The Night She Was Followed
Paranoia is the luxury of people who have not yet confirmed their suspicions.
Pursuit || Danger || Voss || Night
It was on the twenty-eighth night that she first became certain she was being watched. Not suspected — she had operated under the assumption of being watched from the beginning, which was the only sensible operational baseline in an institution where the director appeared to have eyes that did not require the normal physiological conditions of observation. But being suspected of being watched and having confirmation of it are different states. The confirmation came in three steps on the same evening, in a sequence that had the deliberate quality of something arranged rather than accidental. First: she found her office on the second floor unlocked when she was certain she had locked it that morning. Nothing appeared disturbed. She would not have noticed the unlocking except that she had begun, on day sixteen, leaving a small piece of thread tucked in the gap between door and frame at exactly waist height — a basic intrusion check that she was slightly embarrassed to be implementing and entirely glad of when the thread was gone. Second: at the nine o’clock medication rounds, Nurse Cray looked at her differently — not hostilely, not obviously, but with the specific quality of someone who has been asked to look at a person in a new way and is complying. Third: Voss appeared at her door at half past nine and invited himself in for what he called a professional consultation, which was a new behaviour. He had not visited her office before. He sat in the patient chair across her desk with his white coat arranged precisely and his hands folded in his lap and asked her about the progress of her patient assessments with a conversational ease that was entirely calculated — she could feel the calculation behind it the way you feel the frame of a building behind its facade. She answered straightforwardly, because straightforward answers were currently her best camouflage. She asked him, as a professional courtesy that she had been meaning to raise, about the Institute’s emergency protocols in case of extended snowfall. “If someone needed medical evacuation,” she said. “What’s the procedure?” He held her gaze with the unblinking steadiness she had catalogued on day one. “Our medical resources are comprehensive for most emergencies,” he said. “External evacuation is rarely indicated.” “And if it were?” He smiled. “There are procedures,” he said. “I would manage the assessment of necessity.” She nodded. He left. After the door closed she sat for a while and thought about the word necessity, about who would determine it, about the locked road and the sealed building and the twelve feet of snow that the valley had accumulated and the small piece of thread that was no longer in her door frame. She was running out of time to be invisible.
She went to Carey that night and told him this directly. He sat on his cot and listened and when she finished he looked at the wall — his wall of writing, the two hours of record that had been his only productive activity for eight months. “How long do we have?” he asked. “Until Voss concludes that his experiment on me is producing results he doesn’t want,” she said. “He brought me here for a reason. When he decides the reason isn’t working, or when he decides I’ve found out enough to be dangerous, the situation changes.” “What does it change to?” She looked at the marks on his wrists. “I don’t intend to find out,” she said. “Here’s what I need from you.” She outlined it: when she came back to this door, it would be to bring him out. He needed to be ready to move immediately, to move quietly, to move without stopping regardless of what he encountered in the corridor. He was thin and had been confined for eight months but he was mobile and he was mentally sharp and she had assessed, across three long conversations, that his will was intact in the specific way that mattered most: he had not stopped believing in the reality of what he knew. “Ready,” he said. “I’ve been ready since the third week.” She looked at him steadily. “I’ll be back within four days,” she said. “The road clears partially after a hard snowfall. There’s a supply convoy scheduled.” She did not yet know exactly how she was going to manage the next part. She knew she was going to manage it. She looked at him one more time. “Hold on,” she said. He looked back at her with eight months of a locked room in his face and something on the other side of the eight months that was still very much intact. “Hold on,” he repeated. Not an echo. A confirmation.