By habit he plots his days like an alibi, edit block before noon, calls after lunch, meeting by dusk, because empty hours are where the old hunger gets a voice. The calendar isn’t a productivity trick; it’s a barricade. If he can account for every hour, he can account for himself. If he can’t, his mind starts offering bargains: one drink to smooth the nerves, one pill to stay sharp, one late night to “finish the timeline” that always turns into another.
He wakes to the same alarms, the same cold water, the same sequence of motions that keeps his hands from wandering to trouble. Coffee measured. Shower timed. Notes reviewed at the kitchen table like he’s studying for an exam he can’t fail twice. The sobriety coin sits in his pocket with the weight of a tiny verdict; his thumb finds its ridged edge without asking permission. It’s what he does when he hears a familiar excuse forming. I’m different.*
The case keeps trying to break his schedule. It shows up in the gaps between tasks, in the pauses while a file renders, in the quiet after he ends a call and the line goes dead. A name in a document can spike his pulse like a siren. A bland procedural phrase, sealed storage, access restricted, can make his mouth dry. He tells himself to stay professional, to keep his voice steady, to treat the whole thing like any other episode: collect, corroborate, cut.
But he knows how obsession dresses itself up as diligence.
So he builds routine into the investigation itself: check-in texts before every meeting, a hard stop at dusk no matter what lead is dangling, a route that keeps him out of streets where bars lean warm and inviting. He writes his next steps on paper, ink, not an easily deleted note, because paper feels harder to lie with. When he catches himself imagining the law firm, the locked cabinet, the thrill of a door that shouldn’t open, he forces his attention back to the clock.
Time, he’s learned, is either a structure or a weapon. He intends to keep it on his side.
He keeps his kit the way he keeps his life now: pared back, defensible, impossible to dramatise. One recorder, the kind a municipal clerk might use to dictate memos, its scuffed plastic chosen on purpose. No shotgun mic, no cables like veins, nothing that looks like he’s here to trap anyone. Consent scripts sit in his head in neutral, practiced English, what he’ll do with the audio, how they can stop, what “on the record” actually means, so he doesn’t have to fumble with papers when a room goes tense.
His phone stays clean. Airplane mode when he can manage it. Files exported twice, encrypted, then duplicated onto a dull grey drive marked only with dates and episode codes, never names. Names turn into trouble; dates can pass for admin. Even his notebook is unromantic: black cover, grid paper, a column for times, a column for sources, as if he’s auditing himself.
If someone asks, he can show everything and make it look like work. Boredom is camouflage. Legality is armour. And the gap between them is where he tries not to feel anything at all.
He chooses his interview locations the way he chooses his routes home: lit, public, ordinary enough to make everyone behave. A café by the tram stop where the milk steamer shrieks on schedule, a municipal lobby with polished stone that throws every footstep back at you. Places with cameras, witnesses, and at least two ways out. He arrives early, sits with his back to a wall, orders something harmless, and lets the room do part of the work. People talk differently when other people can hear them; they soften their stories into bureaucratic shapes, call bribes “favours” and threats “misunderstandings”. He keeps his voice low, his questions plain, the recorder tucked between a napkin and a phone, and waits for the moment they forget the danger has an address.
At home, he takes other people’s mess and makes it march. Testimony becomes a timeline, a column of times, a column of names, every “I think” shaved down to what can be pinned to a document. He edits out the tremor in a witness’s voice, the pause before a denial, telling himself it’s craft, structure over spectacle, proof over paranoia, though his thumb keeps scoring the coin raw.
When his notes begin orbiting the same absences, signatures that should exist, case numbers that don’t match, that familiar Kravets & Morozova stamp surfacing like mould, he reacts the only way he trusts. He tightens his calendar until it squeaks: earlier mornings, shorter calls, meetings double-booked as alibis. If every hour is accounted for, maybe the case can’t slip its hand into his.
The file refuses to stay put in his head. He opens it on the kitchen table, a municipal photocopy with a coffee ring he doesn’t remember making, and the pages behave like spring steel. Flatten for a moment, then snap back into their old shape the second he looks away. Each reread turns into something bodily. His throat tightens as if he’s swallowed a wire. The pulse in his wrist keeps time with the tramline outside, steady, then suddenly not.
He tells himself it’s just paper. A case number, a signature block, a death classified as accident because an “independent review” said so. But the margins are crowded with absence. A witness statement referenced in the index that isn’t in the file. A timestamp that doesn’t align with the incident log he pulled last week. A partner’s stamp, Kravets & Morozova, crisp, official, landing on the page like a thumbprint on a throat.
He slides his sobriety coin between finger and thumb without taking it out, working the ridges until his skin complains. The motion is automatic, muscle memory dressed up as grounding. It doesn’t ground him. It sharpens him. It drags his attention into the same narrow corridor he used to walk when he wanted something he couldn’t admit he wanted.
In the audio on his laptop, interview clips, room tone, the soft hiss of a café espresso machine, there’s a pause he didn’t clock before. A witness swallowing. A careful choice of wording where a name should be. That pause expands every time he plays it, like a bruise blooming under light.
He can feel the case trying to become a place. A stairwell that smells of damp tobacco. A door marked SEALED that isn’t really sealed, just guarded by the right kind of silence. He swore he’d never walk through places like that again: places where rules are used like hands, where someone’s “procedure” can close around your wrist and not let go.
He closes the file, then opens it again, as if repetition will tame it. It doesn’t. It only makes it heavier.
He forces himself to label it, like a clinician taking inventory. Not dread. Not the old itch. Hunger first. Clean and metallic, lodged behind his teeth. Heat in his throat, as if he’s swallowed a match. Impatience skittering under his skin, making every quiet in the flat feel staged, every minute a dare. He stands at the sink and lets cold water run over his wrists, watching the veins darken and settle, pretending his body can be negotiated with by temperature and routine.
The clock on the microwave reads 21:[^17]. He counts forward: eight hours until morning, ten until the next meeting, twelve until he can call his sponsor without it sounding like a confession. He rehearses the mantra he’s used for years, eat, shower, sleep, show up, stacking it like sandbags against a flood he won’t name.
It’s adrenaline, he tells himself. Just the job. A story with stakes and deadlines, nothing more. But his breathing stays shallow, and the file on the table feels less like paper than a doorway.
His hand goes to his pocket without permission, as if the body has its own filing system for panic. The sobriety coin sits warm against his thigh, familiar as a scar and just as tender. He worries the ridged edge with his thumb until it bites through the thin callus, a precise sting that makes sense in a way the rest of the evening doesn’t. Count the ridges. Press. Release. He listens for his breathing to fall back into its assigned rhythm.
It isn’t comfort, not really. It’s proof of a boundary: this pain is his, chosen, measurable. The other kind, what the case is doing to him, how it turns absence into appetite, keeps spreading in the dark, unlabelled.
He takes out a clean sheet and starts pinning the mess down like evidence to corkboard: the first call, the second, the gap that shouldn’t exist; stamps that match by ink but not by hand; signatures that recur where different clerks should. He draws arrows until the chain of custody becomes a circle, looping back to the same courteous refusals. If he can keep it structured, the sound stays tapping. Not a fist on the door.
Each line in his outline seems to lean, sooner or later, toward Kravets & Morozova, and something in him locks into place. The calm voice he uses on tape goes brittle in his throat. He refuses the old fantasy (bottle, blur, mercy) and instead pictures the steel cabinet marked SEALED, its key in someone else’s pocket, and the document inside that could close this cleanly without hollowing him out.
He can take a roomful of contradictions and make them behave. Give him a handful of half-remembered times, a police report that reads like it’s been laundered, a witness who keeps circling the same omission, and he can lay it all out until it looks ordained. The trick is not magic; it’s craft. He lines up the timestamps, marks what should have happened between them, and lets the gaps speak louder than the statements. He braids testimony into something with tension and release, edits out the throat-clearing, leaves in the hesitation. By the end, the story feels clean enough to be destiny.
That cleanliness is what scares him.
Every time he exports a final cut, he feels the old itch for outcomes. Not for applause, he’s never trusted applause, but for a sign that the work has weight outside his headphones. He tells himself he’s documenting, not prosecuting. He tells himself he doesn’t need anyone’s permission to be right. Then the upload completes, the episode goes live, and he’s back to watching his inbox like a man awaiting a sentence.
He checks for the messages that mean he struck bone: a clerk who “can’t say much” but attaches a photo of a logbook; a junior lawyer asking to speak off-record; an anonymous address that only says, Stop. He refreshes until his eyes blur, until the blue light dries the back of his throat and he can taste paper and cheap coffee. The quiet does something to him. It turns his careful narrative into a dare that nobody answers.
He knows that in this city, truth doesn’t travel on its own. It needs a vehicle. A name with letterhead. A badge. A judge who doesn’t flinch. Without that, even the sharpest timeline is just audio on a feed: order imposed on rot.
Still, he keeps refreshing, because hope is the last bad habit he hasn’t learned how to quit.
The pattern is so familiar he could cut it into an intro sting. The first day after an upload, his inbox fizzes: strangers writing from kitchens and night shifts, thanking him for “giving voice” as if voice is the same as leverage. A few messages are earnest and long, threaded with their own dead ends; others are a single line that lands like a hand on his shoulder. The numbers tick up. New patrons, new follows, a little surge in the analytics graph that briefly resembles a heartbeat.
Then the drop-off comes. Silence by degrees, as predictable as the tram timetable: replies slow, tips dry up, the comments turn to speculation and armchair verdicts. The agencies he’s named do not react; they do not threaten, either, which is worse. A closed file is a sealed room: no echo, no footsteps, nothing to confirm anyone is even inside.
He keeps refreshing anyway, not because he believes in applause, but because he’s waiting for the one message that means the story reached somewhere it isn’t supposed to.
In the hush between uploads, it isn’t praise he craves; it’s consequence. The city stays the same colour, the same hard-faced officials stepping over the same cracks, and his work feels like sound poured into a drain. That sense of weightlessness is dangerous. He recognises the familiar reach in his body before it becomes a thought. An old reflex for velocity, for something that will pin him to the moment and drown out the waiting. He presses his thumb to the sobriety coin until the ridged edge leaves a crescent in his skin. In for four, hold, out for six. A text to his sponsor, unsent but composed. Routine like a handrail. He isn’t chasing a rush. He’s chasing a record that can’t be edited away.
What he lacks isn’t craft, he can splice doubt into certainty with a mouse-click, but something uglier and heavier: proof with ink and chain-of-custody, a stamp that can’t be laughed off in a corridor. Not another witness statement to be “misremembered”, not an audio clip to be called “edited”. He needs a document that drags the case into daylight and makes obstruction cost someone.
Without paper that can survive a hostile reading, he’s only a voice in someone else’s aftermath, stitching pathos to a beat and calling it work. The thought turns his stomach. He imagines the next family, the next “accident”, and his own episode queued up like entertainment, grief rendered listenable. If this ends as content, he’ll have helped no one: least of all himself.
His version of love isn’t lyrical; it’s logistical. A matter of coordinates and timestamps. Turn up when you said you would, even if the lift smells of bleach and failure and your hands are shaking for reasons you don’t want to name. Answer the hard questions without bargaining for softer ones. Keep your tone even when the room is doing its best to make you flinch.
He learned it in recovery first, before he learned it in work. The meetings where men made promises that sounded like hymns and then disappeared for a week. The sponsor who didn’t praise him, just asked, again and again, what time he’d eaten, whether he’d slept, where his feet were right now. Love as a checklist you could live through. Love as a phone call returned before it curdled into shame.
Natasha fits that definition in a way that makes him uneasy, as if she’s reading from the same manual. She doesn’t touch his arm to reassure him; she slides him a note with a shelf code and a warning folded into the wording. She doesn’t say be careful like it’s a prayer. She says, flatly, Don’t use your name at the desk. Don’t sign anything you don’t get a copy of. Practical tenderness, delivered in the key of procedure.
He’s seen people use affection as camouflage: soft eyes, soft hands, and then, later, the invoice. Petrovic’s brand of courtesy belongs in that category: a smile that means paperwork, a concern that means surveillance. Against that, logistics feels clean. If someone shows up twice, then three times, at personal cost, it becomes harder to call it theatre.
Still, the trouble with logistics is that it doesn’t protect you from what you’re asking of another person. Every time he pictures her badge swiped after hours, a quiet late-night retrieval that someone will notice, his mouth dries. The work wants sacrifices. His body remembers the old bargain: trade safety for momentum.
He keeps his gaze steady anyway. That’s part of it, too. Staying present when the urge is to vanish. When the story starts to resemble a trap, he tries to be the kind of man who doesn’t drag someone into the dark and call it intimacy.
He distrusts declarations the way he distrusts polished evidence: too clean, too eager to be believed. He’s heard men in church-basement circles promise the moon with their palms upturned, then vanish the moment the craving got teeth. He’s watched officials deliver condolences like scripted weather reports and file the truth under administrative error. Words are cheap; they’re also useful, which makes them dangerous.
What steadies him is the dull, repeatable thing: behaviour that costs a person time, sleep, convenience. A text that arrives when it would be easier to forget. A door held open without a glance around to see who noticed. Someone doing the right small act again, not for applause, but because the alternative feels wrong in their bones.
He catalogues it the way he catalogues leads: dates, patterns, deviations. If kindness is only performative, it frays under pressure. If it’s real, it persists when the lighting is bad and the corridor is empty and no one’s recording. That’s the proof he trusts: not a speech, but a habit.
He learned to recognise intimacy by its lack of spectacle. Not flowers on a feed, not a grand confession timed for maximum effect, but the small, stubborn adjustments people made around his edges. A text before the day could tip, phrased like logistics. Eaten?*. So it didn’t feel like pity. Someone taking the outside seat at a meeting so he had a clear line to the door without having to ask. Coffee turned down, casually, because she’d noticed the smell of it made him restless. And when his thumb started worrying for the weight of a coin, when his hand drifted towards the old reflexes, she wouldn’t grab him. Just a pause, a glance, her hand hovering near his wrist like a question he could answer with honesty.
He wants a person who can stay in the room when the tape turns ugly. When the audio is all brittle hiss and shallow breath, when a witness stops speaking and you can hear the shape of what they won’t say. Someone who can listen to his questions go clinical, his voice flattening into survival, and not mistake it for cruelty: or try to sand it down for comfort.
If he strips it down, that’s all he can credibly promise anyone: no saviour act, no cinematic confession in the rain. Just the unshowy work. Telling the truth even when it makes him smaller, staying when it would be cleaner to bolt, and building a discipline sturdy enough to return the next day. Not because it feels good. Because it’s owed.
He runs the investigation like a dry-drunk runs a day: boxed, timed, and double-locked. Interview requests live in one folder, case notes in another, and his personal life, what’s left of it, gets shoved into the narrow hours that don’t threaten the plan. If he answers a message the moment it arrives, it stops being a message and becomes a door. Doors lead to rooms. Rooms lead to wanting something, and wanting is where he used to lose time.
So he lets the phone sit face-down while he builds a timeline from scraps: a call log with a missing page, a municipal memo that swears a thing happened on a day that didn’t exist in anyone’s calendar. He waits until the meeting is finished, until he’s had his bad instant coffee and said the familiar lines to men who know the shape of excuses. Only then does he scroll through the unanswered: friends, colleagues, the gentle insistence of people who still believe he can be reached at random. He types replies that sound like competence because competence is a mask no one questions.
Invitations get the same treatment. Drinks are easy to refuse on principle; dinners are harder, because dinner is where someone might notice his eyes darting to the exit, his jaw going tight when the conversation drifts towards family or history. He can handle a witness going silent. He doesn’t know what to do with someone waiting, patiently, for him to fill the quiet with himself.
Natasha is the one complication he cannot file away. She doesn’t demand immediacy; she offers it, in practical increments: an accession number scribbled on a receipt, a time window that isn’t a trap. When she speaks, it’s as if she’s already weighed the cost. That steadiness should be a relief. Instead it makes him more careful, because the safest way to keep her out of the blast radius is to keep her slightly outside him.
On paper, he can be dependable: dates, citations, clean audio. In a room with someone who might read the strain behind his calm, reliability becomes a negotiation he doesn’t trust himself to win.
When someone leans in his first impulse is to start arranging the room. He listens for the hinge-squeak of the conversation turning personal and, without meaning to, inventories exits: what he’s said, what he’s implied, what can be twisted into a version of him he won’t recognise later. It’s an old survival trick dressed up in adult clothes.
Sobriety didn’t kill the reflex; it civilised it. Now it comes out as schedules and boundaries that sound like policy: call me after noon, send it in writing, we’ll keep it to forty minutes. He keeps his voice even, his questions clean, his laughter timed. People read that as coolness, sometimes as contempt. He tells himself that’s fine. Better they think he’s aloof than see the tremor underneath when a line gets too close to home.
But the truth is uglier: closeness feels like a loss of jurisdiction. If someone knows him well enough to ask why his hand is in his pocket again, rubbing the coin raw, they might also know where to press when this job starts pressing back.
He has watched proximity become a tool in other hands. It never arrives as a threat; it comes dressed as routine: an extra name pencilled beside an appointment, a familiar face seen lingering by the courthouse steps, a light offered for a cigarette outside a door you shouldn’t have found. Then the questions start. Not to him, not at first, but to the people nearest: Why were you with him? What did he say? A clerk gets audited, a neighbour gets a “friendly” visit, a boss receives an anonymous complaint timed to payday. In Novigrad, affection is just another filing category, another route for procedure to find your throat. And once it’s there, it doesn’t let go.
He practises distance like a trade. No one rides in his car; no one gets the whole map. He edits at night with headphones clamped on, shaving breath and hesitation from his own voice until it turns tight, mean. Someone you wouldn’t want to know. When pressed, he offers half-truths in a calm tone: plausible, paperwork-clean, just enough to keep them stepping back.
When the loneliness comes in sharp, chemical waves, he handles it like any other trigger: thumb worrying the edge of the sobriety coin until the ridges bite, breath measured in fours, the next meeting time checked twice. Wanting someone would be a negotiation with his own worst instincts: one exception, one unsaid detail, one just this once to keep a warm body close. He can’t afford improvisation.
The flagged line in his notebook catches again, black ink gone shiny where his thumb has worried at it: sealed storage, law firm archive. It’s a lure dressed as administration. He feels the familiar lift under his ribs. The beginning of the old hunger for pursuit, for the moment where everything clicks and the world narrows to a single correct thread.
He refuses the spiral by making it ugly with structure.
A fresh page. Date at the top. Header: *K&M. Columns. He writes as if a supervisor will audit him: Who signs out sealed material; when retrievals happen; which accession range covers the year of the death; what alternate case number the file might be wearing if it’s been walked to a different shelf. The pen scratches, steady, until the adrenaline has somewhere to go.
Names come first. Partners, senior clerks, anyone with the authority to touch the steel cabinet without leaving fingerprints on policy. He adds Petrovic’s name, then brackets it and underlines twice: not evidence, a pressure point. He writes the whistleblower’s handle from the old message and draws a line to “firm archive contact?” then crosses it out; dead ends don’t get to masquerade as leads.
Dates: the day of the death, the coroner’s report date, the filing date of the civil settlement he’d found buried in a municipal bulletin. He adds “court annex, visitor log?” and “tram junction cameras, city archive?” because procedure is how this city remembers and how it lies.
Accession numbers are guesswork, but educated. He flips through printouts, scans the margins for stamps, makes a list of likely ranges. Every uncertainty becomes a question he can assign to someone else or to daylight.
When his hand pauses, he forces it back to the page. Not narrative. Not righteousness. Just steps: request, cross-reference, confirm. Obsession, disguised as work, and tethered (if he does it right) to a time, a place, and an exit.
He phones his sponsor before he can talk himself into “later”, before the day has a chance to fray. The call isn’t a confession; it’s a contract. He says the firm’s name once, like swearing something in, then pins the rules down with numbers and times so they can’t wriggle. Daylight only. One meeting before, one after. Location texted in advance. Phone on loud if he has to make any call from inside: no private muttering in stairwells that could turn into old bargains.
His sponsor doesn’t soothe him; she asks what he’ll do when the story starts to feel like a drink. Ilya rubs the sobriety coin until the ridges sting and answers with the only thing that’s ever worked: leave early. Not after “one more question”. Not after “just a quick look”. If his hands start hunting for excuses, he walks, full stop.
He repeats it back to her. He writes it down. He sets two alarms. The rules don’t make him safe, but they give him a handhold. Something solid when his mind tries to turn hallways into negotiations.
He drafts a cover that will tolerate both bored receptionists and sharp-eyed gatekeepers. Nothing heroic. Nothing that sounds like an accusation. Just a segment on procurement appeals: how contractors contest bids, how the city “corrects” itself on paper, how case numbers migrate between departments. It’s the kind of topic that makes people glance at the clock and wave you toward the forms.
He writes the lines on an index card and trims every sentence until it has the texture of routine: public-record research, background for an episode on administrative process, no names, no claims. If someone probes, he has a second layer ready: cross-referencing accession logs for a timeline piece. Boring, procedural, plausible. A story designed to slide past curiosity without leaving anything for it to bite.
He runs the script in his kitchen as if he’s already in the building: kettle hiss for ambience, voice low, unhurried. He times pauses like edits: leave space, let them fill it with policy. I’m just mapping procedure. Then, casual as a clerical error, he threads in the needle: where sealed materials are routed, which logbook catches the handover, whose signature makes a box disappear.
The more he lays it out, times, routes, names, exits, the less it resembles safety. Structure should dull the edge; instead it hones it. Each checklist item points to the same hidden premise: somewhere in a sealed box there’s a paper that turns an “accident” into a method, a death into a line in a ledger. And whoever signed it into silence won’t hesitate to keep it there.
He pauses at the entrance long enough to let his breathing fall into a counted rhythm, palm pressing the edge of the sobriety coin through his pocket. Metal against skin, a quiet check-in before he steps into the hush. In for four, hold, out for six. The old arithmetic of not wanting anything too badly.
The glass doors give a reluctant sigh when he pushes them, as if the building is warning him off in its own exhausted way. Warm air from the corridor dies at the threshold and is replaced by a dry chill that smells faintly of toner and cardboard. His eyes adjust to the flat light. Everything here is labelled, signed, initialled; even the silence feels filed.
He keeps his gaze moving, not lingering on people long enough to look like he’s counting exits. He notes them anyway: the coat rack by the noticeboard, a CCTV dome over the far corner, the security barrier with a plastic tray for bags. A clerk behind a partition glances up, then down, as if checking him against an internal list. Ilya makes his face neutral and uninteresting. He has learned how to be forgettable on purpose.
His thumb circles the coin once more (ridged edge, familiar weight) before he lets it rest. No furtive clenching, no tells. Just another man with a shoulder bag and a reason to be here.
He steps forward and waits behind a line of tape on the floor that pretends to be order. A pensioner argues softly about a missing decree; a student clutches a folder like it might run away. Somewhere, a stamp hits paper with an officious thud.
When it’s his turn he leans in just enough to be heard, not enough to crowd. He has a name ready, a topic ready, an innocuous lie polished until it sounds like truth: procurement appeals, background research, nothing current, nothing that would make anyone reach for a phone.
His mouth forms the first word; his throat stays dry. He swallows, steadies, and speaks anyway.
The archive swallowed sound the way deep water did: no splash, just a steady pressure. Fluorescents hummed overhead with a tired insistence, flattening faces, bleaching colour out of coats and posters. The air tasted of paper-dust and old glue; each breath felt borrowed from a room that didn’t expect to be disturbed. A chair leg rasped across linoleum somewhere behind him, then stopped abruptly, as if even movement had learned to apologise.
Ilya shifted his messenger strap higher on his shoulder and forced his hands to be useful, not restless. The sobriety coin stayed in his pocket, a small, stubborn weight he refused to touch. He kept his posture square but unchallenging, the stance of someone used to queues and forms, not someone hunting a secret.
To his left, a photocopier exhaled warm plastic. Ahead, a partitioned counter ran along the wall like a border, with openings cut into it for voices and paperwork. A rack of request slips sat fanned like dull playing cards. He picked one up, read the instructions twice, and let his face settle into the only safe mask here: routine, compliant, forgettable.
At the counter he offered a nod that could pass for manners or fatigue and slid the request slip forward with the slow care of someone used to forms being rejected for the wrong ink. “Afternoon. I’m looking at procurement appeals,” he said, letting the phrase sit there, dull, administrative, safe. “For a background episode. Nothing current.”
He didn’t lead with names. He led with parameters: 2016 through 2019; Municipal Development Committee, Transport Directorate; tenders over a certain threshold. He listed appeal grounds like he’d memorised them from a guideline, improper bid scoring, conflict disclosures, late addenda, technical noncompliance, until it sounded like he was trying to avoid wasting her time, not find trouble. He kept his eyes on the paper, not on her face, as if the documents mattered more than the person guarding them.
He planted both hands on the counter’s scuffed laminate, palms down, fingers deliberately slack. No phone in sight, no mic, nothing to make a clerk feel hunted. When the woman behind the slot asked, flatly, “Outlet?” he gave the podcast title and let a tired half-smile pass for modesty. “Just… background.” A shrug, as if this were paperwork, not a fuse.
The pretext sat in his mouth like a line he’d rehearsed on the tram: serviceable until it met daylight. He gave one docket reference too quickly, the digits clipped and confident, then hedged on the next, smearing a year into a range. The lapse tightened something behind his eyes. He held still, listening to the room’s hush, waiting for the bureaucratic mercy of a stamp: or the single question that would peel him open.
Behind the counter, Natasha lifted her eyes from the intake slips as if she’d heard a change in pressure, not a voice. Her gaze landed on him with the unblinking steadiness of a reference librarian confronting a misquoted statute: polite by training, not by warmth. There was no tiny intake of breath at his name, no reflexive smile that said she’d listened to him on her commute. If she recognised him, she refused to give him the comfort of it.
The room made a religion of small sounds: the scrape of a chair leg, the faint rattle of a radiator, paper whispering against paper. Natasha’s fingertips kept their place on the top slip while her eyes moved over him in quiet inventory. She looked, then looked again, not for who he was but for what didn’t fit. The way his posture was set too deliberately, as if he’d practised being harmless. The way his voice held a flat administrative pitch that didn’t quite mask the tension riding underneath.
A clerk’s judgement was supposed to be mechanical: title, year, docket, accession path. Hers wasn’t. It had the calibrated patience of someone used to people arriving with half-truths and expecting the archive to bless them with paper.
She glanced down at his request slip, then back up, lingering on the printed boxes he’d filled in with a hand that tried not to tremble. The ink strokes were neat, controlled: overcontrolled. A small tell. Natasha’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, more the beginning of a comment she decided not to donate to the open air.
“Procurement appeals,” she repeated, softly, as if testing whether the phrase would behave. Her tone suggested she’d heard it used as camouflage before.
Her pen hovered over the counter’s edge, poised to stamp, to deny, to ask for one missing number that would send him away. Instead she held the pause. Measuring him the way she measured documents: by the clean parts, and by the stains that had been scrubbed too hard.
Ilya delivered the line the way he delivered most things lately: measured, workable, sanded down to avoid snagging on anyone’s suspicion. Procurement appeals. Background episode. Routine access. He kept his tone neutral, the sort of neutrality that belonged to forms and queues, not to a man with a voice people recognised in their headphones.
Natasha didn’t reward it with agreement. Her face stayed arranged in professional calm, but her attention slid off the words as if they were just another cover sheet. She watched the gaps instead. The fractional delay before he volunteered a detail, the way his shoulders held as if braced for a stamp to come down hard. His eyes tracked her pen more than her expression, like he was already mapping out denial.
His right hand drifted towards his coat pocket, stopped, drifted again. Not fidgeting, exactly. Checking. A habit with a purpose. Something small and circular, an anchor he didn’t want anyone else to notice.
She let the silence stretch long enough to hear the building breathe. Then, without looking at his name, she shifted the slip an exact centimetre back towards him, as if returning a document for correction rather than a man for judgement.
“Docket number?” she says, level as a shelf label, not a challenge so much as a requirement. The syllables are clipped clean, the kind that don’t leave room for improvisation. Her pen hangs over the paper, tip suspended in a small pool of fluorescent light, ready to make him official or send him back to the public terminals.
Ilya feels the question settle in his chest like a weight he’s carried before. Numbers, dates. Facts that should line up if you belong here. His thumb finds the edge of the coin in his pocket and rubs, once, twice, the familiar ridges grounding him while his face stays composed.
Natasha doesn’t watch his mouth for an answer. She watches his hands. As if she’s seen people lie convincingly, and still betray themselves on the page.
Ilya gives her a year, a department, a case style that sounds bureaucratically plausible, and a docket number that lands a beat too late. Natasha’s eyes narrow, not in accusation but in focus, like she’s found a splice in a tape. She doesn’t correct him. She simply nudges the slip closer by a few millimetres, pen waiting, letting the paper ask the question: are you willing to make this official?
Natasha’s pen moves at last. Not the sprawling, tentative scribble of someone unsure, but quick, neat strokes that stop short of anything incriminating. In the margin she leaves him a sliver of handwriting, small enough to be missed by a camera’s bored eye. Then she slides the slip back, face still neutral. Only her gaze files him somewhere private, unspoken, and final.
Ilya lets the number come out as if it’s been living in his mouth for weeks. A cadence he’s used before, radio voice, steady, unhurried, so the listener hears certainty and doesn’t count the beats between digits. He gives her the docket in one clean line, then adds, lightly, “Procurement appeal, around twenty, ” and lets the year dissolve into a shrug of breath, as if time is a detail for clerks, not stories.
The pen doesn’t move.
Natasha’s eyes flick, not to his face but to the request slip, to the place where the number should anchor itself. He watches her absorb the shape of what he’s said, the way she would a citation: not whether it sounds right, but whether it can survive being checked. The fluorescent light turns the counter into an operating table; his words lie on it, waiting to be cut open.
He can feel the missing digit like a loose tooth. He keeps his shoulders loose, keeps the small smile in place. Social engineering is a kind of manners. You don’t push; you give people room to help you without feeling conned.
His thumb finds the coin again, rubs the edge until the ridges bite. The urge that comes with pressure, old, stupid, familiar, flares and is gone, filed away behind routine. Breathe in. Breathe out. Count the shelves, not the exits.
Natasha’s gaze lifts, briefly, to his hand at his pocket, then back to the slip. A micro-expression: not judgement, not sympathy. Inventory.
“Which division?” she asks, soft as paper, and the softness makes it worse. A request for a parameter. A trap dressed as procedure.
Ilya answers too quickly, hears it as he says it, hears the way it doesn’t quite fit. He adds, “Just for background. Nothing that needs sealed materials. I’m doing an episode on how these appeals get… processed.”
The word processed lands wrong in the room. Like he’s pretending he doesn’t know it can mean buried. Natasha’s pen remains poised, refusing to legitimise a guess. She gives him a second to correct himself, and in that second he realises she already knows he’s fishing: she’s just deciding whether he’s clumsy, or dangerous, or honest.
Natasha doesn’t smile. She tilts her head a fraction, as if listening for a flaw in a recording, and repeats what he’s given her in his own cadence, division, year, docket, each piece separated cleanly, syllable by syllable. It isn’t mockery; it’s verification. Then, without lifting her eyes, she turns the pen between her fingers and says it again the way the archive wants it said, division code first, year second, the docket number clipped to the end like a tag tied with wire.
“The format is D–YY–…” Her voice stays low, neutral, a procedural whisper that could be mistaken for help by anyone not trained to hear the warning inside it.
She draws a small line through the place where his guess would become official and writes the correct order above it in neat, careful strokes. The motion is economical, practised. Like correcting a mislabelled spine before it infects a whole shelf.
For a moment his skin prickles, the sense of being handled by someone who knows exactly where paper turns into consequence. Her pen pauses, hovering at the margin, waiting to see if he’ll insist on the wrong shape of truth.
Ilya shifts gears, smooths his voice into something radio-friendly. “I’m Ilya Markov: podcast. True crime, but this isn’t… that.” He keeps it light, civic-minded. Procurement appeals, public money, a background episode about process, about transparency. Nothing sensational. He lets the words fall in the safe order he’s used on receptionists and press officers: public interest first, himself second, the real question nowhere at all.
Natasha doesn’t look up to reward the performance. Her attention stays where damage happens. On the slip, on the ink, on his thumb worrying the edge of whatever’s in his pocket. As if charisma is just another stamp that can be faked, and his calm another document with an altered date. Her pen waits, immaculate, refusing to legitimise a story that hasn’t earned its citation.
“You can’t appeal a procurement decision in a year that hasn’t happened,” she says, voice level, the dryness calibrated. Enough to smart, not enough to be personal. She slides the request slip back across the laminate, stopping it with one finger. Her pen hovers over the empty line where he’d hoped she might tidy his vagueness into legitimacy, then taps once beside the date field: not scolding. Just refusing.
He leant closer, voice tightening the way it did when a witness started circling the point. Natasha didn’t lean back; she straightened the slip between them and let the rules do the talking. Division code. Year. Subdivision. Docket syntax. Each requirement placed like a paperweight. Not refusal. Definition. The message was clean: she wouldn’t be rushed, sweet-talked, or manoeuvred into inventing a path.
“Docket number,” Natasha says again, and there’s no edge to it. Only the flatness of someone who has learned not to add herself to the work. Her eyes flick from the slip to his mouth, not to catch him in a lie, but to measure whether he’s about to ask her to help him make one.
Ilya gives her the string he’s rehearsed. It comes out smoothly at first, the way he can read ad copy in one take even when his chest is tight. “Twenty-one… slash… four-eight-seven…” He hears his own voice, too even, too arranged, and feels the sobriety coin bite his thumb through the fabric of his pocket. He forces his hand still.
“The year,” she prompts, already writing the header, the pen poised like a gate.
“Two thousand nineteen.” He watches her decide whether to believe him. Not in the way a clerk believes or disbelieves: more like an archivist deciding whether a thing exists in a place they can responsibly admit to.
“Subdivision,” Natasha adds, clipped. “Civil. Administrative. Procurement.”
“Administrative,” he says, then hesitates on the branch code, the part that never shows up in the headlines. A digit sits at the back of his tongue and refuses to become a fact. He could gamble. People do, in this room. They throw sand into the machine and hope it spits something useful.
Natasha doesn’t correct him this time. She just stops. Her pen hangs a millimetre above paper, motionless, waiting for him to either commit to an invented number or admit he doesn’t have it. In the brief silence, the archive asserts itself: the hush of felt-soled shoes, the soft thump of a stamp somewhere behind glass, the air that smells of dust and warmed plastic.
Ilya clears his throat. “I: might have transposed it. There’s a… second digit.” His gaze drops to the slip, to the empty boxes that want to become a trail.
A faint shift in her expression: almost a relief, almost nothing. She writes a small notation in the margin, not in the main fields. When she slides the slip back, her fingertip rests beside it a beat too long, like a bookmark.
“Some things,” she murmurs, low enough that it could be meant only for him, “are filed to be retrieved. Others are filed to be lost.”
The counter gives them no room for theatre. Laminate edge, scuffed at the corner, presses into Ilya’s forearms as the queue behind him shuffles forward in patient, resentful inches. A pensioner coughs into a handkerchief; a student’s backpack knocks his hip. Natasha’s terminal sits canted away, the glow reflected in her lenses but never offered, as if the screen itself were privileged material.
She pulls a blank request slip from a drawer and sends it across with two fingers. No smile, no apology. Her pen doesn’t touch paper; it acts like a pointer. Tap: fonds. Tap: inventory. Tap: case. The rhythm is practiced, not petty: an index of how the system wants to be fed.
Ilya takes the slip and finds his handwriting suddenly too loud in the hush. The sobriety coin digs into his thumb as he steadies it under the counter, a private metronome.
Natasha keeps her eyes on the form, not his face. “In that order,” she says, quietly. A concession follows, almost invisible: she nudges the slip a fraction closer, placing the fields where his hand naturally falls, translating bureaucracy into something he can’t pretend not to understand.
Ilya tries to widen the net. “Procurement appeal. Early twenty-tens. Municipal contractor. There was a collapse. The paperwork went… quiet.” He keeps his tone mild, the way he does on mic when he wants someone to forget they’re being steered.
Natasha doesn’t take the bait. No sympathetic tilt of the head, no let’s see what we can do. Just a small exhale through her nose and the slide back into workflow. “Identifiers first,” she says, pen uncapping with a soft snap. “Narratives later.”
Her finger finds the accession-code box on the slip and settles there as if pinning an insect. The nail is short, clean; the pressure is gentle, unwavering. It isn’t reprimand. It’s a boundary drawn in stationery. Either he produces a number that exists, or he admits that he’s fishing.
Ilya recalibrates, offers what he can without begging. Municipal agency, appeal class, the judge’s surname spoken like a password. Natasha’s hands move: keyboard, catalogue card, accession ledger, each cross-check precise and brisk, then a pause where her shoulders tighten. When his account turns too polished, her fingertip knocks the laminate once. Again. A quiet metronome, marking the points where files ‘misplace themselves’.
The lane narrows until it’s just the two of them and the machinery of access. Ilya tracks her cursor through nested menus, then down to a handwritten ledger, her pen hovering as if one wrong stroke might wake something. Natasha studies him in the periphery. Waiting for the flare of impatience, the little shove of privilege. The slip comes back altered, not granted: two extra numbers, inked cleanly, left uncommented.
Ilya had made a habit of reading rooms the way other people read headlines, and he did it now without thinking: the laminated badge clipped to her coat, the tight, economical posture that suggested she was always one interruption away from being called to account, the way her gaze kept skimming to the entrance and returning to him with a neutral reset. Not jumpy. Managed. Like someone who’d learned what attention could cost and trained herself to spend it sparingly.
For a second he resented the ritual of it all: the forms, the codes, the ledger like scripture. The archive’s slow breathing. The feeling that you needed permission to remember. He’d come in telling himself this was just another angle, a polite pass through a civic building with bad lighting, and already the pace was crawling under his skin.
Then he noticed what the pace was doing to her.
Her hands didn’t fidget. They executed. Each movement arrived with a purpose and ended cleanly, as if she was giving nothing away in the margins. She didn’t sigh like the bored ones did, didn’t brighten like the eager ones. She treated him the way you treated a sealed envelope: assume there’s something inside you’re not meant to see, and behave accordingly.
He watched the quick check of the corridor again, subtle enough to be deniable, and the faint set of her jaw afterwards, as if she’d just heard a sound that didn’t belong. The reflex was familiar. Not from libraries, but from court hallways and addiction clinics and police stations: places where the walls listened and the wrong name in the wrong mouth became a problem.
His annoyance thinned, washed out by a colder curiosity. If she was this cautious, it wasn’t because she liked procedure. It was because procedure was the only shield she was allowed to carry in public.
Ilya kept his face mild, almost blank. Let her have her rules. Let her believe, for a few more seconds, that he could play within them. He tracked the line of her sight, the angle of the door, and wondered who had taught her to watch it.
She caught it not with her eyes at first, but with the part of her that kept tallies without permission. His hand stayed out of sight, yet the coat moved like a second pulse. Thumb to something hard. Thumb again. A worry-stone. A coin. The kind of habit you didn’t develop in a comfortable life.
Natasha’s expression didn’t change; the counter demanded neutrality. But her voice did. The bright, serviceable cadence slid away, replaced by something flatter and more deliberate, each word placed as if it might be replayed later. Still courteous. Less human, on purpose.
“Procurement appeals,” she repeated, not as a question but as an agreed fiction. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard without touching it, a pause that made room for distance. Then she angled her body a fraction, blocking the view of her screen from the entrance with the easy instinct of someone who’d had to learn angles.
“I’ll need the docket number,” she said softly. “And the year.”
Not why. Not for whom. The rules were a shield; she offered him the rim of it. Her eyes flicked once, quick as a stamp, to his pocket-hand, acknowledging the metronome, then back to his face, measuring whether he could keep himself together long enough to be harmless.
Ilya started with the kind of explanation people used when they were nervous about being denied. Background episode, public record, procurement patterns, just trying to understand how the appeals were logged: he kept stacking clauses like sandbags, expecting a flood. Halfway through, he caught himself. Natasha wasn’t waiting to be convinced. She was waiting for coordinates.
Her face stayed composed, but her attention sharpened at the seams: docket, year, jurisdiction. Structure. Not story.
He cleared his throat, felt the sobriety coin bite his thumb through the fabric, and let the rehearsed narrative die in his mouth.
“Right,” he said, quieter. “I’ve got… maybe 14-37. Or 14-73. And it’s 2016. Late.” He slid the slip forward and didn’t fill the silence with anything else.
Natasha didn’t correct him out loud; she corrected the paper. Her pen moved with a restrained certainty, two digits slotted in as if she’d watched that exact error get weaponised before. She didn’t blot, didn’t hesitate. Then, with a small turn of her wrist, she angled the slip so the corridor cameras would catch only the stamped fields (the clean, official face) while the amended line sat hidden beneath her hand.
Before she returned the slip, Natasha lowered her pen as if tidying a clerical loose end. A quick graphite whisper in the margin: nothing anyone would bother to query. Yet it carried weight: a reference written like routine shorthand, a deliberate gap where a file title should be, and a pair of initials that didn’t match any department. An invitation disguised as compliance.
The pencilled line didn’t read like a message so much as a correction to the universe. To anyone else it would have looked like clerk’s detritus. An orphaned code, a date range, a box drawn with impatience. To Ilya, who’d spent years learning how people hid the important thing in the dullest possible wrapper, it clicked into place with the soft violence of a tumbling lock.
A shelf mark that shouldn’t exist. Not in the public scheme, anyway. The first segment matched the municipal series; the second jumped tracks into a closed stack designation that the online catalogue never admitted was real. Then a date range, compressed, all dashes and slashes, the kind of shorthand used in internal memos when you didn’t want outsiders lingering over specifics. 15/10–12/16. Not a case year. A window.
His thumb worried the edge of the coin in his pocket, grounding him against the old itch to overreach. Don’t grab. Don’t push. He let his gaze stay on the slip as if he were simply checking her handwriting.
Natasha’s hand paused above the margin for a fraction, long enough for him to register the tiny square around one word: verify. Not underlined. Not circled. Boxed: an instruction converted into a step, a step converted into a legitimate reason to touch something you weren’t meant to touch.
From her side of the counter, Natasha watched his eyes, not his face. She read the way his attention snagged on the impossible code, how he didn’t smile, didn’t flinch, just went still. People who understood rules as weapons always went still first.
“You’ll want to bring back the docket,” she said, voice neutral, as if she were scolding him for sloppy numbers. “For verification.”
The phrase landed with two meanings: one for anyone within earshot, one for him alone. Her expression didn’t change, but her fingers shifted minutely, covering the initials she’d added: two letters that didn’t belong to any department and yet felt like a keyring.
He nodded once, careful. “Of course.”
In the quiet between them, the archive’s fluorescent hum seemed to lean closer, listening.
Natasha reached for the stamp with the air of someone completing a minor chore. The rubber face kissed the inkpad once, no flourish, no hesitation, and came down on the request slip with a flat, bureaucratic certainty: RETURN FOR VERIFICATION. The red letters bled into the paper fibres like a judgement, loud enough to satisfy procedure, ordinary enough to vanish into a pile of identical forms.
She turned the slip a few degrees as she lifted it, not enough to look like concealment, just enough to look like neatness. Ilya tracked the movement by instinct, not with his eyes but with the part of him that listened for doors clicking shut. The counter camera would see the stamp, the date, her clerk code; it would see the archive doing what the archive claimed to do. It would not see the pencil scrawl in the margin, the boxed word, the gap where a title ought to be.
Her thumb smoothed the edge as if aligning it for filing. Her hand stayed between the lens and the graphite, an accidental shield made deliberate by practice. When she slid it back across the laminate, her face remained neutral. Only her gaze flicked once to the black dome above them, then back to him, as if to confirm he’d understood what had been recorded, and what hadn’t.
Without lifting her eyes from the logbook, she let the rule fall out in a tone too flat to be casual. “Verification requests have to be re-submitted in person,” she said, pen moving as if she were noting an accession date. “Within forty-eight hours. After that, the system closes it.” A small pause. Ink blotted, then corrected with the tidy violence of a trained hand. “We don’t hold material on a ‘maybe’. Not without fresh initials.”
It sounded like policy. It carried like warning.
Her gaze stayed on the paper, but her fingers shifted, tapping once near the boxed word as if marking where his attention should land. Then, softer, almost bored: “Bring the docket. The proper year. Otherwise it’s a dead request.”
Ilya heard the second meeting hiding in the phrasing as if procedure itself had cleared its throat and invited him back. He folded the slip with the same care he used for court summonses and receipts, nothing sacred, nothing suspicious, and slid it into his pocket. His thumb found the sobriety coin and worried its milled edge until his lungs remembered how to behave.
Natasha’s pen didn’t pause as she delivered the last correction, voice level enough to pass as impatience. “Bring the docket number and the accession year. Not the headline year.” She slid the logbook a fraction closer, as if the desk itself were a teacher. The phrase clicked in Ilya’s head like a latch: the catalogue wasn’t built to remember truth, it was built to exploit how people misremember it.
Ilya taps the request slip with a knuckle, as if the paper might confess under pressure. The reading room’s radiators hiss and click; a trolley squeaks somewhere behind the stacks. He keeps his phone face-down, screen dark, like an animal pretending to sleep. Still, he lowers his voice. Habit. Superstition. The city trained both.
“If the accession year points to a refile,” he says, steadying the words so they land like ordinary curiosity, “where do the ones marked sealed end up?”
His thumb finds the sobriety coin in his pocket and worries it, ridged edge biting skin through fabric. He tells himself it’s grounding, not wanting. Count the grooves, count to ten, breathe. Across from him Natasha’s hands rest on the desk, pale against the laminate. No jewellery. No tremor. Only the slightest pause where a pause shouldn’t be.
He watches her face for movement the way he listens to tape for an edit: the tiny discontinuity, the breath that doesn’t belong. Her eyes flick (not to him, not to the slip) but to the far wall where a small black dome of a camera sits above a fire-exit sign. The glance is brief, almost accidental, but it tells him more than any answer.
He wants to push again. Sealed storage. Late-night retrievals. Logs that don’t match. Names. He can see the episode timeline forming in his mind, neat chapters imposed on rot. A whistleblower’s silence, a law firm’s shadows, a death smoothed into “accident”. The word sealed sits between them like a manila envelope nobody admits to holding.
He shifts, bringing his knee under the desk, making himself smaller. Non-threatening. He’s practised at it: soft tone, open posture, letting other people feel clever enough to speak. “I’m not asking for. Natasha’s mouth tightens, not in anger but in calculation. When she finally looks up, there’s a dryness there, a librarian’s patience sharpened into warning.
“Procedural curiosity,” she says, almost lightly, “has a price in Novigrad.”
Natasha doesn’t answer directly. Her shoulders lift a fraction, then drop into a stillness that looks rehearsed, a body remembering rules before a mind commits to them. She angles the request slip so the overhead light skates across the ink, buys herself seconds by reading what she already knows is there.
“Sealed is a category,” she says, tone neutral enough to pass for training. Technical, clipped. A definition offered in place of a location.
Ilya waits, letting the silence do what pressure would: make space for error. Her eyes don’t go to him. They go past him, to the aisle ends, to the doorway, to anything that might be listening with a human face. When she speaks again, the words are arranged like index cards: correct order, no unnecessary detail.
“It means access restricted by instruction,” she adds. “Not necessarily by statute.” A beat. “Sometimes by… internal decision.”
Her fingers tap the corner of the slip once, twice, quiet punctuation, then flatten it again, smoothing imaginary creases. “If you need a formal explanation, you submit a request. It will be logged.”
Logged, he hears, and the camera dome in his peripheral seems to lean closer.
He tries again, gentler this time, letting the question wear the mask of process. “Just for my own notes,” he says, as if notes are harmless, as if logs can’t be weaponised. “If a file is retrieved after hours, someone signs out a box, there’s a timestamp, a courier slip, what happens when it doesn’t come back in? Is there a reconciliation? A monthly audit?”
He keeps his hands visible on the desk, fingers relaxed, thumb refusing the coin by sheer will. He makes himself sound bored, mildly puzzled, the way clerks do when a number doesn’t balance.
Natasha’s gaze stays on the paper, but her attention fractures: door, camera, corridor. The arch of her shoulder rises, then settles, a controlled flinch smoothed into posture. Her professionalism doesn’t crack into alarm. It compresses.
It doesn’t break: it tightens into a smaller, harder shape. Natasha’s mouth settles into a faint, dry line that might have been humour in a safer city. Her eyes lift at last, steady but guarded, and she keeps her hands flat as if touch itself could be misread. “You’re looking for a story,” she says softly, and story lands like a stamped warning, not a compliment.
The space between them didn’t widen; it thinned, sharp as wire. Intimacy, in Novigrad, came dressed as caution: two people sharing the same reflex to listen for the building listening back. Ilya felt his questions queue up, impatient, and with them the worse hunger: momentum, confession, her hand placed in his. Natasha didn’t move, but he could see the arithmetic behind her eyes.
Natasha’s composure didn’t crack; it locked. The shift was so fast it felt like a mechanism catching. One click, then the soft parts of her face were gone behind a well-fitted neutrality. Ilya had barely leaned in, barely let his voice narrow into something more pointed, and already she was elsewhere: not in the conversation, but in the building, in its habits, in whatever invisible ledger tracked who asked what.
Her posture stayed correct, shoulders level, chin neither defiant nor meek. Yet the space around her tightened as if someone had pulled a drawstring. She rotated the request slip with two fingertips until the printed lines faced her alone, the movement small and clean, like turning down a radio. The paper became a modest screen between them, not quite a refusal. Something more disciplined. A boundary executed with practice.
He caught himself watching her hands. Librarian hands, he’d thought earlier: quick, competent, a little dry from soap and cheap sanitiser. Now they were instruments of control. She smoothed the slip once, twice, flattening it as though it had arrived creased. The gesture was calming, but not for him. For her. A routine to keep fear from showing its teeth.
Ilya kept his own hands still on the counter, palms open, the universal sign of harmlessness that never quite worked when someone already knew the cost of being wrong. He wanted to say he understood, that he wasn’t trying to trap her, that he knew how procedure could be used like a fist. The words rose and stalled. He could feel the old instincts (the push, the chase, the need to make the truth happen now) testing the edges of his restraint.
Her eyes flicked up briefly, meeting his for just long enough to register him properly: not just a curious member of the public, but a man asking after doors that preferred to stay shut. Then her gaze slid away again, deliberate, giving the room its due. The archive hummed with its usual noise, paper, fluorescent ballast, distant footsteps, and underneath it, a thinner note Ilya could almost hear: the sound of attention arriving.
“Not here,” Natasha murmurs, so quietly Ilya has to lean in without looking like he’s leaning. It isn’t a rebuke; it’s a calibration. Her eyes move with trained economy, taking inventory of the room the way she would a shelf: the desk phone with its coiled cord like a waiting question, the corridor gap where anyone can pause and pretend to read a notice, the patch of dead space above the reference stacks where a camera could sit behind a polite plaque and nobody would ever admit to seeing it.
Ilya keeps his face neutral, the practiced calm he uses in interviews when someone’s about to bolt. The sobriety coin in his pocket presses into his thumb, a small metallic anchor. He wants to ask about sealed storage, about retrievals that happen when the building is meant to be asleep, about which boxes go missing and who signs their absence into existence. But he catches the tightening at the corner of her mouth, the slight hitch of breath she hides behind routine.
In Novigrad, fear doesn’t look like panic. It looks like procedure, weaponised. Her caution tells him more than an answer would.
Natasha set her palm over the request slip as if she were pinning down something that might flutter up and draw eyes. She smoothed it once, then again, the movement unhurried, almost tender in its precision. Paper made its small, dry sound against laminate. The corners aligned with the desk edge; the margin became a straight line, a rule. Her thumb lingered on his handwritten note, too dark, too obvious, then slid forward until it vanished under skin, as though covering ink could cover intent.
Ilya watched the gesture the way he watched a witness’s tells: not for nervousness, but for the choice of where to put it. Her breathing stayed level. Her gaze stayed on the form. The message, delivered without words, was clear enough to sting: keep it clean, keep it dull, keep it unremarkable.
Without looking up, she nudged the slip back a centimetre. An archivist’s refusal, minimal, deniable. Her mouth barely moved. “Questions don’t stay questions here,” she said, tone mild as a footnote. “They get logged. They get copied. Then someone decides what they’re worth.” A pause, her fingers stilling on the paper. “And who pays.”
A faint half-smile touches Natasha’s mouth, dry, almost polite, then dies before it can warm her eyes. She makes it sound like a term of art, something stamped onto every form in Novigrad: curiosity as “noise”. Her glance skims the phones, the corridor, the ceiling corners. “Noise carries,” she says, barely audible. “It echoes. It attracts someone who wants to know why you’re listening.”
Ilya let the grin arrive as if it had wandered in by accident, borne on the tail end of an exhale. It was the kind of expression he’d learned to use in interviews. Soft edges, no teeth, nothing that looked like a challenge. “You know,” he said, keeping his voice down as though the air itself might be taking notes, “if anyone’s doing real detective work in this city, it’s librarians. You’re the ones who actually remember where everything’s buried.”
In his coat pocket, his thumb found the worn rim of the sobriety coin and began its slow orbit. Metal, warmth, a groove he could trust. He matched the rhythm to his breathing: in, four; out, four. A small ritual threaded under the words so the words wouldn’t lurch into something sharper.
Natasha’s face didn’t lift to meet the compliment. Her gaze stayed where it was. On the desk, on the bland surfaces that could be justified if someone asked what she was looking at. The corners of her mouth moved in the direction of amusement, then checked themselves, like she’d caught the impulse reaching for the wrong shelf. He saw the calculation, not unkind: how much of a response could be afforded.
He pressed on anyway, too used to talking to people who thought safety lived in silence. “I’m serious. You’ve got the catalogues, the accession logs, the boring stuff that tells the truth by accident. Detectives get to chase; you get to remember.”
His thumb tightened on the coin until it bit back. He loosened it, forced the grin to stay easy. He’d promised himself (before he even walked in) that he wouldn’t sound hungry. Hunger made people shut doors.
Natasha finally looked up, only briefly, as if giving him exactly one line of sight. Her eyes were clear and tired, like she hadn’t slept properly in months. For a heartbeat, he thought she might let the joke stand.
Then her expression set into something flatter, professional as a stamp. Her voice stayed soft, precise. “Detectives have badges,” she said, and the words landed with the weight of something she’d watched happen more than once. “And still they get reassigned.”
Natasha didn’t take the bait. The hint of humour in his line met her like a file meets soft metal, patient, practised, taking off anything that might catch. “Detectives have badges,” she repeated, not louder, not harsher, as if she were quoting a regulation to herself. Her fingers straightened the slip again, aligning its edge with the desk as though order on paper could stand in for order elsewhere. “And still they get reassigned.”
The words sat between them with the chill of a corridor after hours. A badge, in her mouth, wasn’t protection; it was identification. It meant you were visible, addressable, transferable. It meant someone above you could turn a career into a warning without ever raising their voice.
Her eyes stayed steady on his, just long enough to make sure he understood the shape of the implication, then drifted away to the safe geography of forms and shelves. Soft voice, clean diction, but the sentence cut. It carried a whole catalogue of vanished names, desks cleared out overnight, doors that didn’t open again.
Ilya let the badge line settle, then eased his questions sideways, the way he did when a witness flinched at direct nouns. Not who gets punished, too sharp, but how it looks on paper. “Reassigned,” he said, as if tasting the bureaucracy. “Is that… a formal thing? A rotation? Who signs it?” He kept his tone light, almost curious, like he was asking about shelving rules. His thumb found the sobriety coin again, a small circle of metal to keep his pulse from showing. “And when someone moves,” he added, “what happens to their work? Files, logs. Does it travel with them, or does it… get misplaced?” Gentle words, but he didn’t miss the way his own focus tightened, hard and hungry beneath the calm.
Her shoulders drew in a fraction, not quite a flinch. More like a door eased onto its chain. Even the way she breathed changed, shallow and measured, as if the room might file it away. When she spoke, each sentence arrived trimmed to the bone: policy, routine, nothing accusatory. The calm wasn’t ease. It was rehearsal. Answers designed to survive replay.
The silence after his questions carried weight, as if the air itself had to be cleared through channels. Ilya could feel his own insistence sharpening, say what it is, name the lever, name the hand, and watched her deny him even a clean noun. Natasha’s caution wasn’t defiance; it was self-preservation, practiced to invisibility. Two methods, neither kind, meeting like blades that refused to spark.
Her warning came out almost as courtesy, pitched low enough to be mistaken for advice between colleagues. “Procedural curiosity has a price.”
Ilya felt the phrase settle in the space between them like a stamped form. It didn’t carry his name in it. It sounded older than this conversation, older than her, something passed along in offices where people learned to keep their heads down without looking like they were bowing. A line you could deploy without admitting there was anyone to fear.
He watched her mouth close on the last word and understood the economy of it: no accusations, no claims, nothing a listener could quote back as proof of misconduct. Just a price, unnamed, which meant it could be anything. Overtime you never got paid for, a transfer you didn’t request, a lock changed, a “routine” inspection that tore through your desk. The kind of consequences that arrived dressed as process.
His thumb worried the sobriety coin, metal biting into skin. The old instinct rose, push harder, get the lever, force a confession out of silence, then the other instinct, learned the hard way, pulled him back: don’t turn a human being into a tool when they’re already being used.
“You mean… here?” he asked, and hated how weak it sounded, how much it invited her to educate him.
Natasha didn’t answer directly. Her eyes flicked past him, not to the bookshelves but to the angles of the room: doorway, corridor, the glass pane that made every movement readable from outside. When she looked back, her expression was composed, but the composition had the brittle quality of something set too often.
“People ask,” she said, a fraction of a pause before the next words, as if deciding what could safely exist in air. “They ask and then they’re surprised when the reply comes in paperwork.” She adjusted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder, a small, practical motion that also made her body ready to leave. “It isn’t personal. That’s the point.”
For an instant, something in her slips out of alignment. Not panic (nothing that would earn a glance from a passer-by) but a minute falter like a misfiled page: irritation, fatigue, and the quiet anger of being expected to pretend that caution is merely temperament. Her lips part as if she might say the true sentence, the one with names and dates and motives, then she stops herself. The pause isn’t hesitation. It’s calculation.
She swallows, throat working once, and her shoulders settle back into their proper lines. The softness doesn’t vanish from her voice so much as it is trimmed down, made office-safe. Words chosen for how they will sound if repeated. Sentences that could survive an audit.
Ilya hears it in the change of cadence: the way she places each clause like a stamp in the right box. He knows that re-centring; he has done it in meetings, in kitchens, in front of mirrors, anywhere the wrong truth could turn into an excuse.
“Please,” she says, and it lands less as a request than a boundary re-drawn with a ruler. “Not here.”
He caught the things she didn’t quite manage to file away. The bruised half-moons under her eyes that no concealer could make look like sleep. The way her fingers kept the bag strap pinned to her chest, not possessive but defensive, as if it could stop a hand that wasn’t there. When he shifted his weight, her focus slid past him automatically (over his shoulder, to the corridor, the glass, the blank stretch of wall where sound could travel) then returned to his face with an effort that read as professional courtesy.
It wasn’t invitation. It was inventory: exits, witnesses, plausible deniability. In her stillness he felt the constant motion of someone measuring risk in real time, and calling it routine because calling it anything else would make it real.
The room reconfigured itself the way he’d heard audio do when someone leaned away from a microphone: angles shifting, distances recalculated. Doorway, corridor, glass. Each became a potential listener. Natasha remained the model clerk, voice level, hands composed, giving him something that could pass as routine. But he could see the bracing underneath, as if consequence were not threat but schedule.
He feels it answer in his own spine, that practiced angle of self-containment: fear packed down, worn daily, folded neat as outerwear and never set on a chair. Her warning isn’t judgement. It’s instruction. Street-level statute, delivered in a voice that has learnt to survive repetition. Reluctant, yes, but not empty. A sliver of trust, carefully rationed.
The fluorescent lights buzzed with a steady insistence, a thin electrical whine that sat just inside the skull. It bleached the colour from everything it touched, paper, skin, even the varnished wood of the counter, until the room felt less like an archive and more like a photographed crime scene waiting to be labelled. Air moved, but only in theory; what he actually breathed was warmed dust and toner, the faint, sweet bite of old glue in binding tape. The kind of smell that clung to your clothes and made you wonder, later, who might recognise it.
Ilya shifted his stance and the sound of his shoe on linoleum came back to him too sharply, as if the building were amplifying it for an unseen ear. Somewhere behind the wall, a printer coughed and began a new cycle, the rollers catching with a wet, rhythmic chatter. The noise patterned itself into something that felt like transcription: a machine learning the shape of their silence.
Natasha didn’t fidget. She didn’t have to. The tension sat in the set of her jaw, in the careful way she arranged her hands as though they belonged on a form. Her gaze stayed polite, but it had edges: trained to skim for reflections in glass, for shadows in doorways, for the sudden absence of footsteps. When she spoke, her diction was crisp, the kind of careful that could be called professional in a report.
He kept his tone mild, deliberately unhurried. Questions, in Novigrad, weren’t just questions; they were requests for someone else to carry part of your weight. He could feel the impulse to press (names, dates, the word sealed) but even the syllables seemed dangerous under that light, too clean, too recordable. He watched her mouth, the way it tightened a fraction at any phrase that sounded like an accusation in disguise.
The overhead buzz held steady, as if it were the room’s only honest statement. Every other sound felt chosen, and therefore suspect. He hated that he understood her caution. He hated, more, how much it made sense.
In his pocket, the sobriety coin turned from keepsake to instrument. His thumb found the ridged rim and began its circuit, slow enough to look like nothing from the outside, precise enough to give his nerves a job. Once. Twice. The metal was warmer than it should have been, heat trapped by fabric and the insistence of his grip. He let the familiar texture talk him down: count the grooves, feel the nick near the edge where he’d dropped it in a stairwell two winters ago, remember the weight as proof of time that didn’t end in a blackout.
The room wanted his body to confess. Heart rate, breath, the tiny tell of agitation that men like Petrovic could smell through paperwork. He refused. He kept his breathing shallow and even, pulled his tongue off his teeth, loosened his jaw. The coin’s circle became a metronome for restraint, a silent edit: cut the urge to push, cut the hunger to be right, cut the old reflex that said pressure solves everything.
He listened for his own pulse and made sure it didn’t get loud.
He makes himself readable on purpose. Not open, never that, but legible in the way a form is legible when it’s filled in neatly. Palms loose, fingers empty, phone left facedown and untouched. He angles his body a half-step back from the counter so she has air, so it doesn’t feel like he’s closing a distance she didn’t offer. Weight settled evenly, knees unlocked, nothing that says hurry, nothing that says corner.
It’s a performance, but it isn’t false. He knows what men do with proximity when they want compliance. He knows what procedure looks like when it’s used as a hand on the throat.
So he gives her exits: space, time, silence. He lets his eyes soften, keeps them steady, and waits as if waiting is the whole point.
In his head, phrases lined up like raw tape waiting for a blade. He ran them through the mental edit suite: cut the heat, cut the implied blame, cut the kind of curiosity that turned, later, into an allegation. Even his softer prompts (help me understand, just off the record) felt barbed in this place. He kept the words behind his teeth until they sounded harmless enough to survive being overheard.
He chooses the smallest truth he can stand to offer. “I’m not here to make trouble for you,” he says, and keeps it plain enough to be believed. He lets a gap open afterwards just air. In that quiet he reads her, not for interest but for strain: which tightens first, her mouth when she speaks, or her eyes when she doesn’t.
He keeps to the questions that could live on a laminated instruction sheet. Which desk stamped reclassifications before they went upstairs. Whether a citizen could request a scan instead of a physical pull. How long the public queue ran in winter, when the buses stalled and people gave up. He phrases everything as if he’s trying to avoid wasting her time, as if the only stakes are his schedule and a missing form.
Natasha answers with the economy of someone used to being overheard. Her voice stays low, precise, clipped at the edges. “Requests go through Records Intake. If you put ‘urgent’ they’ll ignore it.” A pause, a faint shrug that doesn’t lift her shoulders. “Reclassifications aren’t a branch. It’s… a decision.” She doesn’t say who makes it.
He could push (sealed storage, late-night retrievals, boxes that enter the ledger and never leave it again) but he watches the small sign before the words: the way her fingers flatten against the counter, as if smoothing paper that isn’t there. The way her eyes flick once to the phone cradle, then away. The building teaches reflexes.
So he lets the line go slack on purpose. He asks about opening hours and takes the answer as if it matters. He asks whether the reading room has lockers and nods like a tourist. Then he stops, cleanly, mid-current, proving he can stop himself. A controlled silence, offered back to her like space.
In his pocket, the sobriety coin shifts under his thumb: ridged edge, familiar weight. He rubs it once, the way he does when a craving takes the shape of a question. Not the craving for a drink. The other one: to force the truth out of someone by tightening the screws.
He breathes through his nose, slow, and keeps his voice level. “If I file a request and it comes back denied,” he says, “is there an appeal process that actually works, or is it theatre?”
Natasha’s mouth twitches. Not quite humour, not quite pain. “There’s a form,” she says. “It goes somewhere.” Another careful pause. “It comes back when it comes back.”
He nods, taking the answer as complete, even as it isn’t. He makes himself easy to dismiss. Easy to forget. The opposite of a threat.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he says, and for once the sentence isn’t bait dressed up as decency. He feels the old instinct reach for leverage, tell me where it’s kept, tell me who signed it out, and he keeps it penned in, like a dog that’s learned the cost of biting.
He shifts his weight away from the counter, giving her space that can’t be mistaken for a manoeuvre. The sobriety coin sits heavy in his pocket; he doesn’t touch it. Touching it would turn this into a ritual, and rituals have a way of becoming bargains.
“I’m not asking you to break rules,” he adds, voice low enough to stay between them. “And I’m not going to pretend I can protect you if someone decides you’re… useful.” The word comes out dry, procedural, like something printed on a notice.
The fluorescent light makes everything look overheard. He glances, briefly, at the phone cradle, then back. Letting her see he understands why her answers arrive trimmed and clean.
“If you want me gone,” he says, “say so. I’ll leave. No hard feelings.”
She doesn’t soften, not in any way that would read as surrender. The caution stays in place: straight-backed, neatly buttoned, built out of policies and the muscle-memory of consequences. Yet when he says, “Natasha,” he keeps it quiet and exact, without the oily warmth of familiarity, she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t lift a finger to correct him back into Mr Markov and Ms Velichkova, doesn’t reach for the small shield of titles.
Her gaze holds his a beat too long for a service counter exchange. Not inviting. Appraising. As if she’s weighing the gentleness for hidden barbs, testing whether his patience is genuine or simply another method of pressure dressed in civility.
The impulse comes sharp and easy: make it human, ask for her number, offer a lift, turn himself into an answer she can accept. He catches it at the root, need dressed up as care, and lets it die unspoken. Instead he keeps his hands still and gives her a clean exit. “If there’s ever something I can request in daylight,” he says, “you decide. I follow.”
They close it down the way the corridor trains everyone to: a minimal nod, a clerk’s half-smile that means nothing, bodies angled apart as if the cameras prefer clean lines. She turns back to her desk; he lets the distance happen. Outside, foot traffic swallows him, tram bells and damp coats. Two truths keep pace in his head. She can’t be made into a source, and he’s already lying if he acts like she’s just another file.
Natasha’s voice held its usual careful evenness as she turned the folder towards him, the way she always did. Flat palms, no fingerprints on the margins, a habit dressed up as courtesy. Ilya asked it like he didn’t care, like it was a footnote he could afford to be wrong about: whether that accession stamp (oval, violet ink, the tiny serifed “Municipal Legal Depository”) had been in circulation in ’09 or if it came in with the new batch the year after.
For a fraction too long, she didn’t move.
Her gaze stayed pinned to the paper, but it didn’t seem to read it. The fluorescent light above the desk made a hard line on her cheekbone; her pupils looked slightly blown, as if she’d stepped out of a dark room and hadn’t adjusted yet. Ilya felt his thumb find the edge of the coin in his pocket and worry it once, a quiet ritual to keep himself in his body.
“’09,” she said, and the answer landed clean, confident, correct.
Then she spoke again immediately, as if the pause had offended her. “It was introduced in the third quarter,” she added, too precise for the question, the words quick and clipped. “Not that it matters.” Her fingers tapped the corner of the page in a little reprimand, not at him: at herself.
Ilya waited. Silence in the archive was never empty; it was made of fans and distant drawers and the soft drag of felt chair-legs. He could hear his own breathing and, underneath it, the urge to push, names, dates, who had done it, rising like thirst.
Natasha swallowed. “I haven’t been sleeping properly,” she said, and the confession came out like a technical error she’d discovered in her own system. Embarrassed, almost irritated. She didn’t look up when she said it; she reached for her pencil, then stopped, as if she’d forgotten why it was in her hand.
Her mouth tightened. “It’s nothing. Just… bad habits.”
Nothing, she called it, the way people call smoke a smell. Ilya kept his tone neutral on purpose. “That does things to you,” he said quietly, not asking for more, letting the statement sit where it could do the least damage and the most good.
In the lull between patrons, Natasha made work for herself out of nothing. She squared the folder to the desk edge, then squared it again; tapped the pencil until it sat exactly parallel to the spine; smoothed a page that was already flat. The movements were neat, practiced, and just a shade too fast. Like she was trying to keep ahead of something that could catch her if she stopped.
“I’m up in pieces,” she said, eyes still on the paper as if it required her full attention. “Ten minutes. Twenty. Then I’m awake again.” Her fingers pinched the corner of an index card, released it, pinched it again. “You start listening for the building instead of sleeping. Pipes. Radiators. The lift cable when someone comes in late. And then. “. The quiet where you think you heard footsteps, but you can’t prove it.”
When her phone lit in the dark, she said, her body reacted before she’d decided whether she was afraid. A sharp, involuntary flinch, heat in the chest, then the mind racing to catch up and pretend it had been in charge.
She gave a single laugh, dry, scraped thin, as if she could file it under humour and be done.
Ilya let the moment sit, unclaimed. He didn’t reach for the obvious questions. The ones that sounded like concern but functioned like a trap. Names could be repeated. Accusations could be quoted back with the right emphasis. Even a well-meant “who?” could turn into a knife in someone else’s hand.
In his pocket, his thumb found the sobriety coin and pushed, hard. The ridged edge cut a clean little pattern into his skin, pain as punctuation, a private reminder to stay here: desk, paper, her breathing. He didn’t mention it. He didn’t let his gaze dart to the cameras or the door.
When he spoke, it was almost flat, the volume chosen the way you choose a safe route home. Low. Even. Nothing for the room to catch and carry.
He told her he understood what it did to the nerves when you couldn’t tell if you were being watched, or if your body had simply learned to brace for it. He didn’t dress it up as courage, didn’t dismiss it as paranoia. He spoke of it like muscle ache: real, measurable, exhausting. The steadiness of his voice made the corridor feel briefly private, less like a room with an audience.
Natasha drew in a careful breath and let it out on a slow count, the first unguarded exhale he’d heard from her. Air leaving like something finally unclenched. She gave one small nod, gratitude stripped of the word, and returned to the file with less rigidity in her shoulders. When the next patron approached, her face reset. Still, the mask had a seam now, and she didn’t stitch it shut.
At the archive counter everything had a correct shape to it. The forms were the right colour, the stamps landed where they were supposed to, the phrases came out in the approved order: request slip, accession number, “please wait”, “collection is off-site today”. The performance of legality.
Ilya played his part with the ease of a man who’d learned that the quickest way through a barrier was to treat it as real. He kept his hands visible on the wood edge, voice pitched for the room rather than for her. When she asked for identification, he slid it over without comment, eyes on the paper, not on her face.
But it was in the gaps that the actual conversation happened.
Natasha’s gaze lifted once, quick, measuring, then dropped back to the screen. Her index finger tapped the laminate a single, light knock as she returned his card. Not a signal you could quote. Not a gesture you could accuse. Just a tiny refusal of the space they were in.
Not here.
His thumb found the coin in his pocket and rolled it once. He let his expression settle into mild comprehension, the kind clerks responded to because it didn’t ask them to take sides. “Of course,” he said, as if she’d explained a filing rule. He picked up the request slip with two fingers and nodded, the nod people gave when they’d been told the wait would be long.
He stepped away without haste, angling his body so any camera would read it as a simple clearing of the queue. He didn’t look over his shoulder. He didn’t hover close enough to make her responsible for him. In the reflection of the glass partition he caught a flash of movement, Natasha straightening a stack of returned folders with unnecessary precision, aligning corners until they could have been cut from one sheet.
A patron moved into his place and Natasha’s voice changed texture, polite and public again. Ilya drifted toward the noticeboard and studied the pinned announcements as if he’d never seen a timetable in his life. He counted the hum of the fluorescent lights, the scrape of chair legs, the soft slap of a stamp.
When Natasha’s fingertip traced, briefly, the edge of the counter to the left he made a small, ordinary pivot in that direction, as if following signage.
He knew how to leave a room without making it a scene. He knew, too, how to stay close without forcing anyone else to be brave.
They began to time it with the care of people handling something fragile. Ilya arrived when the midday queue had bled away and the archive’s air thinned, when the corridor copier was chewing through someone else’s requisitions and the racket gave them cover. Natasha watched the room the way other people watched a clock. Supervisor’s door shut, a courier’s footsteps fading, the security guard turning his head towards the window as if the grey light might explain itself.
At the counter she did everything correctly. Request slip taken. Stamp applied. Screen consulted. Her mouth formed the sanctioned phrases. Her hands, though, told the truth. She returned his identification with the corners perfectly squared, nudged his papers back as if by accident, leaving a fraction of a gap. Enough for his eyes to catch a pencilled number on the margin, a misplaced date.
He answered with the same small courtesy each time: no reaching over the glass, no quick questions, no body language that could be narrated later as pressure. His thumb rolled the sobriety coin once and stopped. He kept his gaze on the documents, not on her face, letting her control what was offered and when.
Away from the desk, her voice is the first thing to shed its uniform. The vowels soften, the words come smaller, as if they have to fit between the stairwell’s echo and the grind of a distant lift. “So,” she says, and lets it hang with a thin, dry twist that could be humour if her eyes weren’t already checking the ceiling corners, the sprinkler head, the seam where the door meets the frame.
She starts a sentence like it’s harmless, they moved it, then catches herself and rewrites it on the fly. “It was… reclassified. On paper.” The pause isn’t for emphasis; it’s for survival. Even pronouns feel risky. She gestures with two fingers, not pointing at anything, and her mouth tightens as though she can taste the word that got someone punished last time.
He learned to move at the speed she could afford. One question, then he let the stairwell breathe. A thought surfaced (Kravets & Morozova again, the sealed cabinet, the neat handwriting) and he swallowed it back before it could sound like a demand. When she paused on a landing he paused too, shoulders angled away, hands open. He listened with a recorder’s patience, but without the red light.
Their contact stretched by increments you could miss if you weren’t counting: the few steps together before the stairwell swallowed them, the tram platform where wind and metal shredded syllables into harmless noise, the café table set at an angle to the door. Natasha fed him significance in splinters, a date repeated, a reference that didn’t quite fit, a name caught behind her teeth, watching for his lunge. He stayed still. He let her choose the edges, and the trust assembled itself there.
In the stairwell’s half-light, Natasha keeps her voice level and her hands occupied, the way a person does when they know eyes can land on them without warning. From her tote she produces a thin folder (unremarkable, soft at the corners) like it’s nothing more than a bundle of shift notes and overdue slips. The paper smells faintly of dust and toner, old rules made physical.
She opens it on her knee, using her body as a shield, and slides a single sheet into the gap where the handrail throws a shadow. Ilya leans in just enough to see. He doesn’t touch it. In his pocket his thumb finds the ridged edge of the sobriety coin and worries it once, twice, a private metronome.
Natasha’s finger taps the case number. A sequence of digits printed in bureaucratic certainty, the kind that decides what exists and what doesn’t. “Look,” she says, and the word is barely a sound. With the corner of a pencil eraser she rubs one digit (careful, controlled) until the ink loses its crispness and becomes something that could be read two ways if you wanted it to. Then, with the same pencil, she redraws it cleanly. The new line is confident. Ordinary. The kind of confidence that passes through offices unchecked.
“Not a forgery,” she murmurs, eyes lifting to the landing above as if listening for footsteps. “A correction.”
Ilya watches the digit settle into its new identity and feels his stomach tighten, not from fear exactly, but from the clarity of it. No smashed locks. No missing boxes. Just a tiny, sanctioned-looking edit that reroutes any honest search into a corridor that ends in shrugged shoulders and closed doors.
“So the file’s still here,” he says, keeping his tone neutral, almost bored.
Natasha’s mouth twitches, dry humour without the safety of a smile. “The file is always ‘still here’,” she replies. “It’s just… filed somewhere else.” Her pencil tip hovers a second, then she tucks it away, as if the act itself was never meant to have happened.
Natasha takes him down into the second layer, where the paper stays put and the record moves. She doesn’t touch the file this time; she points at the screen on her phone, brightness dimmed, the interface of the catalogue made ghostly by the stairwell’s grime. On the surface it’s clean: title, case number, holding. But she shows him the seams. How a date can be “standardised” from a messy human entry into a format that sorts differently, how a subject tag can be swapped for something that means almost the same to a machine and entirely different to a person, how a location code can be nudged one character so it lands in a shelf range that exists on paper but belongs to another collection’s geography.
Ilya feels the urge to ask who authorised it, who keyed it in, and clamps down. He can hear his own pulse in the quiet, the old instinct to make it a confrontation.
“No shredders,” Natasha says, as if answering the question he doesn’t voice. Her eyes stay on the stairwell above them. “No drama. Just order.”
She looks back at him. “If it can’t be found,” she adds, “it might as well not exist.”
Then she draws out a photocopied accession page and slips it over the original like a skin. The two sheets align almost perfectly, and that’s the point: the difference has to live in the margins of attention.
Her nail pins a line where a clerk’s name should sit. “Look at the hand,” she murmurs. The writing is neat, careful, trying too hard to be neutral. Too even in its slant. The loops close like they were taught to, not like they were earned, and the downstrokes press hard at the ends as if the writer needed the paper to believe them.
“Respectable penmanship,” she says, dry and precise, “is not the same as the right hand.”
Ilya lets her finish, holding his questions back like a trained reflex. In his pocket the coin turns and turns, ridges biting into his thumb until the sting feels earned. When her voice trails off, he gives her a piece of himself as payment. Stress is a doorway, he says. Not a dramatic thirst, just quiet bargaining. He lives by blocks of time, ringed with meetings; if the structure slackens, his head starts issuing permissions in a voice that sounds like his own.
Natasha doesn’t soften; her gaze recalibrates, less guarded than appraising. Ilya draws his hand out slowly and flashes the sobriety coin, dull metal, ridged edge, then closes his fist again, like the sight itself is a debt. He tells her, plain and careful, that relapse doesn’t announce itself as disaster. It arrives as a normal minute that asks to be forgiven. In the stairwell, the words carry like instruction.
Natasha slid the slip of paper across the counter between the stamp pad and the day’s intake tray, a movement so practised it could have been part of the job. No pause. No emphasis. Just a rectangle of cheap white, trimmed crookedly, carrying one catalog reference in her precise, small hand.
The number looked like every other number in the building. That was how it was meant to survive. Ordinary enough to disappear into routine, specific enough to point like a finger if anyone chose to follow it.
She kept her eyes on him while she squared a stack of returned folders, tapping their edges against the counter until they aligned. Her fingers never hovered over the paper, never claimed it. If someone glanced up from the security desk, it would read as paperwork shifting. In the glass behind her, his own reflection blinked back at him: headphones around his neck, a tired face trying to look like a citizen with a question.
He felt the weight of the test before he understood its shape. Not whether he could remember a string of characters (his recorder brain was good at that) but whether he could carry it without turning it into a weapon pointed at her. The slip wasn’t an offer. It was a measure.
His thumb found the ridged edge of the coin in his pocket and worried it once, the small, familiar friction anchoring him to the counter, to the smell of old paper and toner. Don’t rush. Don’t seize. Don’t perform gratitude.
Natasha’s voice, when it came, was barely more than a bureaucratic aside. “It’s filed under the general index,” she said, as though she were explaining how to request a map. “If you can’t find it, you didn’t hear it from me.”
A custodian rattled a trolley past, keys clinking, and Natasha’s shoulders stayed loose. Her mouth didn’t smile, but the corner of it tightened in dry warning.
Ilya didn’t reach for the slip immediately. He let the beat pass, one more return stamped, one more folder slid into place, then drew the paper in with two fingers, like he was picking up a receipt. His eyes stayed on hers as if he was signing something he’d be held to.
He said the reference back to her once, low enough that it could have been a note to himself, and watched her face for the flinch that would mean he’d misjudged the risk. None came. He folded the slip into a tight square and slid it into his wallet behind a dead library card, then kept his hands on the counter as if the exchange had never happened.
Outside, he didn’t let the number turn into a mantra. He didn’t text it to himself. He didn’t record it. He walked two blocks, breathed through the first itch of urgency, and waited for the tram like anyone else with nowhere urgent to be.
When he finally moved on it, he did it sideways. A public request, phrased clumsily on purpose, for nearby holdings. Adjacent dates, adjacent case numbers, the kind of dull sweep that clerks processed on autopilot. He asked for things that would be pulled anyway, things that wouldn’t set off a late-night “correction” in the log. He took notes on the margins, not the headline, and built his trail from what was allowed to exist.
The restricted item stayed untouched, a shadow he refused to point at.
The next time they meet, Natasha doesn’t start with the file. She starts with the absence of one. Her eyes scan him the way they’d scan a shelf: looking for the wrong gap, the fresh scuff, the tell-tale misalignment that means someone pulled too hard. She has already walked the corridor he would have walked, read the day’s sign-out sheet as if it were gossip, listened for his name in the clerks’ bored chatter. Nothing. No irritated supervisor. No late correction in the accession log. No box left sweating in the wrong place.
A breath leaves her through her nose: almost a laugh, but disciplined.
Then, because comfort is a trap, she leans in and murmurs, “You requested adjacent holdings under the wrong series code. Next time, use the municipal index. It looks lazier.”
In return, Ilya offers her something that isn’t quite a confession, but lands like one: his notebook laid open, spine flattened by use. A timeline built from splinters: time-of-day, weather, light levels, the background noises people don’t catalogue because they don’t think they matter. He shows her his brackets, his colour marks, the place he makes himself write unknown and stop.
Natasha watches his thumb pause over the screen as he replays the clip: tram brakes shrieking, then, two beats later, a church bell, and beneath it a station announcement smeared by wind. He writes the timestamp beside a remembered sentence, like pinning a body to the wall before the room can spin. When she hands the notebook back, her fingers stay on the page edge a fraction too long. “Next,” she murmurs, nearer than kind, “I can pull the duplicate docket. Don’t ask for sealed storage. Not yet.”
The platform is all glare and crosswind, the kind that turns breath into static and makes every sound feel sharper than it should. The fluorescent tubes above them buzz with an impatient, insectile note, flattened further by the metal roof and the constant grind of the junction beyond. A tram rattles through without stopping, windows lit like an aquarium, and the slipstream tugs at coats and loose paper.
Ilya keeps his shoulders loose by force of habit. His hand stays in his pocket, thumb worrying the sobriety coin until the ridged edge bites back. One small, honest sensation in a place built from reflections. He scans the shelter glass as if checking the timetable: faces doubled and distorted, the angle of a jaw, the way someone’s gaze rests a fraction too long before sliding away. Everything is framed; nothing is direct. Even the adverts seem to watch, glossy models smiling over public warnings and municipal slogans.
Natasha stands half a step behind the timetable post, posture arranged as ordinary. Weight on one foot, scarf pulled up, a woman waiting for a tram after a long day. But her eyes move like a reader’s, left to right, returning to the same line until it resolves into meaning. She doesn’t look at him; she watches the space around him. The wind flips a strand of hair loose and she tucks it back with neat fingers, the gesture so practiced it could be a signal.
A station announcement coughs out of the speaker in a blur of syllables. Someone laughs too loudly near the ticket machine, then quiets as if remembering where they are. Ilya catches the smell of wet wool and cheap tobacco on the wind; it threads under the antiseptic tang of the platform cleanser. He shifts a centimetre to put the post between himself and the stairwell entrance, an adjustment that can be coincidence if anyone asks.
Natasha’s gaze flicks to a CCTV dome, then away. Counting it, mapping it, dismissing it. Her hand tightens around the strap of her bag, knuckles whitening for a beat, then relaxing into compliance. Ilya lets his breathing follow the rhythm he uses in meetings: in, hold, out. Slow enough to keep his pulse from writing its own story.
A man in a dark cap drifts into their orbit on a line too clean to be chance. Not a shove, not the clumsy bump of a commuter with headphones. Just a measured brush of shoulder and sleeve, close enough to trade heat through cloth. Ilya catches the faint rasp of stubble, the damp-metal smell of rain on cheap fabric, and the way the man’s pace doesn’t change even as he makes contact, like he’s gauging resistance rather than apologising for it.
Natasha moves first. She pivots with the economy of someone who has practised becoming harmless: torso angling away from Ilya, chin lifting, eyes going blank and courteous. Her face settles into that municipal expression, present, compliant, forgettable. If the man looks back later, he’ll find only a woman inconvenienced by weather and schedules.
Ilya delays by half a heartbeat on purpose, long enough to look natural. Then he follows the script: shoulders soft, gaze sliding past the man as if there’s nothing to register, feet shifting so they’re no longer aligned. Two strangers sharing a platform. Two separate silences. His thumb grinds the sobriety coin once, hard, a private warning not to flare.
The moment doesn’t break so much as dilute. The man keeps walking with the same calibrated pace, then settles by the far rubbish bin as if it has always been his destination. He brings his phone up, screen dark for a beat too long, and tips his head: not looking, listening. A courier trolley clatters past; somewhere behind them the junction coughs up another tram, its approach a thin electric whine that climbs the rails and eats the smaller sounds.
Under the fluorescents, faces bleach into mask-like planes, eyes hollowed by shadow. Ilya uses the noise as cover for a slow exhale. Four in. Hold. Six out. He keeps his gaze on the timetable glass, on the reflected ads, anywhere but the man. The impulse to turn and measure that attention fades, reluctantly, like a hand unclenching.
When the cap finally dissolves into the commuter churn, Natasha’s discipline falters: not in her posture, not in the careful blankness of her eyes, but in the brief, unconscious reach of her hand. Two fingers hook Ilya’s sleeve, testing cloth, testing presence, as if the platform might tilt without something solid. Ilya covers her knuckles with his palm, steadying and unremarked, and keeps breathing like nothing happened.
Their eyes find each other for a beat, measured, rationed. Too long would be confession; too short would be fear. In that thin corridor of permission, Natasha tilts her chin as if checking the arrival board, and Ilya steps in on the same borrowed logic. The kiss lands quick and necessary, a coded pulse more than tenderness. When they part, faces flatten back into public angles, but the pact stays lit under the wind.
They separate the way people do when they’ve learned the city watches for softness. Natasha turns her shoulders as if the wind has caught her wrong, fingers busying themselves with her lapel, smoothing wool that doesn’t need smoothing. The motion makes a small barrier between her face and anyone looking for tells. She doesn’t glance back; she simply angles towards the nearer exit, becoming another tired worker with a sensible bag and a blank agenda.
Ilya drops his hand into his pocket and finds the sobriety coin by habit, thumb worrying its ridged edge once, twice, then still. His other hand lifts his phone, screen bright enough to justify his lowered gaze. He scrolls without seeing, letting the gesture read as impatience or routine rather than aftermath. In the glass of the shelter, the two of them occupy the same strip of reflected light for a few steps, parallel silhouettes, shoulders almost aligned, until a tram shudders past and the reflection breaks into jittering fragments.
He times his pace to the noise. The junction is generous with cover: a bus exhaling at the curb, a vendor’s radio spitting tinny pop, the thin sleet of conversation from commuters who have never learned to keep their voices down. He turns when he should, not when he wants to. Procedure, he reminds himself. Blend. Don’t look like a man following or being followed.
Natasha’s footsteps become smaller, absorbed by the platform’s rough concrete and the damp air. The last glimpse he allows himself is not of her face but of the back of her head: dark hair pinned tight, the line of her neck disappearing into her collar. No hesitation in her stride. If anyone studied her, they’d see only purpose.
When Ilya reaches the street, the shop windows catch him in cold panes. For a moment, he expects to see her shape beside his, an echo, a confession, then he’s alone in every reflection, framed by adverts and sodium light. He keeps walking anyway, phone up, jaw set, coin steady, as if the night hasn’t left a live wire under his ribs.
The next morning the archive smells of damp wool and radiator dust, the kind of heat that dries your throat but never your coat. Ilya takes his place at the counter like he belongs there: elbows in, voice low, nothing about his posture that says urgent. The clerk slides a small stack of slips towards him with the bored efficiency of someone paid to stop noticing patterns.
A return notice sits on top. Clean white paper, municipal font, the due date stamped too hard, as if pressure could make the bureaucracy real. Beneath the printed line, three call numbers have been added in careful block letters.
They aren’t hers on paper, Natasha’s hand runs narrower, more economical, but the choice of numbers is hers in the way a key fits a lock. Specific, angled, pretending to be ordinary. A guidance note disguised as a reprimand.
He doesn’t look up. His thumb finds the edge of the slip, testing it like paper can tell the truth if you listen hard enough. The numbers fold into his memory with the same cold precision as a license plate. He tucks the notice into his notebook between blank pages, where cameras see only stationery and procedure.
He doesn’t reply in text; words have weight, timestamps, pathways. Instead he edits his week the way he edits audio. Cutting silence, trimming risk. He shifts meetings to the first light slots, when his head is clear and his cravings haven’t learned his schedule. Interviews become tight, thirty minutes and out, no lingering corridor talk, no friendly second coffee that turns into a vulnerability. He stops using the long tram platforms where you can be pinned in open space; he takes bus routes with bad timetables and better cover, entrances that spill him into crowds, not sightlines. If someone decides to trail him, they trail him through turnstiles, markets, stairwells that echo and confuse direction. He doesn’t lead anyone to a building with her in it. Not once.
Natasha’s guidance settles into a quiet system, each piece small enough to pass as negligence. A torn newspaper corner appears in a municipal yearbook at the exact month a committee “lost” its minutes. A bookmark turns up misfiled, its frayed ribbon pointing to the accession ledger where the rewritten entries wear their neat, alien hand. On a shelf label, a single pencil dot: don’t pull this in daylight; come back when the cleaners are in.
They never name it, but the work starts to include staying alive. Ilya’s attention strays from documents to doors, from dates to the shape of a corridor and who’s loitering with nothing to do. He times his questions so she can answer without leaving a trail. Natasha adjusts her shifts, plants plausible errands, builds him clean exits into her day. Every exchange carries the same quiet assumption: the truth will surface: and they mean to still be standing.
Sasha made a ceremony out of not making one. On the right afternoons (never the same day twice, never close enough to be called a schedule) the brass bell over the door would jingle for the last time and his hand would move as if pulled by string: CLOSED FOR INVENTORY swung into place, centred, straightened with a thumbprint wiped away. From the street it looked like small business drudgery; inside, it was an agreed signal that didn’t need speaking.
He dimmed the front lights to a tired amber and left the window display exactly as it was: a leaning tower of atlases, a chipped porcelain inkwell, a stack of municipal yearbooks that had outlived their usefulness. The shop’s hum changed when the fluorescent tubes went off: less buzz, more of the building’s bones: distant plumbing, the soft rattle of a tram two streets over. He didn’t lock the door. He just turned the bolt halfway, the kind of half-measure that said I’m here, but not for you.
Ilya came in like a customer who’d forgotten what he needed. He kept his hands out of sight, thumb working his coin through pocket fabric until the ridges bit. The recorder stayed off, a dead weight in his bag. He watched Sasha’s face for the micro-flinch that meant someone had asked questions, or that the wrong person had been browsing too long at the front shelves.
Sasha’s backroom table cleared with a speed that was too smooth to be innocent. Receipt books and catalogues slid into a drawer, a cloth went down, and on top of it appeared what they were really there for: a cheap desk lamp, a battered hole punch, a cup of pencils sharpened to points like needles. Beside them, a stack of blank paper cut to the same size as official forms. So any copy, if it needed to, could pass at a glance.
He spoke little. When he did, it came out sideways, like legal commentary muttered over poetry. “Inventory,” he said, deadpan, as if the city could be counted and corrected. Then his eyes flicked to the corridor, to the front door, and back again: measuring risk by habit, because habit was the only camouflage that held.
Natasha began treating Sasha’s shop like a stage set where every prop had an alibi. She arrived before the bell’s last jingle, while the front lights still pretended to be open for business, and moved with the studied patience of someone killing time between buses. One day she pulled municipal yearbooks from the bottom shelf and stacked them in a neat, apologetic column; another she asked whether he had anything by Akhmatova in the old translation, as if poetry were the only contraband she’d ever carried.
Her fingers always came away dusty. That helped. Dust was proof of innocence.
When Sasha’s back was turned, she’d slide a sliver of paper into a spine. Never the same book twice, never a title that would look out of place in a student’s hands. The strip was thin enough to be mistaken for a receipt, the ink cramped: call numbers broken into harmless fragments, box labels written as if they belonged to tax files, asterisks where the real meaning lived. Shorthand that was nothing on its own, but became a map if you already knew the city’s dead ends.
Ilya came on a different cadence, as if the city had taught him that urgency was a kind of confession. He never arrived breathless, never looked at his watch. He let the bell announce him like any other patron and took a slow circuit past the counter display, eyes skimming titles while his hand worried the coin in his pocket until his pulse levelled out.
The recorder stayed buried, zipped inside his bag beneath paperbacks and a folded rain jacket. His phone remained dark. What he carried instead was memory and a notebook so small and bland it could have held shopping lists: milk, batteries, string. He wrote only when he had to.
In the back, his questions came out pared to bone. Who signed, who handled it, who moved it, and who got paid when it vanished.
Soon they stop acting careful and become it. They arrive separated by minutes, trade a few harmless lines at the counter, ink, birthdays, a nephew who “likes trains”, then let speech die the instant the backroom door clicks shut. If a browser won’t leave, Natasha drifts into the stacks, hands busy, face blank. Ilya turns into any man hunting a gift, coin biting his thumb through cloth.
On each return to the shop, their talk compressed. Dates became “before the transfer” or “after the midnight pull”; names fell away into functions. Locations were called by their absences: the shelf that stayed too clean, the cabinet that never opened on paper. When Sasha set down tea and drew the backroom door closed again, they weren’t bargaining for trust. They were taking stock.
He doesn’t take her to his flat. Too many neighbours, too many eyes, too many chances for a knock he can’t ignore. Instead it’s the back room of Sasha’s shop after closing, the security shutter down and the street noise turned into a soft, dampened hiss. The air smells of paper dust and cheap tea.
Ilya clears a rectangle on the workbench as if he’s setting up a surgical tray. From his bag come the tools that make him feel less at the mercy of other people’s stories: a stack of index cards held tight with an elastic band, three felt-tip pens, a battered notebook, and a cheap tablet with the screen dimmed low. No flourish. No “let me show you.” Just method, laid out.
He spreads the cards into columns. Names in black. Dates in blue. Institutions in green. Red only for what should exist but doesn’t. Missing attachments. Absent signatures. An exhibit number that’s referenced like everyone knows it, then never appears again.
On the tablet he taps a file and lets her hear ten seconds: his own voice, controlled, narrating a sequence as if he’s already in the studio. Then he stops it, rewinds, and speaks to her instead. “Every claim has to earn its seconds,” he says. “If it doesn’t, it gets cut. Even if it’s interesting.”
Natasha watches without touching, hands folded in her lap like she’s in a meeting with a superior. Her eyes track the colour shifts more than the words.
He holds up one card, turns it sideways. “This is where people hide,” he tells her. “Not in the loud bits. In the transitions.” He taps the blank space between two dates. The pause feels physical, like a bruise under skin.
“Where would you expect a lie to breathe?” he asks.
He doesn’t fill the silence for her. He waits, thumb rubbing the coin in his pocket through the fabric, but his gaze stays steady, as if her answer will change the entire shape of the story.
He doesn’t tell her what to think; he shows her what he listens for. A witness who starts with jokes and ends in statute language. A man who says I saw until the moment it matters, then retreats into it was decided. Dates that walk backwards from certainty into fog, the Tuesday after, late summer, around then, as if vagueness is a kind of legal shield. He marks each shift with a clipped symbol on the cards, small enough to miss unless you know to look.
“Here,” he says, tapping a gap between two neat blocks of colour. No note. No exhibit number. Just air. “This isn’t empty. It’s edited.”
Natasha leans in despite herself. The fluorescent light makes her face look paler, all concentration and caution.
He slides the card closer, careful not to crowd her. “If you were burying something without changing the story on paper,” he asks, “what do you pull? What goes missing that still gets referenced like everyone’s seen it?”
His thumb worries the sobriety coin through his pocket, habit as anchor, while he waits for her to give the absence a name.
Natasha’s mouth twitches, as if he’s asked the wrong question on purpose. “You keep saying ‘missing’,” she says, softly. “Files don’t go missing. They move.”
She shifts forward and, with one finger, redraws his neat columns into an unspoken org chart. Not names: roles. The clerk who stamps without reading to kill a backlog. The senior who “mis-shelves” to avoid a confrontation with a partner. The one who reads everything, remembers everything, and never signs a log because she doesn’t have to.
“In the archive,” Natasha says, “paper has weight. It falls toward certain hands.” Her gaze flicks to the red card. “If it’s referenced, it existed. So someone made sure it would be seen and then made sure it would be elsewhere when you came looking.”
They swap methods until it stops being a swap and starts being a shared dialect. Ilya stops asking for titles and starts asking for gravity. Accession trails, midnight sign-outs, whose initials sit beside a box before it “seals.” Natasha, hearing his rhythm, offers more than what’s there: what would fracture on air. An attachment cited but absent. A duplicate with different stamps. A log entry that refuses to line up.
Their private shorthand hardens into something sturdier than convenience. Dates stop being trivia and start acting like anchor points; names shed personhood and become functions; addresses turn into choke points and blind spots. Natasha teaches him how curiosity gets noticed: how it’s answered with smiles, forms, and “procedure.” Ilya hears the warning and, without saying so, redraws the plan to keep her out of the direct line of fire.
Under Sasha’s cheap desk lamp, Natasha pulls the accession ledger toward her as if it might bolt. The lamp throws a tight cone of light over the page and leaves everything else, Sasha’s cluttered bench, the stacked exercise books, the greasy window, submerged in shadow. She braces the spine with her wrist. The binding creaks, a tired sound that makes Ilya think of doors that have been opened too often and never by invitation.
Her fingertip traces the case number she already knows by heart. The ink is official: blue-black, firm, bureaucratic. The pencil note in the margin is not. It’s a quick, slanted hand, written by someone who didn’t expect to be questioned: a shorthand mark for retrieval, a time, and then a name.
Natasha’s breathing shifts. Not a gasp. A controlled pause, like she’s stepping around broken glass.
“That doesn’t belong,” she says, almost to herself.
Ilya leans in but keeps his hands off the paper. He has learned that the fastest way to make a careful person shut down is to touch what they’re protecting. “Whose is it?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flick to the shop door, to the bell that hasn’t rung. Then back to the ledger. “Not ours,” she murmurs. “Not any archivist assigned to the legal branch. And not a courier.” Her nail taps the margin once, soft, precise. “It’s… external.”
Ilya feels his sobriety coin bite into the pad of his thumb. The urge to rush it, to call it a smoking gun, rises like heat. He forces it down. “External how,” he asks, keeping his voice plain.
Natasha swallows, and when she speaks again the words come out clipped, practical. “A name used on requests routed through counsel. The kind that never appears in catalog metadata because it isn’t supposed to exist there.” She turns her head just enough to meet his eyes. “If that signature is in our ledger, it means someone made the archive behave like a private corridor.”
Ilya watches the pencil strokes as if they might rearrange themselves into a confession. “And the file?”
Natasha’s mouth tightens. “It moved,” she says. “And whoever moved it wanted a record: just not one anyone would read.”
Natasha’s thumb worries the page-edges, flipping back, then forward, letting the ledger fall open where it wants to. Adjacent weeks, adjacent hands, the kind of drift an auditor would miss if he was tired or paid to be. She isn’t looking for a headline; she is looking for the same small lie told the same way.
There it is again. The retrieval mark (identical down to the abbreviated flourish) paired with a time that sits outside the building’s official breathing hours. 23:[^47]. 00:[^12]. 01:[^05]. No counter-signature from the night supervisor, no stamped authorisation, no corresponding entry in the daily movement sheet. Paper “maintenance”: a phrase that means nothing and explains everything.
She slows, breath shallow, and checks the surrounding columns the way a librarian checks a shelf after a missing book. What else is disturbed, what else has been nudged into the wrong place. Each after-hours sign-out is followed, days later, by a clerk’s name crossed through in red, a note about “reassignment,” a blank where a desk would have been.
Ilya hears the pattern before he names it: repetition with consequences.
Sasha doesn’t comment. He shifts his weight on the bad leg, reaches over the ledger with the care of a man handling something that could stain, and tilts the lamp until the pencil strokes flare silver. The shop’s hum seems to thin around that small adjustment. He slides a strip of blotter beneath the page, flattening the curl at the gutter, pinning the evidence in place without touching it more than he has to.
Ilya keeps his hands in his pockets, thumb worrying the sobriety coin to a slow metronome. He watches Natasha’s face rather than the columns. How her eyes stop skimming and start measuring, how the set of her jaw changes when the pattern stops being theory. Her detachment doesn’t break; it hardens into certainty.
Natasha begins to sort the entries aloud, not as a story but as inventory, months, years, the same narrow windows repeating, tight as a rota. Her voice is low enough to vanish under the shop’s quiet. “April. Then again. October.” A fresh pencil note sits beside one run: reassigned. Another: left service. Words that pretend to be neutral, stamped over departures that came too clean, too fast.
Natasha doesn’t say corruption. She doesn’t have to. Her nail lands on the first cluster, tap, tap, then stays planted, a quiet pin through paper. Ilya follows the line she’s drawing: after-hours retrieval, then a name struck out; another retrieval, then a blank slot where a person used to be. It isn’t proof yet, but it is a method. And a place to press.
Ilya spreads the court packet, the hearing transcript, and his own checklist across Sasha’s backroom table, letting the papers form a timeline rather than a mess. Edges aligned, corners squared, the way he arranges an episode when the facts refuse to sit still. The air back here smells of paper dust and old glue; the desk lamp throws a hard cone of light that makes every staple hole look like a confession.
His thumb circles the sobriety coin in his pocket, the ridged edge worrying at skin. Not a prayer, not quite. Just something to keep his hands from doing what they used to do when he found a seam worth picking.
He runs the transcript line by line, listening with his eyes the way he listens to raw audio. The voices on the page are flat and procedural, but the rhythm is familiar: question, answer, qualifier. Then the phrase lands like a pop in the waveform.
“As per Attachment C.”
He stops, not because he doesn’t understand, but because he does. Attachment C isn’t an aside. It’s a prop. It’s something held up, passed along, anchored in the room. The transcript treats it like a shared reality: counsel quoting from it, the judge responding as if he’s seen it, a timestamped reference that assumes paper in hand.
Ilya’s gaze drops to his checklist. Attachments: A, B. Present. Exhibits: listed, mostly present, some photocopied poorly. He slides his fingers under the back of the packet, lifts it, shakes it once as if something might fall out like a loose razor blade. Nothing.
He leans closer and scans the margins where clerks mark inclusions. There are no annotations, no “missing,” no “to follow.” Just clean bureaucratic silence.
His throat tightens. He knows this kind of clean. In audio, it’s the cut that’s too perfect: the breath removed, the room tone mismatched. On paper, it’s the absence that’s been sanded down until it looks inevitable.
“Attachment C,” he murmurs, almost to himself, and hears how it sounds: a handle. A thing someone else is holding.
He flips the packet again, slower, letting each page fall with a papery sigh. His eyes don’t skim now; they inventory. Tabs, headings, the faint discolouration where a photocopier once chewed the margin. He tilts the bundle under Sasha’s lamp and hunts for the small tells: staple shadows, torn fibre at a punched hole, a ridge where something thicker used to sit and has been pressed flat.
Nothing obvious. That, perversely, is what makes his pulse pick up.
The absence has edges. In the transcript, the lawyers don’t describe Attachment C like a rumour or a future exhibit. They speak as if it has weight, as if it’s being slid across the table: as per, as shown, turn to page. The judge answers in a cadence that assumes he’s looking at the same paper. It’s shared reality on the record.
Ilya’s thumb finds the sobriety coin and worries it hard enough to sting. He imagines a clerk’s hand removing one set of pages and then smoothing the file until it looks like it was born incomplete: bureaucracy as sleight of hand. He counts again, and the count comes up wrong in the only way that matters.
“That isn’t clerical,” Ilya says, keeping his voice down the way he does around walls with ears. He taps the line with a fingernail, precise, almost gentle. The phrasing isn’t casual; it’s staged. As per Attachment C. The kind of reference counsel uses when they can see the paper, when they expect everyone else to see it too. He can hear the room behind the transcript: the faint shuffle, the slide of pages, the pause while eyes track a paragraph.
His mouth goes dry. In audio, a cut like this leaves a seam you feel more than you hear: room tone wrong, breath missing, the lie polished until it shines. On paper, the polish is the absence itself. Someone didn’t forget. Someone removed.
Sasha doesn’t argue, doesn’t even sigh. He just shifts his weight like pain is a routine expense and limps to the shelving, fingertips sure among the clutter. The municipal directory he brings back is brittle with age; the spine crackles when he opens it. He threads a strip of microprint into the reader and adjusts the focus until the blur snaps into a notice: Kravets & Morozova, consultant, not counsel, hovering at the edge of the same case.
Ilya copies the reference numbers into his notebook, the pen moving with a recorder’s discipline, then drags a hard underline beneath Kravets & Morozova until the nib snags and the page buckles. The missing attachment stops being a void; it becomes a route. Across from him, Natasha doesn’t look away. Her silence cinches into something braced. Less refusal than calculation, as if she’s choosing the moment to name what she knows.
Natasha exhales through her nose, a small controlled release, like she’s steadying a stack that’s started to tilt. When she finally speaks her voice is low and even, the cadence of a woman who has spent years turning panic into procedure.
“It isn’t a rumour,” she says. “It’s a second set.”
Ilya watches her hands first. They stay folded on the edge of the table, fingers interlaced too tightly, knuckles pale. Her eyes don’t quite meet his; they fix on a point just past his shoulder, as if the air there holds the safest line of sight. He can hear Sasha’s shop breathing around them, the radiator’s tired ticking, the faint scrape of a tram outside, and in that ordinary noise her words land with the weight of something smuggled.
“Same case title. Same year. Same parties listed in the header,” she continues, and the precision sharpens as she goes on, each detail a rung on a ladder she’s climbed before in her head. “But not the same story. The language shifts. The sequence of events shifts. Things that are supposed to be incidental become… necessary.”
She tells him she has held it. Not glanced, not heard about, not seen across a desk while someone stood too close. Held it with both hands, the way she handles brittle collections: careful, respectful, listening through her fingertips. The paper was wrong for a municipal copy. Too heavy, too clean at the edges, like it had been guillotined recently and then taught to look old. The ink sat in the fibres differently, not sunk the way the older printers left it, but slightly raised, as if it hadn’t had decades to soften into the page.
“The stamps,” she says, and there’s a flicker in her mouth that might have been a joke if it wasn’t tired. “People think a stamp is a stamp. But the seals from that period bite deeper. The crest leaves a bruise you can feel. This one was… polite.”
Ilya feels his sobriety coin in his pocket, the ridged edge biting his thumb. “Where did you see it?”
Natasha swallows once. “In a box that was never meant to be opened during the day.” Her gaze finally meets his, guarded but steady. “And every time it surfaces in the system, it’s routed out the same way. Like it knows where it’s supposed to end up.”
“The first tell is always the metadata,” Natasha says, as if she’s reciting a rule she wishes she didn’t need. She lifts one hand, palm down, and makes a small flattening gesture, smoothing an invisible page.
Accession numbers in that year are meant to march, block, shelf, box, folder, no improvisation. But this one stutters. A digit repeats where it shouldn’t. A gap appears that doesn’t correspond to any deaccession note. And the separator is wrong: a hyphen where the branch standard requires a slash, because the hyphen denotes a departmental transfer, not storage. Most people don’t see it. They see familiar fonts and an official-looking header and they stop thinking.
She taps the table once, precise. “The clerk’s initials,” she adds. “They’re formatted the old way. Two capitals, no period. We stopped doing that after the audit. Two years earlier. After that it’s surname code and a dot. That change was everywhere. Overnight.”
To anyone moving quickly, it passes. To her it reads like a document wearing borrowed clothes: the right shape, the wrong seams, stitched by someone who learned procedure from a sample, not from the work.
Then she finally says what the second set does, and it isn’t dramatic. Just lethal in its neatness. In the duplicate, the time of death isn’t a vague window smoothed into convenience; it’s pinned to a specific hour that doesn’t fit the official route home, doesn’t fit the neighbour’s statement, doesn’t fit the patrol log that “found” him. A single digit in the date line is different, and that difference drags everything else with it.
And there, filed where the court record insists it should be, is the missing attachment, complete: a signed addendum, a diagram, a short chain of notes that make the “accident” read like a decision. The phrasing changes too, from closure to dispute. No interpretation needed. Just contradiction that refuses to stay buried.
Ilya keeps his mouth shut, but his body gives him away: shoulders squaring, breath held, the stillness of a man hearing a lock click. The coin in his pocket turns once under his thumb. “How many times?” he asks, quiet.
Natasha’s gaze drops to the table edge. “More than once.” Not luck, not curiosity: procedure. Request submitted. Box flagged. Retrieval logged in that anaemic language that makes theft look like routine.
Natasha lets the thought land like an object placed on a desk: carefully, so it can’t be called a fling. It isn’t a scatter of bad luck, she says. The route is consistent. Every time the duplicate surfaces, the paperwork shepherds it onward, past units that are meant to keep it, and it arrives at the same address. Not a judge. Not evidence control. Kravets & Morozova, where contradictions are processed back into silence.
Sasha did not announce favours the way people in films did, with grand pauses and moral weight. He treated them like stock: fragile, finite, liable to crack if you handled them with greasy hands. In the back of his shop, under the buzz of a tired strip light, he slid a slip of paper across the workbench as if it were a receipt.
“Not a partner,” he said, voice mild, eyes sharp behind the wire frames. “Not even an associate who still thinks the letterhead is a crown. Senior clerk. Old school. He files things by touch, not by instruction.”
Ilya watched Sasha’s ink-stained fingers hover over the paper but not quite point, a magician refusing to show the trick. The coin in Ilya’s pocket warmed under his thumb. Names had weight in this city; you didn’t speak them unless you were willing to be remembered.
“He owes you,” Ilya said.
Sasha’s mouth twitched. “He owes the shop. He bought a set of municipal yearbooks on credit when his divorce got ugly. He paid in instalments. That kind of shame makes a man reliable, if you don’t squeeze him.”
Natasha stayed quiet, listening for the part that mattered: where, when, and what could be explained away if someone later asked.
“Off-site,” Sasha went on. “Daylight. A café where the tables are too close and the music is too loud. He’ll think it’s about a property registry that died with the old cadastre office. Paper men love ghosts like that. Gives them something to correct.”
“And the question?” Ilya asked, already hearing it in his own voice, the careful tone he used when he didn’t want his hunger for answers to show.
Sasha looked from him to Natasha, measuring their faces like he measured margins before cutting. “One. Not two. You don’t interrogate him. You let him feel helpful.”
Natasha’s fingers tightened around her tote strap. “We make it sound like a clerical problem.”
“Exactly,” Sasha said. “You ask about a missing attachment that shouldn’t be missing. You ask where sealed materials go when they’re ‘routed for review’ and never come back. And you ask it like you’re trying to fix a filing error, not expose a crime.”
Ilya nodded once. Calm on the surface, a current underneath. Someone was going to notice them: on purpose, this time.
Natasha waited for the hour when the archive looked busiest on paper and emptiest in practice: midweek, when lunch staggered into itself and the courier’s arrival pulled everyone’s attention toward the front desk. The supervisor took her smoke break at the same time every day, as faithful as a prayer, leaving the temp behind the counter. Natasha didn’t rush. Rushing was how you became memorable. She moved with the small efficiency of a woman fixing other people’s messes, tote tucked close, eyes on the signage like she belonged to it. Her request form was already half-built in her head: accession code, date range, location tag. No adjectives. No insistence. The archive had a dialect of its own, and she spoke it fluently, “verification of holdings,” “metadata reconciliation,” “routine cross-reference.” Words that made theft sound like filing.
She keyed it in with steady fingers and watched the temp’s pupils skim the screen for red flags that never appeared. If questioned later, it would look like what she always did: tidying. Only she would know she’d timed the city’s blind spot to the minute.
Ilya treated the missing attachment like a flaw you could lever open with a fingernail. Not an accusation. An absence, polite on paper, poisonous in practice. At his kitchen table he drafted questions in the clipped language of procedure, each one a corridor with the doors removed: dates, sign-outs, chain of custody, who requested, who approved. He built them so a truthful answer would land in only a few places, and a lie would have to pick a shelf and sit there.
Two versions lay side by side. One assumed goodwill and left room for a witness to remember; the other assumed coaching and tightened like a noose, offering only yes-or-no steps.
He underlined what he couldn’t say yet. Premature truth, here, was just evidence delivered to the people who specialised in erasing it.
Trust stopped sounding like confession and started sounding like a timetable. A burner number, written once on Sasha’s receipt paper, read aloud, then burned into memory and torn away. Check-ins set at hours that looked accidental: never the same day twice. A rule: no one went anywhere alone without a story simple enough to repeat under pressure. Sasha, practical as bruises, added fallbacks: a note behind the third radiator, a café with “dead” cameras, a tram stop that swallowed faces.
In Sasha’s backroom the copier thumped like a metronome, each sheet a soft warning. They ran the plan on harmless municipal notices, enough to check the cadence: request, stamp, sign-out, return, without tripping the archive’s twitchy thresholds. Ilya’s thumb drifted to the sobriety coin, stalled, withdrew. Natasha clocked it, said nothing, only sharpened the checklist. Novigrad didn’t just track actions; it indexed vulnerabilities, patiently, until a file was ready to be used.
Ilya had come to the annex for a signature and a shrug. Another stamped refusal, another corridor that smelled of wet coats and old toner. He turned the corner and found Pavel Petrovic waiting in the narrow stretch between the public benches and the noticeboard, as if he’d stepped out of the building itself: creased coat, trim beard, that courteous face tuned for an audience.
“Markov,” Petrovic said, not loud, not hurried. The name landed with the confidence of a man reading it off a screen he wasn’t meant to have.
Ilya slowed without meaning to. He kept his shoulders loose, his mouth neutral. His fingers went, by habit, to the sobriety coin in his pocket: then stopped, aware of the movement and angry at himself for it.
Petrovic matched him step for step, never quite blocking him, never quite yielding. They drifted towards the wall where the flow of clerks and anxious petitioners thinned and the CCTV dome above them looked blank, a dull eye that might or might not be open.
“I hear you’re doing well,” Petrovic said. “That’s… good. People don’t manage it in this city. Not with the noise.”
There was a warmth to it that made passers-by soften, a neighbourly tone that suggested concern rather than surveillance. Petrovic kept his hands visible, palms slightly up, a man with nothing to hide.
Ilya let out the sort of small laugh he used in interviews when someone was about to say too much. “We’ve not been introduced.”
Petrovic’s smile held. “No. But names travel.” He tilted his head, as if remembering something kind. “Routine helps, doesn’t it? Same place, same hour. Keeps you honest.”
The coin edge bit his thumb through the fabric. Ilya forced his hand still.
Petrovic leaned in just enough to make it feel confidential. “Stress makes people… inventive. They start seeing patterns. Villains. They pull other people into it.” His gaze flicked, briefly, towards the directory that listed municipal branches, including the archive. “It would be a shame if someone else’s job got complicated because you’re chasing a story that doesn’t want to be caught.”
Petrovic spoke as if he were chairing a committee no one had elected: mild, civic, invested in outcomes. He praised discipline the way officials praised recycling. An admirable habit, best practised quietly. In Novigrad, he said, routine was a public thing; the city watched even when it pretended not to. He made it sound like sympathy.
Then the sympathy acquired dates.
“You still go down to the basement hall on Lenina for Tuesdays,” he said, casual, as if passing time. “The side entrance, because the main doors stick when it rains.” A small pause, a glance that could have been politeness. “Thursdays, it’s the woman with the red folder who ticks names. Strict about it.”
Ilya felt each sentence press into him: ink, paper, pressure. Petrovic didn’t ask if it was true; he placed it.
“And your sponsor (good man, I’ve heard) usually gets your call between nineteen-ten and nineteen-thirty. That’s smart. Keeps the night from getting ideas.” His eyes dropped, briefly, to Ilya’s coat pocket. “Like that coin. Thumb on the edge. You do it without thinking.”
The corridor noise carried on around them. The threat didn’t raise its voice. It didn’t have to.
Ilya let his mouth arrange itself into something like appreciation. “That’s… decent of you,” he said, softly, as if receiving concern rather than inventory. He allowed Petrovic the posture of helpful authority because arguing with it in public only fed it. Inside, his thoughts ran a tight circuit: who had noticed the side entrance, who had access to call logs, which app had been cloned, which microphone had listened when he thought he was alone. He counted his breath until the pulse in his throat eased back into line. His arms hung loose, deliberately heavy, hands open at his sides, refusing the reflex to thumb the coin. The routine of compliance was older than sobriety: give them nothing. Not fear. Not indignation. Not the satisfaction of watching him flinch.
Petrovic dropped his voice by a fraction, the way men did when they wanted you to think you’d been singled out for care. Pressure, he said, made people invent villains; it made them reach for conspiracies to excuse the old itch, the familiar need. He delivered it like a clinical note, relapse as forecastable as sleet. The corridor’s shuffle swallowed the sting, leaving him deniable and Ilya newly, privately exposed.
Then the real message arrived, folded into civility. It would be a shame, Petrovic murmured, if Ilya’s “curiosity” splashed onto archive staff, good, ordinary people with mortgages and timecards, if someone’s fixation forced the city to notice them. He didn’t say a name; he didn’t have to. Ilya offered a small, grateful tilt of the head and kept walking, jaw bolted, hatred rerouted inward because it worked.
Natasha had planned to eat standing, as she always did when the reading room was short-staffed: bread roll, apple, two gulps of tea before the next request slip. She made it as far as the corridor by the staff noticeboard before her supervisor appeared as if summoned by the squeak of her shoes.
“Natasha,” the woman said, voice bright, smile held a beat too long. “Just a moment. There’s a routine review. Nothing to worry about.”
Routine meant paperwork. Paperwork meant a rope you didn’t see until it tightened. Natasha felt her hand move on instinct to straighten the strap of her bag, to make herself smaller, compliant in the way the building rewarded. She glanced past her supervisor’s shoulder. The clerk by the stamps avoided her eyes. Even the cleaning woman’s mop paused, listening.
They walked her down the back corridor where the radiators clicked and the walls sweated in winter. The office was not one of the archive’s usual cubicles; it was a borrowed room, window half-painted shut, air heavy with stale toner and the wet wool smell of coats hung too close together. Someone had turned the overhead light too bright, a bureaucratic interrogation lamp disguised as fluorescents.
Two men sat at the desk, identical grey suits, identical careful haircuts, faces that refused to offer a foothold. No archive badges, no municipal pins: only laminated cards flashed too quickly.
“Compliance,” the taller one said, as if naming a weather system. His tone carried the practiced boredom of people who didn’t require permission to enter any room.
Natasha kept her expression neutral, the way you did around brittle documents and brittle men. Her supervisor remained by the door, hand on the knob, smile still in place but no longer aimed at Natasha: aimed at the air, at plausible deniability.
“Take a seat,” the shorter man said, already pulling a chair back with one finger. “This will be quick.”
Natasha sat because refusing would become its own entry in a log. She placed her lunch bag on her lap like a child’s purse, fingers tightening on the paper through the fabric, and waited for them to show her what they’d decided she had done.
They didn’t interrogate her; they curated her. A thin folder appeared on the desk like a prop, opened to a page already chosen. The taller man squared the corners to the wood, aligning paper to edge with the patient precision of someone who enjoyed rules most when they hurt. A pen was set down between them and her, cap off, nib pointed in her direction, invitation and trap in one gesture, as if she might obligingly annotate her own guilt.
The excerpts followed, slid across in a smooth, practiced motion. Accession logs, cleanly printed, stamped with the archive’s seal so perfectly it made her stomach dip. Several entries were highlighted: “unresolved,” “pending reconciliation,” the polite language of a missing body. Beside each line, her initials sat in a tidy, standardised font. Natasha didn’t touch the pages. She read them the way she read damaged parchment, hands kept back, eyes doing the work. The timestamps were too neat, the retrieval codes too consistent. Whoever built this knew exactly which fields supervisors glanced at and which they didn’t. A frame, assembled with her own tools.
One of the men spoke as if he were reading out a bus timetable (soft, patient, almost kind) about “process,” “routine anomalies,” the need to “resolve discrepancies before they metastasise.” The other didn’t bother with warmth. He tapped the margin where the highlighted lines sat, tapping again when her eyes lingered, a metronome for guilt.
Natasha leaned forward just enough to see the case-number string and felt a cold clarity settle in. “That format’s wrong,” she said. “We don’t use slashes on municipal civil accessions. It’s hyphens. And the year code is in the third field, not the second.”
They exchanged a glance that might have been approval. The taller one nodded as though she’d helped. “Good. Then you understand why we need to limit your badge temporarily,” he said, sliding a form towards her. “All requests will be queued for review.”
Her supervisor kept her gaze fixed on the folder, voice even, quoting policy clauses the way you read out barometric pressure. No emphasis, no mercy. Natasha heard the mechanism behind it: a courteous tightening, silent and procedural. No accusation to argue with, nothing for witnesses to flinch at: just forms that would “require review,” access that would “be limited,” and delays that would become facts. Paper setting around her feet.
Natasha forced herself to study the timestamps until they stopped swimming. The pattern landed like a cold coin on her tongue: late-night pulls spaced to match shift handovers, cross-referenced cleanly, even the “human” pauses between requests mimicked. Nobody had guessed. Somebody here knew the workflow well enough to counterfeit its heartbeat. Knew the blind angles in the corridor, knew which rules stayed asleep until you needed someone alone.
Ilya did what he always did when the air turned thin and his thoughts started to skitter: he made a grid.
Kitchen table, lamp angled low, blinds half-closed against the street. He laid out the notebook pages like evidence. The sobriety coin sat on the table for once, not hidden in his pocket; he pressed his thumb to its ridged edge, counted breaths, then opened the laptop.
Subject lines first. Neutral, respectful. Request for clarification regarding file access. Follow-up: recorded statement availability. He wrote as if tone could get him through a locked door. He copied in public addresses, appended the same attachment each time. One-page summary, nothing inflammatory, nothing that could be called harassment. Send.
The first bounce arrived almost instantly. Not even a minute to travel. Delivery failed: mailbox unavailable. The kind of failure that made no claims, offered no fight. He clicked into the raw headers, hunted for a genuine server response. The details were there, tidy and unhelpful, as though someone had taken care to include the right kind of wrong.
Then, minutes later, the email appeared in his Sent folder.
Not in Drafts. Not in Outbox. Sent. Timestamped as if it had left cleanly, like it had never snapped back at him in the first place. He refreshed again. Same. He stared until his eyes started to sting, and the familiar hot urge rose. Only a little, only to take the edge off, only to stop the muscles in his jaw from grinding themselves down.
He forced himself into routine. New account. Different provider. He tethered the laptop to his phone, cut the flat’s Wi‑Fi out of the equation. Re-send, rephrase, keep it boring. The message went. No bounce.
Two minutes later, the calendar invite he’d attached returned to him as an “updated version” from the recipient, stripped of its notes, time shifted by an hour, location blank. A correction that wasn’t a correction. Just enough to throw him off if he wasn’t watching.
Soft friction. Polite sabotage. Timed like someone was sitting with a clock and his name.
He rang the clerk at the courthouse annex. The one he’d warmed up over months with small, dull questions, always on the record, always grateful. It rang long enough to suggest someone was watching it ring, then clicked into a switchboard voice that insisted, briskly, that the extension didn’t exist. He tried again. Same cadence, same refusal, as if the building itself had learned to say no without sounding like no.
On the third attempt a person answered. A woman with a bright, careful tone that didn’t belong to any of the tired voices he’d heard in that office. “Mr Markov Ilya Sergeyevich,” she said, full name and patronymic, as though reading from a card. “Good afternoon. Of course. We’ll help you.”
His thumb found the sobriety coin in his pocket without him meaning to. “I’m calling about the incident log request. “One moment, please.” He heard a soft smile in the pause. Then the line lifted, and he was handed to a department that handled parking permits and lost property, a man there apologising for the inconvenience before asking, gently, who exactly he was meant to be.
He drafted the follow-up to the witness who’d begun to loosen last week: kept it plain, deferential, built so it could be forwarded without embarrassment. No pressure, no accusations; just a reminder of their last call, a suggested window, a line about recording consent. He read it twice for hooks that could be used against him, then hit send.
The reply landed before his pulse had time to settle. Two clipped sentences: I think you have the wrong person. I don’t know who you are. Like their earlier thread had been wiped clean and this was the first contact.
Then, a few minutes later, an automated “calendar conflict” arrived cancelling a meeting he hadn’t booked, signed off by an assistant whose name didn’t appear in any staff list he’d scraped. The cancellation was polite. The message underneath was not.
Ilya went to the one channel they’d sworn would stay clean: the check‑in code, a dull little phrase that meant Are you safe without ever saying it. He sent it once. Then again, spaced out like breaths. No typing bubble, no read receipt. He stared at the screen until it felt hot, thumb grinding the coin through his pocket lining. An hour later: Don’t come here.
He went back to first principles the way recovery had taught him: write the facts, circle the gaps, move one square at a time. Yet each link he reached for swung uselessly: emails disappearing into “maintenance,” calls landing in the wrong office, helpful voices repeating scripts too smooth to be human. The little scaffolding of favours and timing they’d built didn’t collapse; it fractured, neatly, leaving two separate targets.
Ilya doesn’t switch the lights on. He stands with his back to the sink, letting the room decide its own colour as evening thickens at the window. Outside, a streetlamp throws a hard bar of sodium across the tiles like evidence laid out and labelled. The refrigerator hums in a patient, unblinking rhythm. A motor doing its job. A body that doesn’t ask why.
His thumb finds the sobriety coin by muscle memory and starts to work it, edge to ridge, ridge to edge. The metal is warm where it’s been trapped against him all day, and the raised lettering bites as he presses harder, as if pain can be a substitute for permission. He tries to narrate it the way he narrates everything when he’s scared: the pulse punching at his throat; sweat gathering under his ribs; the faint tremor in his forearms when he holds too still. He names, he lists, he inventory-checks. It should make him feel in control.
Instead the catalogue keeps collapsing into one simple proposition, neat as a receipt: relief can be purchased.
The thought arrives without drama. No cinematic urge, no crash. Just a small, practical door opening in the mind. A drink would be a tool. A unit of sleep. A mute button. His eyes travel to the cupboard where the cheap mugs live, then to the spot on the counter where he once used to set a glass as if it belonged there. The apartment offers him its familiar geography: the corner with the spare chair, the quiet hallway, the coat hooks by the door that could hold him up while he fumbles for keys.
He leans into the counter until the laminate digs into his hip, grounding himself in something real. The hum keeps time. His thumb grinds the coin until the skin at the pad goes numb and then stings. For a moment he can almost hear Petrovic’s voice in the rhythm, pleasant, reasonable, informed. Not a threat, never a threat. Just the city reminding him it knows where to find the soft parts.
Petrovic’s “concern” won’t stay in the street where it was spoken. It has followed him home and taken up residence behind his eyes, replaying not as a sentence but as inventory: the meeting hall off Kamenna Street, Tuesdays and Fridays, the name of the chairperson he never says out loud, the little ritual of bad coffee and plastic chairs. Not guessed. Not overheard. Filed.
He goes to the sink and drinks water until his stomach sloshes. He eats a piece of bread without tasting it. He opens his notebook and writes FACTS at the top, then stares at the blank space beneath as if the page has turned hostile. He dials a number he trusts, thumb hovering over call, and can’t press, because the thought arrives: what if this, too, is being listened to? Even the safe things feel contaminated.
So he does the motions anyway, each one a prop in a play he no longer believes in. The bargaining begins with a kind of professionalism that scares him. Not desperation: procedure. One drink for sleep. One to stop the shaking. One to get Petrovic’s borrowed voice out of his head.
He refreshes his inbox until the motion feels like prayer. Messages hang with that bureaucratic half-life: requests bounced back by tidy automated errors, calendar holds that never harden into confirmations, threads marked seen as if someone’s glanced in and decided he isn’t worth a reply. It isn’t silence; it’s interference. A new login alert squats in the corner of the screen, polite language over an ugly fact, a stranger’s footprint in his private room. He clicks through account history and finds nothing he can point to without sounding paranoid, which is the point. Even his draft notes, names, times, the careful spine of a narrative, start to feel less like evidence and more like bait set out for him to grab. The timeline frays, and he can almost hear it tearing.
Across town, Natasha sits rigid at her terminal, the RESTRICTED-ACCESS banner bleaching the screen in bureaucratic red. She drafts three explanations and deletes them one by one, because she can already hear the response: compliance isn’t a conversation. Her badge history repopulates in a neat, accusing column of doors and minutes. Ordinary diligence, re-labelled as “pattern,” becomes motive by implication.
Neither of them names it, but understanding settles with the soft finality of a latch: they don’t need to prove you wrong to end you. They only have to make proximity to you feel like risk until allies hesitate, colleagues tidy their desks of you, and your own nervous system starts offering retreat as mercy. The city doesn’t debate; it contaminates.
Natasha picked a place designed to erase conversations: a chain café opposite the tram stop, all bright panels and wiped-down plastic, the air overworked with citrus cleaner. People drifted in and out in steady tides, nobody looking twice at anyone. Too many exits, too much noise, nowhere for a shadow to settle. She arrived early and sat with her back to a pillar, coat still buttoned up to the throat as if warmth were something you could lock in.
Ilya slid into the chair across from her, keeping his phone face down, hands under the table until he could trust them. His thumb found the edge of the sobriety coin in his pocket and worried it, metal against skin, a small, private metronome. He didn’t ask why here. He didn’t ask if she’d been followed. His eyes did the asking; hers answered in a brief, almost imperceptible shake.
She didn’t offer small talk. Her gaze held on his face a beat too long (pupils, jawline, the tense set of his mouth) as if she were reading for damage. Then she looked past him to the glass doors, counting reflections.
“What happened?” he said, low.
Natasha breathed in, controlled. “They ran a compliance review.”
“That’s, ”
“Routine,” she finished, and the word came out dry. “They like that word. It makes everything sound clean.” Her fingers stayed folded on the table, knuckles pale where they pressed together. “My terminal was locked when I logged in. Restricted banner. My supervisor called me into a side office, no windows, and started reciting my badge history back to me. Door numbers. Times. Like he was reading it from somewhere else.”
Ilya felt his shoulders tighten, the familiar flare of anger trying to pass for energy. “Why your badge history?”
“Because it’s a story you can make out of anything,” she said. “Late nights become ‘pattern’. Extra retrievals become ‘interest’. And then” (she paused, eyes flicking to the doors again) “then he said there were missing log entries. Not missing files. Missing entries. And my name was attached to them.”
The sentence landed with quiet force, soft enough to be plausible, sharp enough to draw blood. Natasha’s mouth tightened as if she’d tasted something metallic.
“They didn’t accuse you,” Ilya said, because the alternative was too obvious.
“They don’t need to,” she replied. “Not yet.”
Natasha didn’t dress it up. She described it the way you’d describe a lock being changed: first the access flags, then the banner, then the “routine” review that wasn’t routine at all. A supervisor she’d barely spoken to in months had called her in and, without looking at his own screen, recited her movements back to her as if someone had slid a sheet of paper across his desk and told him to perform it.
“They weren’t questions,” she said. “It was theatre.”
Ilya watched her fingers, still folded, still careful, like any motion might be interpreted as guilt.
Then she got to the part meant to leave no bruise that could be photographed. Not missing files. Missing log entries. Blanks in the accession trail where a name should sit. Her name, typed neatly into the absence. A mistake, they implied. A misunderstanding. Something administrative that could be corrected with the right attitude, the right cooperation, the right willingness to stop looking in the wrong places.
The threat lived in the conditional. Clear it up, or let it harden into dismissal.
Natasha’s eyes finally settle on his, steady in the way people get when they’ve rehearsed a sentence against their own panic. “Ilya,” she says, and his name sounds like a warning. She keeps her voice low, shaped to vanish under the café’s noise. “They can’t reach you cleanly. So they’ll come through me.” A beat, then: “My job. My badge trail. Those missing entries they’re pinning on me. They’ll turn it into negligence, into fraud, into whatever makes you look like the reason I fall.”
She doesn’t dress it up as loyalty or sacrifice. There’s no plea for him to be a hero, no apology for being afraid. Just a calculation, bitter and precise. “You have to stop being seen with me,” she says. “For a while. Let them lose the line.”
He took it like a bolt thrown on a door. Fear, already seated in him, put on the mask of betrayal, and his mouth moved before judgment could catch up, sharp, ungenerous words: that she’d known the price, that he was sick of other people’s caution becoming his burden. Under the table his thumb worried for the sobriety coin, useless metal, while a bright, old craving rose in his throat like an alarm bell.
Shame landed at once, hot, bodily, a recoil, like his nerves understood what his pride refused. Natasha didn’t rise to the bait. She withdrew instead, eyes going level and remote, and in that small shift he felt her reclassify him from partner to risk. She stood with careful economy, gathered her bag, and left without glancing back, her absence neat as a stamped form: final, instructional.
Ilya sat on the edge of the narrow bed without taking his coat off, as if he might still be called back out and judged unprepared. The room smelled of radiator heat and damp wool. His thumb worked the sobriety coin in his pocket until the ridged edge started to sting, then he welcomed the sting, worried it into something sharper. Pain was clean. Pain was a line you could hold.
The café replayed itself in his mind the way he edited audio: clipped, labelled, made to fit. His own voice (too loud in memory, too certain) cutting across Natasha’s careful, measured fear. Her silence after, not empty but structured, the kind of pause that meant she had already seen how this ends and refused to argue with a man racing toward it. He could almost hear the room tone beneath their words, the hiss of the espresso machine like a warning buried under dialogue.
Petrovic’s tone threaded through it all, courteous and intimate, as though he’d leaned in to offer advice instead of a noose. Stress does it. Meetings help. History matters. The phrases were ordinary, the way a form was ordinary, and that was the point: the department didn’t need to threaten him with force if it could threaten him with inevitability. Petrovic hadn’t told him to drink. He’d simply suggested, softly, professionally, that drinking was where Ilya eventually went when things tightened.
Ilya stared at the wallpaper seam above the skirting board, eyes fixed as if focus could become discipline. He tried to set his breathing to a count. In. Hold. Out. The coin warmed against his thumb, slick with sweat. Somewhere in the building a tap dripped with bureaucratic patience.
He thought of Natasha’s hands, how they never fidgeted, how she held herself like she’d learned early that panic was a luxury. He had taken her caution and turned it into an accusation because it was easier than looking at the real fear: that Petrovic had named him correctly. Not the investigator, not the narrator, not the man trying to be better: just the old case file with a predictable ending.
It wasn’t the cameras, not really, or the polite delays that could be explained away as backlog. Those were mechanics. The hook had been softer and deeper: the implication that relapse wasn’t a risk but a destination, his most likely ending, the footnote the city had already drafted. Petrovic hadn’t needed to shove him; he’d only had to gesture at the cliff and name it familiar.
The thought slid in with an old, sick certainty (they’ll be right to leave) and his body answered as if on instruction. A tremor started in his fingers, small at first, then spreading, as though his nerves were rehearsing the collapse in advance. He could feel his jaw working, grinding on nothing, the way it did when he tried to hold a secret inside his mouth.
His mind began assembling evidence against him with professional speed: past nights, the missing days, the way people’s voices changed when they realised he’d lied. Procedure became prophecy. Even the silence in the room sounded like a closed file.
He pressed his palm to his thigh, hard enough to sting, and listened for the craving voice to clear its throat.
He cut the spiral off the way he cut bad tape: no argument, just a clean splice. Water first, cold from the bathroom glass, drunk standing up so he couldn’t linger. Then salt: crackers dug out of the cupboard, eaten without appetite, just chemistry. He stripped and took a shower too hot, letting the heat pin him to the present until his hands stopped performing catastrophe. Back in the room he set the lamp on, opened the notebook flat, and wrote the next hours in ugly, obedient blocks: sponsor. Meeting. Food. Sleep. One task at a time, no improvisation. The pen scratched like it was making a boundary. He spoke to the walls, voice low, unadorned: the case doesn’t get to take his sobriety, and it doesn’t get to buy itself with Natasha’s livelihood.
The admission doesn’t comfort him; it deglamourises the whole thing. The hunt isn’t a crusade, it’s logistics: what can be backed up, who can be insulated, which steps leave a paper trail that can’t be “lost”. He sees how often he’s mistaken velocity for courage, how “reckless” has been passing for “brave”, and how neatly Petrovic can shepherd that into a relapse-shaped headline.
He stands in front of the timeline and lets the urge for a grand gesture burn itself out. What matters is what can’t be erased with a stamp or a shrug. In ink, he redraws the order of operations: insulate Natasha, protect any mouth that’s spoken to him, copy and recopy until there are too many versions to drown. Meetings stay on the calendar. Midnight heroics don’t. Proof must outlive him.
Ilya rubs the sobriety coin until the ridges imprint a neat half-moon into his thumb. The motion is small, almost polite, but it keeps the rest of him from lurching towards the kind of decision that feels righteous right up until it ruins you.
On the wall above his desk the case is pinned out in blocks. The last call with Petrovic sits there like a bruise, not in the transcript but in the gaps. Procedure as a weapon. Concern as a warning.
He uncaps a marker and, beneath the timeline, writes three rules in capitals. The ink bleeds slightly where the wall paint has gone chalky.
NO SOLO MEETS.
NO UNLOGGED DOCUMENTS.
NO WORK AFTER MIDNIGHT.
He stares at them until they stop looking like slogans and start looking like constraints. There’s a childish part of him that hates constraints. There’s a grown part that knows constraints are what make it possible to keep going.
His phone is face-down beside the laptop, as if that makes it less loud. When he flips it over, there are no missed calls, no miracle messages: just the blank screen waiting to become a doorway. He drafts and deletes twice before he allows himself the shortest version that still counts as a promise.
I’m changing how I do this. I’ll explain in person. You won’t be left exposed.
He reads it out loud once, to hear if it sounds like manipulation. It doesn’t. It sounds like a man drawing a line and intending to keep it. He sends.
The next thing he does is open a fresh notebook and start a log from scratch: date, time, who, where, what was exchanged. Evidence isn’t only for court. Sometimes it’s for your own future self, the one who will swear he remembers everything and then wake up months later with holes in the story.
He puts the coin back in his pocket, not as a charm, but as a tool. Then he sets an alarm for 23:[^50], ten minutes before midnight, so the rule has teeth.
Instead of chasing a lead through Novigrad’s corridors of favours, Ilya goes where no one can bribe the minutes. The meeting is in a low-ceilinged basement behind a community clinic, a room warmed by radiators that tick like small clocks. Wet coats hang in a row, steaming faintly; instant coffee and cheap biscuits do what they can against the smell of damp wool and old linoleum.
He waits through the readings, thumb worrying the ridges of his coin until the metal bites back. When it’s his turn he rises, hears his own chair legs scrape too loudly, and gives his name into the circle like a document being filed.
“I’m under pressure,” he says, keeping his voice level. He doesn’t dress it up as heroism. He names the trigger precisely: a man in authority offering him isolation as if it were safety, prodding the old impulse to detonate his life and call the blast righteous. He admits the fantasies (the neat relapse, the swift escape) and the uglier thing underneath: wanting to do it alone.
Then he asks, plain and public, for two people to be on-call. He hands over his schedule, dates and hours, as if it’s evidence that deserves witnesses.
Back home, he treats discipline like an engineering problem: if one point fails, the whole structure still holds. He lays out the week in blocks: morning call to his sponsor, midday check-in with one of the meeting regulars, a hard stop on editing before the city turns mean. The calendar isn’t ambition; it’s containment. He buys a second external drive in cash, then a third, and labels them in black tape with dates, initials, and the same terse verbs he uses in his logs: INGEST, EDIT, EXPORT. Every file is mirrored to two places, hashed, and written into a notebook by hand. He sends a copy of his running timeline to Sasha under a bland subject line. If someone takes something from him, the work doesn’t vanish with it.
He rigs the desk like a lab: mic on its shock mount, gain trimmed until his breath sits flat, not dramatic. When he speaks, it’s the version of himself that won’t bargain. Kravets & Morozova. Detective Petrovic. Dates, calls, the procedural squeeze. He time-stamps the file, bundles it with scans and hashes, and encrypts the lot. Not revenge. A firebreak.
He doesn’t release it. He carries the encrypted file to Sasha’s backroom, where the air tastes of paper dust and toner, and plays it for Natasha before it ever touches the feed. Ilya watches her, not the levels. “This isn’t a stunt,” he says. “It’s cover.” If Petrovic leans on either of them, the answer won’t be fear. It will be redundancy, time-stamped and loud.
Petrovic starts showing up in the story the way mould shows up in old buildings, quiet, incremental, deniable. Not a confrontation, not even a threat you could quote. Just a presence that keeps reappearing in different corners, as if the city itself has learned his shape.
It begins with a call to the archive’s security desk at an hour when the night guard is bored enough to appreciate attention. The next day, the guard’s manner changes: a fraction slower to buzz staff through, eyes lingering on lanyards as though the plastic could confess. In the lobby, the logbook is no longer a dead ritual. Pages are turned with care. Names are read twice.
Natasha hears about it the way she hears about most things: through the small, embarrassed kindness of colleagues who don’t want to be involved but don’t want her blindsided either. “Police asked a few questions,” a clerk murmurs while pretending to straighten a stack of returns. “Routine. Probably nothing.”
Probably nothing is the phrase institutions use to make fear look like etiquette.
She keeps her face neutral, gives the correct nod, and carries her routines like armour: stamps aligned, gloves on, pencil behind her ear, voice level. Inside, her mind walks a corridor of consequences. A “courtesy” query becomes a supervisor’s email. An email becomes a meeting. A meeting becomes a mark beside her name that never quite washes off.
Ilya clocks it in the way people in recovery learn to clock danger. Not by drama, but by pattern. The timing is too neat, the pressure too well-calibrated. Petrovic doesn’t kick the door in; he taps the frame and lets the sound travel. He makes the archive’s own procedures feel like surveillance, until everyone starts correcting themselves in advance.
When Natasha passes the security desk that afternoon, the guard doesn’t smile. He just looks at her badge, then at her, as though weighing which version of her will be safest to report. She walks on anyway, steps measured, the air around her suddenly full of invisible fingerprints.
The next touchpoint arrives wrapped in bureaucracy, as if it’s been laundered clean by the language. A folded note waits in her in-tray beneath an interoffice memo about toner rationing: Access logs to be reviewed for anomalies. Please be available for clarification. No signature that matters: just a stamp and a phone extension that routes, inevitably, to someone who will say the right words and mean the wrong thing.
Petrovic calls an hour later. His voice carries that courteous, almost conspiratorial warmth men use when they want gratitude for restraint. “It’s nothing,” he tells her. “But better you hear it from me than from a supervisor. These reviews… they snowball.” The implication is calibrated: he isn’t accusing her; he’s offering her a chance to keep her life tidy.
Natasha listens without interrupting, pen poised over a blank page as if taking notes makes it official and therefore containable. Inside, the numbers assemble: overtime cut, shifts rearranged, access privileges “temporarily” limited. Procedure doesn’t threaten. It only rearranges the floor beneath your feet until you learn to stand smaller.
Petrovic widens the net without raising his voice, letting the city do the work for him. A patrol car idles across from the archive branch at closing, engine ticking, the officer inside lit blue by his phone. The next morning the building guard asks for Natasha’s badge, then asks again as if the first glance didn’t take. He doesn’t apologise; he only smiles in a way that suggests he’s following instructions he won’t name. In admin, someone mentions that transfers happen fast when people get careless, that “reviews” don’t stop at logs. Nothing that would hold up as a complaint. Just a chain of small, deniable frictions that makes her feel watched even when she’s alone among stacks and catalogue cards. She can’t prove it’s him. That’s the point.
Natasha reacts the way she’s learned keeps you employed and breathing: she makes herself smaller. She abandons the terminals nearest the duty desk, starts queuing requests through safer hands, and answers every “routine” question with a brightness too polished to be real. She lets delays accumulate, lets restricted flags go unpulled. It isn’t that she cares less. It’s that compliance is camouflage, and invisibility is a kind of shelter.
Ilya clocks the shift in her posture before she says a word. The softened edges, the careful brightness, the way she starts routing requests through other hands. He’s seen it in witnesses, in himself: the slow shrinking that makes a person easier to erase. He keeps his voice even, his face neutral. Inside, something tightens: not rage at Petrovic, but a sober urgency to box the damage in.
He leaves the archive branch like he’s leaving a room where someone has just struck a match. No argument with himself, no lingering at the noticeboards, no last glance back at the guard’s bored posture by the door. The pavement outside is damp and granular with winter grit. A tram bell sounds somewhere down the avenue, sharp as a warning.
He walks fast at first, then deliberately slows. Not because he’s calm. Because he isn’t. The city has a way of making a man believe he’s being reasonable right up until the moment he’s doing something he’ll have to confess later. He listens to his own breathing and counts the beats between steps until it stops feeling like a chase.
His phone sits in his palm like a small live thing. The screen stays dark. He doesn’t refresh feeds. He doesn’t type Petrovic’s name into anything. He keeps his thumb moving against the edge of the sobriety coin in his pocket, ridged metal under skin, a private metronome. One day. Then another. Then this one, apparently.
A gust cuts between buildings and carries the stale smell of printers and cigarette walls away from him. In its place: cold exhaust, wet stone, frying oil from a kiosk closing early. Ordinary smells. The kind that don’t come with implied consequences.
At the next corner he pauses, not for directions but for a decision. He can hear the old logic lining itself up. Just one drink to smooth the edges, just one to sleep, just one to stop thinking about a badge asked for twice. The craving arrives dressed as pragmatism, always polite. He acknowledges it the way he’s been taught: name it, don’t negotiate with it.
He turns away from the bars he knows by their door handles and toward the community centre. Fluorescent light, scuffed linoleum, a paper sign taped to glass with the meeting time in block letters. Pressure, in there, has an honest name. And inside, he won’t be alone with it.
In the circle of plastic chairs he keeps his hands where people can see them, coin pressed flat in his pocket like a held note. He doesn’t play for sympathy; the room has a nose for theatre. When it’s his turn he gives his name, his day count, and the plain fact that he’s been chasing something that doesn’t want to be found. His voice comes out level, almost bored, which is how he knows he’s telling the truth.
“I’m working a case,” he says, and watches a few heads lift without judgement. “And someone in uniform used procedure to lean on me. Not a threat you can quote. A sequence. Paperwork, delays, questions asked twice so they sound reasonable. And then he reached for the one thing he shouldn’t know to reach for.”
He doesn’t say Petrovic’s name. Not here. He names the mechanism instead: isolation, sleep debt, the fake permission slip of exhaustion. The craving, invited and then dressed up as self-care.
When he asks for help it’s quiet, almost administrative. Two people on-call. If he texts one word, they answer. If he goes dark, they call. He doesn’t promise he’ll be strong; he promises he’ll be reachable.
Afterwards he builds the rest of it the way he builds an episode: not dramatic, just airtight. Back in his flat he washes his hands, makes tea he won’t drink, and sits at the desk with the curtains open as if daylight itself is a witness. Laptop up, interface clean, a new session titled with the date in plain numbers. He checks the clock against the recording timestamp twice, then once more, because accuracy is a kind of shelter.
When he speaks, he keeps his voice level and his sentences short. He states what happened at the archive, the “friendly” pressure, the repeated questions, the way it was meant to steer him into silence or relapse. He avoids speculation, names the lever, and leaves space between facts like he’s daring anyone to edit around them.
He says the names he’s kept sealed behind his teeth: Kravets & Morozova, the death file that keeps orbiting them, the polite harassment framed as professional “concern”. He makes it plain, almost dull: if pressure escalates against him or anyone helping him, the release package goes. Audio, scans, notes, hashes, metadata: plus a distribution list spread wide enough that no single gatekeeper can smother it.
He handles the segment like chain-of-custody: exports, checksums, encrypts. Three copies, three routes. One scheduled to send on a delay if he misses a check-in; one split-keyed with people from the meeting; one on an offline drive taped under a drawer. No single password, no single point of failure. When it’s done he doesn’t publish. He shuts the laptop, rides out the itch, decides.
In Sasha’s backroom, Ilya doesn’t play the audio straightaway. The room smells of paper dust and faint glue; the single lamp throws a hard circle over the counter, leaving the corners to hold their secrets. Sasha has tactfully found something to do at the front, the bell above the shop door chiming now and then like an alibi.
Ilya sets his phone face down and, beside it, an unlabelled flash drive, a small notebook with squares of handwriting, and a folded sheet with a list of names in block capitals. He arranges them with the same care he uses for microphones and cables: nothing tangled, nothing left to chance. Natasha watches his hands more than his face, reading the tremor that isn’t there.
“This isn’t dramatic,” he says, and then corrects himself with a slight exhale. “It’s meant to be boring. Boring means it holds up.”
He talks her through it like a fire drill. One encrypted copy in the cloud under a dead account name. One split between two people from his meeting. Neither of them knows the other’s half. One offline, sealed and placed where a casual search won’t find it. He points to the list. Outlets. Lawyers. A rival podcaster he doesn’t like but trusts to publish out of spite.
Natasha’s mouth tightens at the names; her gaze flicks to the shop door as if it might open on cue. “If they come for you,” she says, “this goes out.”
“If they try,” he replies. His thumb works the sobriety coin in his pocket, the edge biting into the pad of his finger with each turn. It’s not a show. It’s an anchor. “Petrovic wants me messy. Wants me alone. I’m refusing both.”
She studies him, searching for the familiar bravado men mistake for courage. There’s none. Just a controlled, weary precision, like he’s building a railing over a drop.
“And you?” she asks quietly. “Where do I fit in this?”
He meets her eyes then, finally. “Nowhere you don’t choose,” he says. “And nowhere where you’re the only person holding the risk.”
He tells her, without softening it, why she hears this first. Because every other route turns her into collateral: an unnamed clerk in an unnamed room who becomes, in someone else’s paperwork, the convenient pressure point. He’s seen how it works: a “concerned” supervisor, a sudden audit, a question asked too loudly in a corridor with cameras. One person isolated, then corrected.
“This insurance isn’t for me,” he says. “It’s for the parts of this that can’t afford to be heroic.”
The package is built to redistribute risk the way a good system distributes load: no single hand carrying the whole weight, no single name that can be quietly squeezed until it drops. If intimidation comes, it has to announce itself. It has to leave bruises on the record. It has to cost.
Natasha’s eyes narrow, not in doubt but calculation. Counting doors, counting witnesses, counting how quickly rumour becomes official trouble.
He doesn’t ask her to be brave. He asks her to choose. To consent, explicitly, to being included in something structured and defended, rather than being used as an access point and abandoned when the corridor lights go out.
He lets the quiet, unshowy honesty sit between them. He isn’t here to turn her access into a headline, to swagger through locked doors and call it courage. He’s seen what happens when men mistake speed for strategy. When they run on caffeine and spite until the body offers an old chemical shortcut and calls it relief. He won’t do that to himself, and he won’t do it to her.
“If Petrovic tries to make my past the story,” he says, voice kept low, “it won’t work.”
Not because he’s stronger than temptation, but because he’s arranged it so he doesn’t have to be. Meetings on the calendar. Check-ins. Two names who will answer, day or night, and ask the questions that keep him honest. The investigation continues, but inside a frame: rules, witnesses, and a refusal to be manoeuvred into breaking either.
Natasha hears him out without filling the gaps, her attention snagging on the shop door every time the bell gives a nervous tremor. When she finally answers, there’s no warmth to it, only careful inventory. Retaliation, yes: she’s planned for that for years. What she hasn’t planned for is believing in someone. Making an exception. Trusting, and then watching them buckle under pressure and walk away, leaving her name on the paperwork.
Ilya doesn’t try to talk her out of fear, and he doesn’t sell her a clean version of himself. He gives her terms instead: check-ins, hard stop-points, and a rule that if either of them feels the spiral catch, they pull back and move the risk elsewhere. He nudges the headphones across the scarred tabletop, thumb worrying the sobriety coin, and waits.
The silence after his offer stretches until it has shape. Behind the shop’s thin wall a radiator pings and settles, metal ticking like a cheap clock trying to remember its job. Natasha doesn’t soften: she stays arranged in angles: shoulders squared, hands folded, chin slightly raised as though bracing for impact. Her eyes move over him with the cool thoroughness she uses on a damaged file: looking for substitutions, missing pages, the smear of a rushed edit.
He lets her look. No rush to fill the quiet with reassurance. The air carries paper dust and old glue, the faint bite of toner from Sasha’s copier. Somewhere out front, a customer laughs too loudly, then the sound is swallowed by the shop again.
Natasha’s gaze drops to the headphones on the table, to the way he’s set them down carefully. Cord looped, not tangled, as if disorder itself is a kind of tell. She’s expecting the usual pattern: the plea disguised as confidence, the promise that collapses the first time somebody leans on the weak point. The grand declarations that turn, in practice, into her being the one left holding the risk.
Instead she finds a schedule. Names. A plan that assumes things will go wrong and builds room for that without turning it into catastrophe.
“You’re making witnesses,” she says at last, voice low enough to be lost under the radiator’s next tick. It isn’t approval. It’s an audit finding.
“So no one gets isolated,” he answers.
A muscle works once in her jaw, like she’s testing the word against her teeth. Her eyes flick then linger on his face a fraction longer than procedure requires. Something in her expression eases, not into trust, but into the closest thing she allows herself: a temporary clearance.
“You understand,” she says, and there’s a dry edge to it. “If this becomes… melodrama, I’m done.”
He nods, because he does understand. Because he has built his life lately out of unromantic things that hold: routines, contingencies, and the odd, dangerous relief of being believed for exactly what he is.
Ilya keeps his hands on the table as if movement might count as persuasion. Only the small friction of his thumb against the sobriety coin inside his pocket betrays him. A private metronome, keeping time with the parts of him that still want a shortcut. He looks at Natasha, then past her, to the blind spots in the room as if he can already feel Petrovic’s shadow there.
He names the pressure without adornment: the implied search, the casual mention of his history, the way the detective let temptation sit on the table like evidence and waited to see if Ilya would touch it. He doesn’t call it bravery. He doesn’t call it a test he passed. He calls it a trigger, because euphemism is how people die quietly.
“Discipline isn’t distance,” he says, voice level, almost procedural. “It’s the only way I stay in the story and don’t become the story.”
He slides the headphones a fraction closer, not offering comfort. Offering record. A controlled statement, timestamped, named. Insurance, not spectacle. If they try to isolate either of them, the plan is already in motion.
Natasha lets out a small breath that comes out wrong: too sharp to be relief, too restrained to be laughter. It hovers between them like a footnote she hasn’t decided to file. “Caution,” she says, as if naming a standard operating procedure, “is the only reason I still have a job. And a keycard.” Her fingers tap once against her own wrist, where the card would sit on its lanyard, a reflex checked mid-motion.
She doesn’t dress it up. Compliance is camouflage. Routines are armour. Smile, nod, stamp what they tell you to stamp, and keep your real work in the margins where nobody looks.
What shifts is his face. No disappointment, no impatient moralising. He hears it as skill. The ground under her rules steadies, and for a moment her guard isn’t a wall; it’s a shared perimeter.
They set the terms down like an operations order. Two check-ins, midday and close of shift, timed to routines no one would question. One emergency phrase, innocuous enough to say in front of a camera, meaning stop, leave, no discussion. Evidence never lives in one place: two encrypted copies, one paper trail Sasha holds. Natasha adds redundancies with archivist precision. Ilya signs on without bargaining, and it feels to both of them like commitment that can survive contact.
Only then did Natasha take the headphones, holding them like evidence. Careful of prints, careful of meaning. Ilya nudged the recorder nearer but kept his thumb off the button, eyes on her face instead of the device. He let the silence do its work. When her chin dipped, one precise, permission-granting movement, it wasn’t tenderness. It was consent, and it clicked into place like a bolt.
The first warning is audible: a ballast whining, a fluorescent tube deciding whether to live. Then the corridor light hiccups and goes wrong, not like a failure but like a plan being carried out. Panels blink out in a staggered retreat, each one giving up with a faint click, until the long hallway loses its colour and depth. Emergency strips along the skirting take over, painting everything in a thin, institutional green that makes faces look sick and paper look like old bones.
Natasha is already moving when the last overheads die. No glance up, no little frown of surprise. She tucks her coat closer as if the darkness has a draft, keys threaded between her fingers. It’s the kind of readiness you only get by rehearsing a route so many times it becomes muscle memory. She doesn’t tell him what the test schedule is, or who authorised it, or whether she had to ask twice. She just walks, shoulders level, steps measured to the change in visibility.
Ilya follows the logic more than the woman. Fifteen minutes, she’d said earlier. Enough time for someone with a purpose and not enough for someone with doubts. In the green wash, the archive feels less like a public service and more like a vault: the air cool, paper-dry, the smell of glue and dust held in check by ventilation that keeps humming as if nothing has happened.
They pass a noticeboard where the glass reflects them as vague silhouettes, anonymous and therefore safer. Somewhere a printer beeps in a distant office, confused by the power drop. Natasha’s hand finds a doorframe without searching; she turns into a narrower corridor where the emergency lights are farther apart, leaving pockets of shadow between the pools.
She still doesn’t explain. Her silence is a kind of procedural cover. Nothing said that can be repeated, nothing that sounds like conspiracy if caught on a stray microphone. She glances back once, not to reassure him, but to confirm he’s there and moving. Then her gaze goes forward again, fixed on a point only she can see.
Natasha angles them into a service passage that smells of damp plaster and old toner, the kind of back-of-house artery the public never sees. The emergency strips are thinner here, spaced wider, leaving the corridor in alternating bands of green and near-black. She keeps her eyes forward and counts time under her breath. Fifteen minutes reduced to shelf logic, each number delivered in the same flat cadence she uses for call numbers and accession codes. It makes the darkness feel managed, audited.
Ilya stays half a step behind. Close enough that if someone rounds a corner he can be the one they see first; far enough that she can stop without colliding. His thumb works the ridged edge of the sobriety coin through fabric, a small, private metronome against the urge to talk. Procedure is Petrovic’s weapon, words written down, words repeated, so he keeps his mouth shut and lets his ears do the work.
Ventilation hums steadily overhead, indifferent. Somewhere, a door settles with a soft click that could be a draft or a person. Ilya tracks it, marks it, then lets it go, matching Natasha’s pace so she isn’t the only one standing in the open if the corridor isn’t as blind as she’s betting.
At the blind spot Natasha stops as if she’s hit an invisible line. She doesn’t look around; she listens. The building answers with its usual indifference. Only then does she crouch and unlatch a low storage bay that could have held cleaning supplies, spare toner, anything forgettable. The metal door gives a soft complaint. Inside: cardboard, dust, the bureaucratic smell of paper left too long.
One box sits forward, too neat, too recent. The accession tag is the wrong colour and the year notation is off by a digit that would pass anyone skimming. Natasha lifts it with both hands and braces it against her hip, practiced and careful, like she’s moved it a hundred times and paid for it each time in sleep. Ilya keeps watch, coin grinding under his thumb.
They work by the emergency strips’ sickly glow, hands economical, breath held back. Natasha draws folders out a finger’s width (enough for a heading, a stamp, a margin note) then returns them in exact sequence, as if order itself is camouflage. The duplicate set announces itself in errors designed for fatigue: seals too shallow, ink too fresh, a case number “corrected” with one sly stroke, and a signed statement nested where it could be retrieved (or erased) on instruction.
The statement didn’t argue; it itemised. A time, a door, a name that shouldn’t have been present, the kind of mundane detail that turns an accident into a choice. Ilya felt the coin go still in his pocket, his breath tightening around the implications. Natasha slid the folders back, shut the lid, and squared the box to the shelf’s edge. They backed out in sync, silent, unlit, already planning.
In the apartment-studio the air always smelled faintly of dust and warm circuitry, as if the microphones exhaled old conversations. Ilya cleared a space on the desk and treated it like a bench in an evidence room: folders squared, staples checked, copies separated from originals. He made himself write the dates in thick marker, no vague “early spring”, no “around then”, because vagueness was where people hid.
A cheap desk lamp threw hard light across the paper. On the left: the municipal incident report, the one-word conclusion underlined so many times the ink had bruised the page. Next: the archive accession log Natasha had slid to him in a plain envelope, its numbers too neat, its ink too consistent for something handled by different hands. On the right: his own notes, the messiest thing in the room, finally pinned down with arrows and timestamps.
He listened through the clips again, not for drama but for seams. Tram brakes screaming at the junction outside Kravets & Morozova. The hollow stairwell where voices dropped to a whisper. A receptionist’s laugh that clipped off mid-syllable when a name was said. He labelled each file with location, time, and the feeling it left in his gut, because feelings were unreliable. But they were good at pointing.
The sobriety coin rode his thumb like a worry bead. He caught himself pushing too hard, as if metal could take the place of breath. He stood, drank water, checked the meeting schedule taped beside his monitor. Texted his sponsor a single line, Working. Tight. Still here: and waited until the reply came back: Keep it simple. Don’t do it alone.
When he finally sat and armed the track, he heard his own voice in the headphones before he spoke: dry, close, unadorned. He set the levels so nothing peaked, so nothing begged. Then he began the way he meant to continue, calm, competent, and unwilling to let procedure pretend it was truth.
He built the episode the way an old locksmith might work: patient, exacting, suspicious of anything that clicked too easily. Not a tale, a chain. First the event as recorded, then the record of the record. Who wrote it, on what form, under which code, with which signature that didn’t match the handwriting above it. He laid custody out like a relay: desk to desk, shelf to shelf, box to “sealed” storage, every hand that touched the file named and dated where he could prove it.
Where he couldn’t, he said so. There were gaps big enough to drive a tram through, and he didn’t plaster them with theory. He marked the missing parts the way Natasha had taught him to read absences: not emptiness, but deliberate shape.
He kept returning to procedure, because procedure was how they hid. “Followed,” in their mouths, meant selectively applied. A required stamp absent. A log entry too pristine. A retrieval after hours that left no corresponding return.
When a sentence in his narration sounded sharp, righteous, finished, when it offered the listener relief, he deleted it. Satisfaction was a lure. He’d heard enough to know: the moment a story starts solving itself, it’s trying to use you.
Natasha arrived after her shift with that particular, careful exhaustion: hair pinned tight, coat still buttoned as if she might be called back at any moment. She didn’t knock twice. She slipped in on the second rap and closed the door with a soft, practiced hand, eyes doing a quick inventory of the room: the desk, the folders, the mic stand, the window.
Ilya didn’t offer small talk. Small talk was noise; tonight they needed signal. He lifted the headphones and held them out like evidence, not an invitation, keeping his phone face-down and the monitors dim. One ear for him, one for her. Low volume: enough to hear words, not enough for walls.
He watched her face more than the waveform, waiting for the moment procedure stopped being theory and turned into danger.
She stopped him with two fingers on his wrist exactly at 23:[^14]. No flare, just the kind of correction that came from years of handling paper that could ruin lives. The line was nothing to a listener, but it mapped a clerk’s shift and corridor like a pin on a board. Ilya rewound, heard it anew, then cut it clean. No argument. He swapped in process: log entry, seal, after-hours retrieval. Proof intact, person blurred.
Near dawn they run it end to end again, listening for seams, for the tiny tremor that would give them away. He catches himself holding his breath and forces it out, slow, counting like a meeting taught him. In the margin he writes: no bait, no hero, circles it once, then schedules the release. When he looks up, Natasha is watching, steady. Safety, he thinks, is custody too.
Release day didn’t feel like a finish line. It felt like a door unlatching somewhere in the building and a draught moving through every room he’d tried to keep sealed.
By mid-morning the numbers climbed in clean, indifferent steps (downloads, subscribers, shares) each one a small, measurable proof that people were listening. Then the calls started. The first voicemail came in with a smile in the voice: a man who sounded like a neighbour, like someone offering a lift. Just checking you’re all right, mate. You sounded… tired. A pause, then the same voice turning conversational, dropping details the way you’d drop a coin into a donation tin. A tram stop. A bench colour. The name of a café he hadn’t said aloud anywhere.
Ilya didn’t delete it. He saved it twice (cloud and local) then wrote down the time stamp with the careful, almost tender precision he used on witness testimony.
The next call was a woman who asked after his mother, as if they’d met. He didn’t have to check his contacts to know she wasn’t real; her questions slid around facts like fingers around a glass. At the end she laughed softly and gave him weather, looks like rain all week, and in it he heard the thing underneath: we can wait.
An email followed, header neat as a court filing. No insults, no exclamation marks. Paragraphs that spoke in the plural, the way institutions speak when they want you to feel alone: defamatory implication; injurious to reputation; we advise you to reconsider in the interests of all parties. It read like a hand on his shoulder applied by someone who knew exactly how much pressure constituted “guidance”.
He forwarded it to Sasha without commentary, then printed it, because paper was harder to deny. As the printer spat out the page, his phone buzzed again (unknown number, no voicemail left this time) and he stared at the blank screen long enough to see his own face reflected in it, eyes too alert for the hour.
Across town, Natasha checked the archive’s incoming log twice, then once more for the comfort of ritual. A courier signed in under a name that didn’t match the badge. She watched him drift towards the back stairwell as if by habit, and made a note on a scrap of accession paper she’d later “misplace” into a folder only she could find. Procedure, she’d learned, was where threats liked to hide: until someone wrote them down.
The pressure took the old routes through him, muscle-memory dressed up as need. In the café downstairs someone flicked a bottlecap into a saucer and the sound went straight to the soft part of his skull. His mouth watered as if his body had already decided. He watched his own mind begin to draft a brief: one to sleep, one to stop the shaking, one to get through tomorrow without hearing your phone ring. Each line came with a footnote of practicality. He hated how convincing it was, how it borrowed his voice and wore it like a coat.
His thumb worried the sobriety coin until the ridges bit and the metal warmed, a small, controlled pain. He stood in the hallway without remembering walking there, coat on, keys ready in his fist, as if he’d been called to an address. The building smelled of boiled cabbage and damp wool; the lift groaned somewhere behind a wall. He looked at the door as if it might open itself.
He forced air into his lungs and counted, slow. The craving didn’t vanish. It rearranged, patient, waiting for him to stop paying attention.
Natasha didn’t debate the bargain his mind was drafting; she removed its venue. She glanced at the clock the way she checked accession stamps, quick, definitive, then said, “Coat. Now. We’re leaving,” as if it was already entered in a ledger. No tenderness that could be misread as permission to negotiate. She took his sleeve, not his hand, and steered him down the stairwell where the cameras were patchy and the air tasted of damp concrete instead of coffee and bottlecaps. On the pavement she set the pace, brisk but not panicked, keeping him in motion until the street noise thickened and his thoughts had to queue.
At the meeting hall she stayed outside. Book open, pages turned at steady intervals, eyes up between lines. Neutral for anyone passing, anchored for him if he came out looking for an exit.
He came out hollowed and steadier, the way fatigue can strip panic of its teeth without healing the wound. They walked on, unhurried, and he said it cleanly. What he reaches for when shame turns loud, what he imagines the first swallow will purchase, how fast it curdles into penalties. Natasha didn’t soothe or scold. She set boundaries like archive rules, then stayed close enough that he didn’t have to act normal.
Release week keeps setting traps with clean hands: anonymous accounts tagging him into baited threads, a colleague smiling as he slides a glass across a desk like a medal, the phone’s buzz landing as a small, precise threat. The difference is speed. Ilya names the craving aloud while it’s still air in his chest. Natasha quietly adjusts the practical perimeter, routes, timings, who to answer, so saying it stays possible. By Friday, the relief he trusts is structured, witnessed, and unromantic.
By Monday they had stopped pretending they could outrun the week by instinct. Natasha opened a shared calendar on her phone with the same expression she used for a misfiled docket, tight mouth, no drama, and began laying down blocks of time as if pinning down a fugitive.
Blue for archive hours. Grey for sleep, non-negotiable. Green for meetings. Red for edits, with a hard stop that didn’t care what his perfectionism wanted. Yellow for “admin”: calls, email, requests that could eat a whole day if you let them. She insisted on travel time between everything, the city’s delays written in before they could become excuses. Ilya watched the grid fill and felt something in him push back, old reflex, the addict’s allergy to anyone else’s structure, then loosen when he realised it wasn’t control. It was a perimeter.
“Twenty minutes,” Natasha said, tapping a slot near the evening. “For decompression. No screens.”
He almost laughed. “You catalogue feelings too?”
“I catalogue outcomes,” she replied, and her tone stayed light enough to pass as humour if anyone overheard.
His own contribution was less tidy but equally precise. He started running a living timeline alongside the calendar: not just events, but pressure points. The anonymous tags. The delayed file request. The colleague who offered a drink with a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. He marked them like incident reports, date, time, location, who witnessed. When the craving arrived, it had to take a number and wait its turn.
At night, with the tram lines hissing somewhere beyond the window, they did quick check-ins at the kitchen table. Natasha asked procedural questions. Did you sleep? Any contact from Petrovic?. And Ilya answered without performance. When his voice caught, he said the truth anyway. She didn’t touch his hand; she slid the calendar closer, showed him tomorrow, and in that plain rectangle of planned hours his fear had somewhere to go that wasn’t everywhere.
They built it like a system meant to survive people. Two folders, same spine of facts, different skin. The counsel set lived on a sober drive and in a battered accordion file: clean scans in monochrome, accession numbers traced back to municipal logs, every handling noted: who touched it, when, under what pretext. Natasha added a citation index that read like a quiet dare; Ilya wrote chain-of-custody notes in clipped sentences, as if he expected a judge to frown at every adjective.
The listener set was leaner, designed for ears instead of signatures. Short excerpts, a paragraph of context each, and little “translation” memos: what a missing stamp does to a document’s weight, how a swapped case number reroutes a file into oblivion. Ilya cut in audio cues enough to make the bureaucracy audible without making it melodrama.
Nothing sat alone. Each item cross-linked to at least two others: a receipt to a log entry, a log entry to a vanished box, the vanished box to a duplicate page that shouldn’t exist. A catalogue that couldn’t be quietly re-shelved.
They wrote their rules down on paper, not because paper was sacred but because it could be pointed to when a boundary started to blur. No solo handoffs: ever. If someone wanted “just a minute” in a corridor, it became an email with a time stamp or it didn’t happen. No unlogged meetings, no late-night favours, no coffee-shop confessions with anybody orbiting the case. Every document had a location and a custodian; if it moved, both phones got a message and the folder gained a note. Every call was reduced to three lines (who, what, next step) while the voice was still fresh enough to contradict itself.
And if panic, or the old thirst, rose up like weather, it was named. Out loud. Then: meeting, walk, check-in: no improvisation.
Natasha taught him camouflage the way other people taught table manners: request titles, not subjects; cite accession ranges, not dates; use “verification” instead of “copy”; never ask a clerk to interpret. She showed him which countersigns meant a file would be “sealed” and effectively dead. In exchange, Ilya made her safer in public, anonymised attributions, staggered releases, redundant mirrors, and drafted emails that turned any punishment into evidence.
What had started as a favour hardens into a practice they can repeat without drama. Every week, same table, same agenda: what moved, what stalled, what feels dangerous, what feels tempting, what can wait. Natasha ticks items off like accession checks; Ilya logs risk and craving as data, not shame. When pressure comes, it meets a system. Shared backups, shared boundaries, weight split early.
Sasha stopped calling it a backroom the day he bought a second ledger and a proper stamp. The first book was full of half-jokes and favours, names written in pencil that could be denied under pressure. The second was clean, ruled, and boring on purpose. Chain-of-custody, he wrote at the top of the first page, as if the words alone could make the city behave.
It became a relay with rules that didn’t care who was brave on any given morning. Every item that crossed his workbench got a number, a time, two sets of initials. If a copy left the shop, it left with a receipt that looked like stationery inventory. If a hard drive arrived, it went into an envelope with tamper tape and a line in the ledger that could be read aloud in court without anyone blushing.
He rotated copy locations the way a cautious man rotates locks. Some days it was the university library’s scanner. Booked under a student’s name; other days a print shop on the far side of the tram line that never asked questions if you paid in cash and didn’t linger. When the weather turned and the streets emptied early, he used the old microfilm reader in his own shop, the one that hummed loud enough to cover whispered conversations.
Nothing original stayed in one place overnight. That rule was non-negotiable, and Sasha enforced it with the mildness of a teacher and the stubbornness of a man who had seen too many “accidents”. Originals moved in plain packaging: between cookbooks, under invoice pads, inside the false bottom of a battered accounting box. Copies went in triplicate. One for Ilya, one for Natasha, one sealed away where even Sasha couldn’t reach it without asking someone else.
Ilya watched the system take shape and felt something unclench. Procedure was a kind of shelter, if you built it before the storm. Natasha checked the ledger entries with a librarian’s eye and corrected Sasha’s date format without smiling. Sasha, for his part, only shrugged.
“Favour,” he said, tapping the stamp. “Infrastructure.”
Affidavits began arriving the way contraband always did in Novigrad: folded into ordinary objects, disguised as errands. A notarised statement slid between two receipts for toner; a page of careful handwriting tucked inside a returned volume’s back pocket; a courier’s declaration printed on cheap paper that still smelled faintly of van exhaust. Each one was modest, almost apologetic. No grand accusations, no theatrical language. Just what was seen, when it was seen, and who signed what to make it disappear.
Ilya listened to the voices behind the ink. The clerks wrote like people who’d spent years learning how to say nothing and were now practising saying only enough. One swore to a late-night retrieval logged under a partner’s initials that didn’t match the duty roster. Another described a file reclassified mid-week, case number unchanged but metadata “corrected” in a way that made it unfindable. A retired supervisor, pension in hand and nothing left to be promoted into, confirmed the trick: seal it, move it, deny it ever had a shelf.
Natasha checked every stamp, every registry number. Narrow statements, built to survive. Together, they held.
Sasha’s introductions stopped being theatre the day he brought them to the clinic’s side entrance and asked for ten minutes, not a favour. The contact he’d courted (junior solicitor, legal-aid posture, eyes that measured risk like a ledger) didn’t smile at rare books or coded jokes. She asked for names spelled out, for dates that could be sworn to, for a conflict check against half the city. She wanted written authorisations from anyone whose paper crossed their hands, and she wanted to know where the originals slept at night.
Ilya felt the ground shift: less gossip, more gravity. Natasha, quietly relieved, produced accession logs and chain-of-custody numbers like prayer.
“Bring me what survives daylight,” the solicitor said. “Not what survives friendship.”
Petrovic answered the way he always did: with forms and footsteps. A compliance visit at closing time. A “quick” request for clarifications that arrived on official letterhead but smelled of warning. Replies delayed under the tidy excuse of jurisdictional housekeeping. Only now the episode had rewired the air; his procedural touches left visible ridge-lines. And his careful restraint, once dominance, read, to anyone watching, like backing away.
Kravets & Morozova reacted the way a guilty system does. By tightening. “SEALED” stamps multiplied; the steel cabinet gained a second lock; clerks began logging each other’s movements as if the corridors had turned to ice. But the clamp-down left fingerprints. Handoffs stalled when neighbouring offices asked for receipt trails. Partners demanded auditable sign-outs. Their old weapon (silence) started pricing them out of cooperation.
The clamp-down at Kravets & Morozova didn’t stay inside their own walls. It bled into the archive in small, bureaucratic fevers: new stamps in unfamiliar inks, “temporary” restrictions that arrived without authorising signatures, requests routed through three desks instead of one. Natasha watched the pattern the way she watched mould grow on old paper. She didn’t fight it head-on. Fighting made you visible. Instead she let the firm’s panic supply her vocabulary.
Risk management, she titled the memo. Plain header, municipal template, no verbs that could be called defamatory. She wrote about “increased sensitivity of privileged materials” and “the heightened reputational impact of catalogue discrepancies” as if she were protecting the institution from itself. Every sentence carried a courtesy it didn’t deserve.
In her head, it was a net.
Dual sign-outs for restricted boxes: one requesting clerk, one supervising clerk, both present, both recorded in separate places. The official log received its neat handwriting. The second record took the same facts and made them redundant. If one trail was sanded down, the other would still snag a fingernail.
She drafted the changes in increments small enough to be approved by a tired manager skimming at lunch. No “new controls,” just “clarifications.” No mention of vanished files, only “mitigation of mis-shelving risk.” She attached a one-page checklist, the sort people liked because it let them stop thinking.
Recruitment was quieter. Two clerks, both the type who corrected date formats in conversation, both resentful of partners who treated procedure as theatre. Natasha didn’t ask for loyalty. She asked for compliance.
“Help me make it so we can’t be blamed,” she said, and watched them nod: relieved to be offered righteousness that looked like work.
At home, her routines tightened too: notes copied by hand, then burned; passwords changed in the dark; humour used sparingly, like disinfectant. Hope was a dangerous thing in Novigrad, but it was also a tool: if you could keep it procedural.
Ilya stopped turning Natasha’s access into a siren he chased. He opened his week the way she opened a ledger: with margins, with blanks left for things that could go wrong. Her double shifts became fixed points, not obstacles. Pickup times by the tram stop, the corridor cameras that swept the reading room at quarter past, the dead zones where a conversation could happen without a guard deciding it looked like one.
He built his reporting calendar around those seams. Interviews went to mornings, when his voice was steady and his head clean. Edits moved to the hours before lunch, headphones on, file names sanitised, backup checks done like a prayer he was willing to repeat. Meetings with Sasha slotted in before the archive closed, so nothing important had to be carried into night.
When deadlines pressed, he didn’t ask her to stay late. He asked, quietly, what made her feel watched. What routes were safest. What words she could say if a supervisor hovered.
“Fifteen minutes,” she’d tell him, and he’d nod, as if she’d offered him a favour instead of a risk.
The structure didn’t feel romantic. It felt like choosing not to break her.
They didn’t talk about trust like it was a feeling. They treated it like a system that could fail, and built in failsafes. Natasha set up a shared spreadsheet under a name dull enough to be invisible, tabs for box numbers, shelf ranges, accession anomalies, and chain-of-custody notes written in her clipped, careful shorthand. Ilya added columns for audio timestamps and source-risk, and a third for scripts: if questioned, say this; if pressed, ask for that in writing.
He bought a cheap lockbox from a corner shop and, without comment, duplicated the key. The spare went into an envelope Sasha kept behind his counter like a book left on hold. Every handoff earned a receipt, date, time, signature, absurdly formal for two people who were already in each other’s pockets. Redundancy became the closest thing they had to tenderness.
Pressure arrived dressed as routine: a surprise audit stamped urgent, a partner ringing to “clarify” whose authority covered which shelf, a uniform hanging too long by the branch doors as if waiting for someone to flinch. Natasha answered with immaculate procedure: written requests only, retention schedules quoted, every contact logged, dates and names, no opinions. Ilya named it aloud, rang his sponsor, sat through a meeting, and let fear stay a fact instead of fuel.
Later, with their notes squared and filed, the arithmetic turned inevitable. Ilya read figures under his breath, rent, train tickets, a buffer for silence, while Natasha circled cities on a torn map, thinking in routes, not dreams. They listed what could be grabbed in one bag: drives, passports, her keys. Then she wrote a rule at the folder’s top in black ink: sobriety and safety first.
Late evening settles over the tram junction in measured pulses. Red signals holding, white headlamps spilling across wet asphalt, the faint blue hiss of overhead lines knitting the air together. The city moves on schedules that don’t have room for explanations, only intervals: doors open, doors close, metal on metal, a bell that sounds almost polite. In that rhythm, watching becomes background noise. You could be followed and still arrive, you could be tired and still be required to stand straight.
Ilya sits with his back to the timetable board, not because he’s afraid of being surprised, but because he’s learned where attention comes from. Glances that linger, footsteps that don’t commit. The bench is cold through his coat. Somewhere behind the glass of the kiosk, his own face hovers and dissolves with each passing light, a ghost spliced into the city’s reflection. He listens as if he’s still recording: the doppler shift of tyres, the particular scrape of a tram’s brake shoes, a snatch of conversation in a language that isn’t quite his when he’s anxious.
Natasha is beside him, close enough that their shoulders occasionally meet when she exhales. She keeps her hands folded around the shared folder like it’s nothing more than paperwork waiting to be stamped. Her gaze slides across surfaces the way it does over shelf labels, quick, precise, not interested in stories, only discrepancies. In the kiosk glass she checks for the second pair of eyes, the too-still silhouette, the man who pretends to read a poster and never changes page.
A tram arrives on the far track, windows bright as an aquarium. For a moment, faces flicker past: bored, intent, softened by motion blur. Ilya’s throat tightens with the old reflex to make it all mean something. Every glance a threat, every pause a trigger. He lets it pass. He counts his breaths the way he counts timecodes.
Natasha shifts the folder a fraction, squaring its edges against her knee. Paper whispers. No one around them reacts. The ordinary holds. Another signal changes, green flooding the junction, and the city gives them its permission to remain, visible and unbroken, for one more cycle.
They choose the bench as if it were simply the next step in a route, the same slat of wood they’ve walked past in every season. Not hidden behind a shelter panel, not angled for privacy: public enough that anyone could glance over and see nothing worth noting. That is the point. If there is safety left in Novigrad, it lives in the unremarkable.
Ilya lets his palm drift to his pocket out of habit, thumb brushing the ridged edge of the sobriety coin like a check-in he doesn’t need to announce. The metal is cool, a tiny anchor. He doesn’t spin it, doesn’t make a ritual of it. He just acknowledges it and then takes his hand away, keeping both hands visible on his knees, as if to prove, to himself more than anyone, that he isn’t about to claw for an old solution.
Natasha lifts her collar against the damp and smooths it twice, a neat motion that reads as vanity to strangers and as calibration to her. Her eyes keep sliding to the kiosk glass, not staring, never fixing. Reading the reflections the way she reads catalog entries: looking for the wrong repetition, the lingering shape that doesn’t move on when it should.
Between them the folder rests like a third presence, humble and stubborn. The card stock has softened along one fold, but the corners are kept sharp, pressed back into discipline by Natasha’s fingers. Coloured tabs march down the side in a small, orderly spine, dates, names, docket numbers, her handwriting neat enough to look like the institution’s own until you read what it points to. Ilya feels the weight of it without lifting it: photocopies that shouldn’t exist, accession slips that say one thing while the stamps say another, a timeline rebuilt from omissions. Nothing is jammed in at angles, nothing palmed. In a city that hides by misfiling, the simple act of keeping truth where it belongs feels illicit. Their knees almost touch as if guarding it by proximity alone.
A tram rolls in with that low, contained thunder that reaches them a beat before the headlamps, a vibration you feel in the bench slats and your teeth if you’re listening too hard. It slides past and the lit windows go glassy; for a single breath they catch their own reflection (his tired eyes, her set mouth) briefly fused, cut into squares by steel ribs and overhead wire.
There’s no recap, no toast, no line delivered to the night as if it could file their lives into a neat conclusion. Their shoulders touch and do not shift apart. It isn’t romance so much as a stance. Habit made deliberate. They sit with the folder between them and let the city look. Refusing the institution’s favourite trick: isolation dressed up as order.