The light above the server room door was the only red thing in the basement, and it pulsed at a rhythm slightly slower than a resting heart. Slow enough that you noticed. Slow enough that, after a few minutes, you started breathing with it whether you meant to or not.

Four boys were on the concrete floor when Jake came down the stairs. They weren't doing anything. That was the first thing worth knowing about them. In a place like St. Ignatius, where the day was carved into clean two-hour blocks of instruction by a machine the boys called The Educator, doing nothing was a kind of luxury, and you could tell which boys had figured that out. These four had. They sat in the way boys sit when no adult is watching and no adult is going to be watching for some calculable amount of time. Loose-spined. Legs out. One of them had taken his tie off and looped it around his wrist like a bracelet, which was the sort of small private rebellion that wouldn't have been worth the trouble two floors up.

Jake stayed on the bottom step a beat longer than he needed to. He had walked into this room with a destination in mind, the terminal on the far wall, and now there was geography between him and it. Lucas Jameson was the geography. Lucas was leaning against the nearest server tower. He was sixteen and had the kind of face that adults trusted on sight, which Jake had clocked as a useful fact about him roughly a year ago and had not revised since. He was talking, low and even, and the other three were leaning toward him the way you lean toward a fire when the room is cold. The west stairwell, Lucas was saying. After the bell, before the second hum. You've got about forty seconds where nobody's looking at the landing. We use that. We don't waste it.

We. Our. Jake noticed the pronouns the way other people notice weather. One of the boys laughed, too loud for the room, and Lucas didn't shush him but the laugh shortened itself anyway. That was the other useful fact about Lucas. He didn't have to ask for quiet. Jake stepped off the stair. He didn't look at the terminal. He looked at the floor, then at the cooling fans stacked along the south wall, then at a coil of orange cable somebody had left half-spooled by the door, the way you look at things when you want to seem like a person who has wandered into a room rather than a person who has come to a room. Barnes, Lucas said, without turning his head. The voice was warm. Pull up a piece of floor.

Jake did not pull up a piece of floor. He moved along the wall, past the cable, past the fans, taking the long way around the cluster of boys, and Lucas tracked him without seeming to track him. It was a particular skill. Jake had it too, in a quieter version, and he recognized it the way one left-handed person recognizes another across a crowded room. He stopped under the clock above the server rack because he needed a reason to stop, and the clock was as good as anything, and that was when he saw it. The clock had no hands.

Not broken hands. Not stuck hands. No hands. The face was clean and white and circular and entirely empty, the small holes at the center where the spindle would have gone undisturbed, like the clock had been hung that way on purpose by someone who had decided this room didn't need to know what time it was.

Jake held very still. He let his eyes move, slowly, the way you move them when you don't want anyone to notice you're cataloguing. The clock above the door. The clock over the breaker panel. The small round clock mounted on the support column by the stairs, the one he'd walked under and not looked at for three weeks running. All of them. Every face blank. Every spindle bare. He tried to remember a clock in this basement with hands on it and couldn't, and the not-remembering felt less like a gap and more like something that had been sanded smooth. He was still looking up when he felt Lucas looking at him.

He didn't turn. He walked, casually, the last six feet to the terminal. The screen was dark. He touched the keyboard and it woke, soft green, asking him for nothing yet, just waiting. He could feel the room behind him the way you feel a held breath. The four boys had not stopped talking, exactly, but the talk had thinned. Lucas had said something quiet and the others had laughed at the appropriate volume, and underneath that, Jake could feel the attention, steady as the red light over the door. He rested his fingers on the keys. He did not type. He looked at the cursor, blinking at its own rhythm, faster than the light, and he thought about the hands that weren't on the clocks, and he thought about three weeks of evenings spent counting the wrong things, and he closed the interface.

The screen went dark again. He stepped back from it. He turned, slowly, toward the room. Lucas was leaning against the server tower with his arms folded. He was smiling, a small, unhurried smile that arranged itself only at the mouth. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He had the patience of someone who had already decided he could afford to wait, and the smile said, plainly, that whatever Jake had just chosen not to do, Lucas had seen him not do it. The red light pulsed. The fans hummed. Above the server rack, the handless clock kept its perfect, indifferent time.

The chair was still turning when Jake pushed the door open. Not fast. The slow, idle rotation of something a body has just left, momentum bleeding out into the room. The mug beside the keyboard had a film starting to skin across the surface of the coffee, but steam still lifted off it in a thin, undecided thread. The monitor had gone to sleep. The keyboard had not. Jake stood in the doorway long enough to count three cycles of the cooling fans. He had a rule about thresholds, which was that you crossed them once and didn't waste the crossing. He crossed.

The server room at St. Ignatius is not the room the brochures show. The brochures show the chapel and the library and the long oak refectory tables polished by a century of forearms. The server room is concrete, fluorescent, low-ceilinged, and on the south wall there is a clock that has been broken for longer than anyone currently enrolled has been alive. The hands are stopped at ten past two. Nobody has ever fixed it. Nobody, as far as Jake knows, has ever mentioned it. He registered it the way he registered everything in that room. As data. He filed it and moved on.

Garrett Voss kept a workstation the way Garrett Voss kept himself, which is to say with a certain pride in disorder. There was a pen with the cap chewed flat. There was a packet of antacids, half blistered out. There was a Post-it on the lower bezel of the monitor with a phone number on it and no name. And there was a USB drive lying on the desk, half tucked beneath the edge of the keyboard, as if someone had set it down in a hurry and forgotten that hurry was an admission. Jake picked it up. He did not, in the moment, think the word evidence. He thought the word later, which is the word he tends to think when he has just done something irreversible.

He sat in the chair. It was still warm in the small of the back, which was the detail he wished he hadn't noticed. He woke the monitor. The screen asked for Voss's password, then accepted it on the third guess, which is something Jake will think about for days afterward, because the third guess was the obvious one, and obvious passwords mean a man who never expected anyone to look. He slid the drive in. What he expected to find: maintenance logs. Voltage curves. The dull, gridded heartbeat of a building's nervous system. What he expected to confirm: a hunch he had not yet given language to, about a pattern in the supervision windows he'd been mapping in his head for three weeks the way other boys mapped girls or scores. What opened on the screen was a spreadsheet.

It was the cleanest thing in the room. Rows and rows of timestamps, paired in two columns. Scheduled. Actual. Three weeks of them. And next to each entry where the two columns disagreed, and they disagreed often, a username sat in the audit field. Not Voss's username. Jake knew Voss's username. Voss's username was something stupid involving a dog. This one wasn't. The two-hour window the school published, the window the boys had organized their small lives around, the window Jake had been quietly testing the edges of for a month, was not two hours. The spreadsheet said so in a font that was indifferent to whether anyone believed it. Some of the entries were ninety minutes. Some were less. One, on a Tuesday Jake remembered for unrelated reasons, was forty.

He felt the cold of the room arrive at the back of his neck the way cold arrives when you've been still too long. He tried to copy the file. The drive refused. He tried to open it in a second window. The drive refused that too. He tried to drag a single row into a text editor and the row came across as a string of characters that meant nothing, encrypted at the cell level, locked into the disk it lived on. Whatever Voss had built, Voss had built to be read here or not at all. And Voss was not here. Somewhere above him, faint through the concrete, a door closed. Then nothing. Then the fans, which had been cycling at their patient idle, stepped up to full speed with a small audible commitment, the way machinery does when it has been told to wake.

The blackout was ending. It was ending early. Jake checked the corner of the screen and the corner of the screen agreed with him, and the broken clock on the south wall agreed with nobody. He pulled the drive. He shut the monitor down. He wiped the third guess from the login field and then wiped his prints from the keys, which was probably theater, and he knew it was theater, and he did it anyway.

He stood in the dark with the drive in his hand and understood, in a way he would not have been able to explain to anyone, that he had two choices now and they were not the choices he had walked into the room with. He could put the drive back on the desk and walk out and let whatever was happening to Garrett Voss continue happening, uninterrupted, to Garrett Voss. Or he could keep it. He lifted his shirt. He pressed the drive flat against his sternum, against the bone, where his pulse was doing something he wasn't going to look at directly. He held it there. The fans climbed another step. The room around him filled with the sound of a building waking up and beginning, in its slow patient mechanical way, to look. He didn't move.

He stood in the dark with someone else's secret against his ribs and waited to find out whether the door at the top of the stairs was going to open.