takes ten minutes and one of the security men reads it off a sheet and nobody asks a single question, because it's good news and good news doesn't get interrogated.

I've got my pen on the notebook and my heart going and I'm doing the thing where you don't smile in a room like this.

"One exception," Falken says.

The radiator knocks twice.

"Miss Miller's participation in the rescue block is not approved. She'll continue with her assigned rotations. The panel's decision is recorded and the reasons are attached to it."

I hear Torres breathe out beside me. I don't hear anything from the three along the wall, which is worse.

"Rurik," Falken says. "The reasons."

And Voss reads out the finding.

He wrote it. He put me forward for that block weeks ago, in writing, on a form, and then he sat down and wrote the thing that takes me out of it, and now he reads it to a room with me in it, and he doesn't hurry and he doesn't soften it and he doesn't look away from the page to see how I'm taking it, which I understand is the respectful version.

The block operates off the developed campus. Personnel are dispersed by design. Locations are published in advance. Participants are separated from their partners on purpose, at night, in terrain chosen because it's difficult. Two of the three incidents involving Miss Miller happened outside the academic core, and one of them happened because somebody knew where she would be and when.

"On the material I have," Voss says, "I can't write a line saying the block can be made safe for her. I can write one saying it can be made safe for everyone else in it. I'm not prepared to write the first one because it isn't true."

"Thank you," Falken says.

"I'd like something else in the record," Voss says.

"Go on."

"That she's ready for it. That I put her forward in the autumn and I'd put her forward again this morning. Whatever this finding is, it isn't about her capability, and I don't want a panel reading it in two years and drawing that inference."