Page eight has the farmhouse.
I put the farmhouse on page eight because it was the anchor point of the eastern network and the most significant intelligence in the document, and I assembled it from the October logs he gave me and the relay point traffic and the routing table discrepancy I found at chain B-seven. I didn't know, when I put it there, that I'd already found it from a different direction the week before. I didn't know, when I assembled those twelve pages, that the farmhouse on page eight is in Lena's territory.
I know now.
I have known since three this morning, when I went back through the eastern network documents and looked at what I'd actually built.
I mapped Lena's network. I mapped it from files he gave me and I gave it back to him in twelve pages with a full grid reference on page eight and I have been sitting with this for eleven hours and I am sitting here now watching him read it.
He finishes. He looks up.
"This is exceptional," he says.
The warmth arrives in my chest before I've decided how to feel—the approval mechanism landing exactly as it alwayslands, the conditioning that has been running since before I understood what conditioning was. I feel it and I know I feel it and it doesn't stop.
"I know," I say.
His mouth curves slightly. "You do."
"I mapped the eastern resistance network in five days from sources you gave me with half the relevant material redacted." My voice is level. "It's exceptional and we both know it."
"But you wanted me to say so."
I don't answer. He knows I don't need to.
Here is the thing I cannot find the line of: the wanting was there before the magic. I know this. I spent nine days at a brass sphere at the start of this assignment telling myself I was assessing a target and failing every time his back was to me and I let myself look. The wanting was mine. He made it larger. He ran a mechanism on it for weeks—the specific warmth that arrives before his approval, the smoothing of every sharp thought that might have interrupted the wanting—and I cannot find where what was mine ends and what he built begins.
I wanted to give him this. I wanted to be exceptional and have him know it. The magic ran underneath that wanting and made it very easy to sit down and map fourteen resistance safe houses and thirty-two names and not think too hard about what I was mapping.
I have been thinking about it for eleven hours now and the thinking is not comfortable.
He holds the pages in both hands and looks at me over them, and the expression on his face—patient, total, that small thing underneath it that was not in his plan and he knows I can read—makes something shift in my chest that the magic is not responsible for. I know the difference. I have been building a list.
I don't look at that shift right now.
"I'm going back to the workroom," I say. "Supply routes to cross-reference."
He looks at me. Not a question. Not a command. The register he uses when he's already decided something is true.
I stand. I go.
I workthrough the supply routes. I find the discrepancy in chain B-seven. I keep working. I keep working because working is what I do when I am trying not to think about something, and the something I am trying not to think about is this:
Fourteen safe houses. Thirty-two names. The farmhouse on page eight.
Lena runs correspondence through that farmhouse. Lena has been building an extraction route through the eastern territories, through the network I just mapped. I assembled twelve pages from his files and handed him a grid reference for the place Lena operates from, and I did it because I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at me over those pages.
The wanting is going to be the thing that undoes me. I know this now. I have known it for eleven hours and I have been working supply routes to avoid arriving at what it means.
By ten o'clock I am done pretending.
I put the routes away. I go to his rooms.
He opens the door before I knock—truth-sight or the bond, I am going to need to sort out which eventually. I go in. He closes the door. I turn around and he is right there, and I reach for the front of his shirt and pull him down.
He comes. His mouth is cold and I stop thinking about supply route discrepancies and I stop thinking about fourteensafe houses and thirty-two names and the farmhouse on page eight.
For now.