The Central Authority's main hall was exactly as Koshva had left it. Which was the problem.
He'd half-expected something to have changed. Some visible sign that the world had shifted on its axis since yesterday morning. A different quality of light, maybe. A different temperature to the recycled air. Something that acknowledged that a man who worked in this building had spent the last twenty-four hours committing a compounding list of crimes against the institution he'd served for twenty-two years.
Nothing. The hall was the hall. The morning shift was the morning shift. Two junior Ments nodded at him as he came through the main entrance. Somebody had fixed the coffee dispenser on the third floor and there was a note about it on the general board. The investigation into the morgue incident was pinned below that, flagged Priority Three.
Priority Three.
Koshva stared at it for a moment. Priority Three meant handle it when you have time. Priority Three meant probably just a system glitch. Priority Three meant that the body of a dead god had walked out of the central morgue and the Authority had collectively decided that was a moderate concern at best.
He filed that away. Kept walking.
His supervisor, a broad-shouldered woman named Delegate Orvaine who had the energy of someone who had stopped being surprised by anything approximately eight years ago, looked up from her desk when he came in.
"Koshva," she said. "Feeling better?"
He blinked. "I—"
"Heard you had a rough one. The 734 case." She waved a hand. "Losing a subject on intake day, that's hard. Especially the strange ones. They stick." She was already looking back at her terminal. "Take the morning. I've got you on the Sector 4 patrol review this afternoon, nothing urgent."
Koshva stood in the doorway.
'That's it,' he thought. 'That's all.'
"The morgue incident," he said carefully. "The missing—"
"Being handled by the Evidence Division." Orvaine turned a page. "Not our case. Some kind of containment malfunction, they think. The body probably degraded past the stasis threshold and had to be incinerated remotely. It happens with the anomalous ones." She looked up briefly. "Why, you know something about it?"
'I know everything about it,' Koshva thought. 'I know where the body is. I know the body is sitting on a bed in Sub-level 11 arguing with a man who stepped out of the dark like a bad idea. I know the body has been dead and is currently very much not dead and has opinions about pillows.'
"No," he said. "Just following up."
"Leave it to Evidence." She was already gone, back into her terminal, the conversation filed and closed. "Go get coffee. The machine on three is fixed."
Koshva turned to leave.
"Koshva."
He stopped.
He did not let himself react. Twenty-two years of fieldwork. He turned around with the specific unhurried pace of a man who had nothing to be unhurried about.
Delegate-Commander Valentina was standing at the end of the hall.
He hadn't heard her arrive. Nobody had, apparently, because the two junior Ments near the entrance had gone very still with the particular stillness of people who had just registered a sudden change in ambient pressure.
She looked exactly as she always looked. Composed in the way of architecture, the kind of composed that wasn't an effort because it had long since become structural. Her uniform was perfect. Her eyes were not.
Her eyes were doing the thing they did when she was three steps ahead of a conversation and had already decided how it ended.
"Walk with me," she said.
It was not a question. It had the shape of one and none of the content.
Koshva walked with her.
She took him to the observation corridor on the east side, the one that looked out over the lower plaza through a long panel of reinforced glass. The city below was moving through its morning. Transit lines, foot traffic, vendors setting up. Normal. Completely, aggressively normal.
Valentina stood at the glass and looked at it for a moment before she spoke.
"You look tired," she said.
"Long night."
"Mm." She clasped her hands behind her back. "The 734 case. You were attached to it from intake."
"Standard procedure for a Class 2 flag."
"You were in the building yesterday morning," she said. "Early. Before your shift."
Koshva said nothing. The pause was a calculated one. The length of a man who was trying to remember, not a man who was hoping she'd move on.
"I had some things to finish," he said.
"You signed into the Evidence Wing at 0340," she said. "You signed out at 0412. Thirty-two minutes." She turned from the glass to look at him. "The morgue incident was flagged at 0439."
Twenty-two years, Koshva thought. He'd been doing this for twenty-two years. He knew how to hold a line.
"I was doing a final check on the intake documentation," he said. "The 734 file had a discrepancy in the classification coding. I wanted to correct it before it went to archive."
"Did you."
"Yes."
Valentina looked at him. That full, precise look that had nothing behind it that she hadn't put there deliberately.
"The morgue technician on duty that night," she said. "Elias Vance. Do you know him?"
Koshva let himself look mildly uncertain, the expression of a man accessing a file that wasn't a priority. "The name's familiar. Maintenance contract, isn't he? Long-term?"
"Three years," Valentina said. "Clean record. Good work. He also signed out early that night. Twelve minutes before the incident was flagged." She paused. "He hasn't been back since."
Koshva made a small, thoughtful sound. The sound of a man hearing mildly interesting information about a man he barely knew.
Valentina watched him make it.
"Take the morning," she said. Same words as Orvaine. Completely different weight. "Get some rest."
She turned and walked back down the corridor.
Koshva stood at the glass and watched the lower plaza and breathed very carefully for approximately thirty seconds.
Then he went and got coffee. The machine on three was, in fact, fixed.
It didn't taste like anything.