The first thing I did when I made it back to my room was jerk open the desk drawer where I last hid Shade's cloak. An empty drawer did not greet me, as it should have, as I indeed expected to see. Instead, I found a folded slip of paper, and on it, the words "My need seemed greater than yours," written in a neat script.
Too neat.
Too neat for the hands I knew must have, and couldn't have, written it. His hands that I remembered viscerally were once overwhelmed by sharp tremors, now gone steady.
*~*~*~*~*
The next morning after a nice sleep, when I finally felt comfortable confronting the issues that arose from the prior night, I unpacked everything that happened.
I knew why I was sneaking around places I shouldn't have been, but why was Shade there? Honestly, I was a little peeved that he helped me out of a tough spot. He was probably somewhere feeling awfully giddy for his one good deed amidst a sea of bad ones, and I didn't want him to have that satisfaction.
And yet, I didn't turn him in, and didn't plan on detailing that whole misadventure to Tempest to get myself into future trouble with his superiors, so I wasn't exactly a beacon of moral superiority, either.
Regardless, the whole debacle began to feel like a massive risk without any reward to show for it. All I gained was the insignificant knowledge that the information I actually wanted was, in fact, elsewhere.
The top floor. The Elder's quarters, off limits to literally everyone. Even Tempest's key ring would be of no help gaining me access to that area, and, over the coming days, I concluded that it was almost always occupied by at least one of the seven Elder Supers. All Guild founders, all icons of their age, and not ones to be trifled with.
Which led me to my next problem: if I couldn't use keys, did that mean I needed to learn how to pick a lock?
Hmm... I wouldn't even get close enough to pick a lock if I didn't find a time when the floor was empty, but when?
It was while I was chewing through that problem as I put my body to the matter of my continued hopeless endeavor of organizing the Archive - or, as I was beginning to call it in my head, the Dungeon - that Ren found me.
"The Constable would like to see you," he said. Almost as fast as I thought it, he answered my most poignant unanswered question by adding, "You're not in trouble. Come along. We don't keep him waiting."
I narrowed my eyes over the stacks separating us and put all my psychic energy into the thought, If you read my mind just then, blink twice.
He did not, so I tried again, If you read my mind, don't blink at all.
He ruined my "Gotcha!" moment by blinking once, and although I'd been mostly joking, it left me more uneasy than ever.
"Are you going to continue staring creepily into my eyes like a serial killer or are you gonna hurry up and come along?" he asked, crossing his arms.
Hastily, I dropped the papers I'd been holding and traced the path I'd made through the mess back to the entryway. "What does he want?"
Suddenly paranoid, I put extra effort into not thinking about the many very valid reasons he could want to talk to me, just in case.
"I'll let him tell you," Ren replied, and refused any further attempts at prying more information from him as he guided me up four flights of stairs all the way into the very same area I'd only just been plotting about gaining entry to.
I tried not to seem too interested in the layout, focusing on inane details and repeating them over and over in my head until they didn't sound like real words anymore.
If there was a mind reader around, a non-zero possibility given the location, they no doubt thought I was very stupid, like a crow easily distracted by shiny objects.
"I brought Lily, sir," Ren announced after a sharp rap of his knuckles on the door to one of several rooms scattered across the top floor.
"Ah, good. Come in."
The Constable had his back to us when we entered, peering out a large circular stained a hundred different colors that looked over that part of the city. The Guildhall entrance, the roadway, and a nearby nature park. Even in the well-lit room, the sunlight pouring through that window dyed his gray robes random speckles of rainbow.
"It's gorgeous, isn't it?" he said, without looking at us. Not a question. "What a view."
I nodded, though he couldn't see it. "It is. I can see why you chose this room to be your office."
"Chose?" Finally, he turned to face us, shaking his head. "No. I fought for it. And won, of course. I was much younger, then, but so were my fellow Elders, and they wanted it just as much as I did. They fought well, no doubt, but they couldn't do much against this." He tapped his temple with two fingers, smiling through his satisfaction. "My telekinesis has known no true rival all these years. You can't blame them for falling short."
Nervous, due to him being, well, him, and also the circumstances, I said, rather dumbly, "There's always tomorrow," and regretted it instantly.
Why would I say that. Do I want to make him mad?
His smile somewhat frozen on his perpetually handsome face, the Constable shifted slightly to Ren and arched a brow, who clapped me hard on the shoulder.
"Pay no attention to her, sir," Ren stated. "She's rather stupid."
Wow. Thanks for the back up.
The Constable recovered quickly from my failing social skills and gestured at a wooden chair, while he took the opposing position at the opposite side of a sprawling desk. "Please sit, dear girl. I can call you Lily, right?"
I barely managed an affirmative before he pressed on.
"Things have been rather quiet since your kidnapping. Two months is a long time to go without Shade causing some sort of trouble."
Unsure of what he wanted me to say, and unwilling to elaborate and risk embarrassing myself further, I settled on, "Yep."
He stared hard at me over steepled fingers, and abruptly changed tact. "How are you settling in here? Do you like it?"
"Good. I'm still getting used to things, but overall it's good."
"Wonderful. Tempest has made you feel at home?"
What did Tempest have to do with anything?
"He's nice..." I said carefully.
"Wonderful," he repeated. "We at the Guild take care of our own, and you're one of us now, make no mistake. Now that you're fully recovered from your... ordeals, and had time to readjust, we wanted to touch base with you again about any details you may have forgotten about your abduction, specifically any reason stemming from that situation that may have led to Shade's prolonged absence, and the release of his long term captive, Atticus Courten."
I wasn't sure where I thought all this was going, but that certainly wasn't it.
"If anything, my memory of the events has only gotten worse," I said truthfully, because memories generally tended to work that way. "Not better. I said everything I knew the first time. I'm as confused as you."
Less truthful. Moving on.
I felt Ren staring hard into the side of my head. "You remember nothing else?" he asked pointedly.
"I certainly don't know why he's not still causing trouble," I said defensively. "He dumped me in a forest for three weeks. We weren't exactly having heart-to-hearts, and I know I didn't do any lasting damage on him that would cause him to go into an early retirement."
I couldn't harm him, even if I tried, because he could heal himself, on top of controlling ice, using darkness to his benefit in a similar manner to the Shadow, and also telekinesis, exactly like our dear Guild leader.
No! I mentally berated myself, forcibly halting a blossoming, heart stuttering realization in its tracks, lest it reveal itself on my face. Not now. Not here!
Think of anything else. The imperfections in the table wood. The number of pictures on the walls. The colors splayed across the room from the window. Red, blue, orange, green, purple, yellow, turquoise, teal, lavender-
"You haven't seen him at all since then?" pressed Ren, getting up from his chair beside mine to circle around my back to my other side.
It would make so much sense for Ren to be a mind reader, I thought, before I could sweep the notion away or bury it beneath an avalanche of inanities. Disguise him as a pencil-pusher, a secretary or assistant to the other Supers so people let their guard down. Have him do the interrogations - do my interrogation - and also attend the press conferences to see what angles the different reporters were pushing. Who were pro-Guild, and who was against. Follow the Constable wherever he went to weed out his enemies.
Hell, I couldn't even begin to catalogue all the things I'd thought around this seemingly normal, supposedly powerless man.
I answered Ren's question with a question. "Why would I not tell the Guild if I saw him?"
The Constable leaned forward, probing. "Dear girl... that's what we'd like to know."
With that one action, a switch flipped in my brain turning mere discomfort into fear. I was alone in a room with two Supers, and they obviously suspected something, though I wasn't sure what. "Isn't it good that he's gone?" I asked, my voice not coming out as strong I'd like it to be. "Isn't this a good thing?"
"Not necessarily, not if we don't know why. He might be plotting something big. Catastrophic, even."
"I do not know why!" I insisted, leaping up to my feet, because I did not like the feeling of being towered over, being diminutive around someone that seemed to take up so much space. "Atticus would know more about him than I do! Have you tried talking to him?"
Ren and the Constable shared a loaded look that I couldn't decipher.
"Atticus Courten... has not been made available to us," Ren said, each syllable carefully thought out to the last.
"We've been informed by the Courten Estate and various healthcare professionals that most of his experience in captivity has been blocked from his memory. The family refuses to cooperate without lawyers present and non-Super affiliated interrogators." The Constable's mouth twisted with distaste, letting me know what he thought about confronting an iron wall of legal-might even his superpowers couldn't force his way through. "It does us no good to anger them by insisting."
The Courtens obviously held more sway than I ever imagined, to be able to hold the nearly unchecked power of the Guild at bay for so long. The formidable Mrs Courten only rose in my esteem every day.
It still stung, though, knowing the full difference between Leigh and I, knowing my dads were my only advocates in the whole world, while her family had a team of lawyers.
The Constable knew he could drag me up into this tower and interrogate me unprompted because I had no power, physical or proverbial, to speak of. I was exploitable.
Something within me hardened at that sudden awareness. The Guild was no perfect organization hellbent on doing good. They were like any other business, and I was expendable to them.
"Sorry," I said, short. "My shift just ended for the day, and I really have some place I ought to be."
The Constable seemed liable to object, but Ren cut in smoothly, "I'll walk you out."
And he did, covering my back as I retreated from the Constable's office, and down the first set of stairs into the third floor landing, where my path forked towards the stairs to the second floor, the Conference Rooms, or the Residences.
He broke our silence first with a genuine laugh, startling me. "Maybe you're not so stupid as you'd have us believe. You went and figured me out."
I considered playing coy and pretending I didn't know what he was talking about, but decided he'd see through that anyway, so I said, "Are you sure you should be telling me that?"
"Nah, but it was hilarious listening to you try to confuse me. You seemed pretty confident in your theory."
I poured my energy into thinking as loud as I could, I was not, and he scoffed again.
Eerie.
"How does your power work? Is it, like, actually reading?"
"You can't expect me to disclose all my secrets," he said, continuing right past me down the steps to the second floor, leisurely in his stride.
He disappeared down the stairs for only a moment before I darted to the top of the landing and stared down at his retreating back. I called after him something that in my heart I knew had to fit into the puzzle, "Does the Guild know the identity of every hero that works here?"
"No." He paused. "For its own sake, and the sake of all Thaumaturges, we don't pry. That way, if the government comes sniffing around, we can deny all we like about people's personal lives."