“Hey.” I’ve never gone to Richard’s office without being asked, but I don’t know what else to do. “Can I like . . .” I wave my hand.
He looks up from what he’s reading, smiles at me. “Sure, man.” He points to a chair. “Come on in.” When I’m in the seat, he raises his eyebrows. “What’s up?”
“In my glide just now . . .” I don’t even know where to begin. “I saw something I think you need to know about.”
He pushes the hairs that have escaped his ponytail back behind his ear. “Did you dictate it?”
I nod. “Yeah, but . . .”
Richard smiles. “Believe me, if it’s something we need to know about, we’ll be notified.”
I shake my head. “No, but it’s—”
He shakes his head. “Alex, do you trust what we’re doing here?”
I shrug, then remember how much I shrug and stop the shrug halfway through and switch to bobbing my head back and forth. “Yeah . . . but—”
“More importantly, do you trust that the Gentry know what they’re doing?”
I blow out a breath. “Yeah . . .”
He smiles again. “The stuff you dictate is reviewed through methods I cannot even begin to tell you about here and now, but you have to trust me when I tell you that they’re thorough and we have yet to let something important slip through our fingers.” He points at me. “Process is everything here. Trust the process.”
“Yeah.” I stand up slowly. “Alright.”
He nods, and I turn and walk out as slowly as I stood. I stop outside his door, just for a moment, trying to come up with a new argument for telling him, but I can’t. I walk back to the commons feeling alone.
Corina’s sitting on the couch reading a book when I walk in. I almost say hi, but something stops me. It’s getting harder to talk to her recently, so instead I kick my shoe against the floor to make noise.
She looks up at me, smiles. “Hey, Plugzer.” She waves me over.
I smile back but immediately stop, because all I can see is the goofy face that Jordan saw when he looked at me. “Hey.” I stop in front of her. “What’s up?”
She cocks a shoulder at me, holds up her book. “Important business.”
I don’t recognize the book she’s reading, but I think she’s kidding, so I smile. “Yeah.” I stand in front of her, waiting for something.
“You need something?” She’s smiling, but I’m embarrassed.
I shrug, then make a decision. I sit down next to her. “I saw something really weird on my last glide.” I jerk my head toward where Richard’s office is. “I went to talk to Richard about it, but he wouldn’t let me.”
She nods. “He can’t.”
“Yeah.” I sit forward. “I get it, but this was . . .”
She reaches out, puts her hand on my back. Her touch is firm and I can feel each and every finger. “Look, if it’s really something they need to talk to you about, you’ll hear from Bishop. But yeah, we see some freaky shit.” She sighs. “Things are gonna get bad.”
I nod. I can still see my face through Jordan’s eyes.
I’m already in bed when there’s a knock at the door. I look over at Paul’s bed to see if he’s going to say anything, but I think he’s already asleep. “Yeah?” I whisper as loud as I can.
They don’t hear me and knock again, so I get out of bed and open the door.
Bishop is on the other side of it. He’s dressed down from the suit I usually see him wear, a pair of jeans and a polo shirt that looks like it’s a size too small. “Alex,” he says when he sees me. “Can I talk with you for a moment?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
He stares at me for a second, waiting on something, but I don’t know what it is. “Can you come with me to my office?”
I look down. I’m wearing sweats and a T-shirt. No shoes. I look back up at him. His look says I need to stop worrying about what I look like. “No problem.”
He leads me through the commons to the patio and then back to the Long Hall. He doesn’t turn around or make small talk as we walk, and every step makes me more nervous. By the time we get into the Long Hall, I’m nauseous. The lights inside come on when we enter. The Live-Tech wallpaper starts to glow, but before it can grab a thought, a portion of the wall to our right slides back, revealing a doorway that leads to an entry hall place with another hallway which ends at a big door across from us.
Bishop leads me to the door, opens it, ushers me inside.
The room is big, a couch and a couple of chairs face each other around a table nearer the door, but the room is dominated by a single desk which is plunked right in the middle. There are two hardback chairs facing the desk and he points me to one of them before walking around the desk to face me.
“The powers that be reviewed your last glide,” he says as he sits down. “There are some questions.”
I nod. I don’t want to sit—too anxious—but I do anyway. “Okay.”
“Had you had any previous indication that Jordan Castle was going to meet you?”
I shake my head.
“Did you see or recognize any other face or person present at the time?”
His questions feel like they’re coming from a cop and the way he asks them makes it hard to think, but I close my eyes and try to picture the moment I saw myself, the room, the other tables around. It’s all a blur of color and cringiness about how I look. I can’t pull anything new out of my brain. “No . . .” I shake my head again. “I don’t think so.”
He writes something with his stylus on the desk, so I lean forward a little bit. The desk has a series of screens, low light, impossible to see or read from where I’m sitting. He’s writing on one of them with his finger. “Did you give any indication that you knew you were being observed by yourself?”
I looked at me, up in my perch. The memory is strong, real. “Yeah. I knew I was in there. I could feel me looking up at me . . .” I trail off because I don’t have more words.
He taps something else on his desk and then leans back and looks at me. I feel like he’s about to say something, but then I realize he’s listening to something, paying no attention to me. Moments later he nods, says, “Yeah,” and then refocuses on me. “Okay, you can go back to your room.”
Even though he says he’s done, he’s not moving to get up like he wants me to leave, so I stay where I am, staring at him until he says, “You can leave now, Alex. Thank you.”
I get up, slowly, and pad back out the way I came.
Paul’s snoring softly when I get back to the room, so I lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling in the dark, replaying the whole conversation. He didn’t say I did anything wrong, and I know I didn’t break any rules, but I can’t escape the feeling that Bishop thinks I’ve messed things up.
It takes me a long time to fall asleep.