Chapter 23: What Cael Sees

The room was not uncomfortable, which was the part Cael kept coming back to.

They had given him a camp bed with a foam mattress and a wool blanket that smelled of storage rather than use. There was a folding table with a bottle of water and a paper plate that had, at intervals, contained sandwiches. The sandwiches had been adequate. Someone had thought to include a napkin, which struck Cael as a particular kind of strange — the gesture of a person who had been told to do this properly and was doing it properly, to the letter, including the napkins. The room had a single overhead light on a pull cord and no windows and a door that was not locked, which he had tested twice and then decided not to test a third time because the corridor beyond it had a person in it who was polite in the specific way of someone who had been told to be polite rather than someone who was.

He had been here, by his best estimate, somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-six hours. His phone was not with him. He knew this because he had checked the pocket it usually lived in approximately forty times in the first three hours, the way you keep touching a bruise.