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.

Forty-three boys, two empty chairs, and the smell of bleach laid down so recently it stung the back of the throat. The Main Classroom at seven in the morning was a cathedral of fluorescents and right angles, and at the front of it, the Educator's lens swept the rows in its slow, unhurried arc. Jake Barnes counted the empty seats in the third row twice. Both times he came up with the same number, and both times the number meant nothing he could safely say out loud. The drive sat against his sternum, taped flat under his undershirt where the hem held it in place. He had spent the night with it there. He had slept the way a man sleeps next to a coiled snake, which is to say he hadn't.

Morning announcements were the usual liturgy. Schedule. Reminder. A note about the gymnasium floors. No mention of the third row. No mention of the technician, whose name Jake had not heard spoken aloud in eight days. The Educator's eye paused on Jake for what he counted as a beat longer than its standard interval, then moved on. Probably nothing. Probably he was learning to see weight where there was only mechanism. Between first and second period he made his detour. The corridor board outside the dormitory wing was a clipboard graveyard, sign-out logs from the previous month layered three deep on rusting hooks because no one in administration had bothered to clear them. Jake had lifted a page two days ago. He kept it folded inside his trigonometry notebook, behind a worksheet on the law of cosines, because nobody, in his experience, ever asked to see your math.

He needed twenty minutes alone with the page and a clear surface. He found both in the chapel library, which at this hour held exactly one boy reading scripture and one boy pretending to. Jake took a carrel at the back and put the page on the desk and put his own list beside it, a column of times he had memorized from the terminal screen before the screen had gone dark on him. The matching took longer than he wanted and was finished sooner than he was ready for.

The sign-out log was kept in pencil, in a hand that leaned slightly to the right and crossed its sevens like a European. Every shortened blackout in his column had a corresponding signature on the page. Every single one. The same loops. The same crossed sevens. He had seen that handwriting on study group rosters, on the bulletin under the chapel notices, on a Christmas card last December that had been signed, with a small flourish, Lucas. Jake sat with the two pages in front of him and did not move for what might have been a minute.

It was wrong. It was too clean. Lucas Jameson did not sign his name to things he wanted hidden. Lucas Jameson, who managed to make even compulsory attendance feel like a favor he was doing you, did not leave a paper trail in pencil on a dormitory clipboard. Which meant either Jake had spent two days carrying evidence that pointed exactly where someone wanted it to point, or Lucas had made the kind of mistake that people like Lucas did not make, and Jake had no way to tell the difference without showing his hand to the only person in the building he was sure he should not show it to.

He folded the page back into the notebook. He closed the notebook. He did not feel relief. He felt the drive against his sternum, warm now from his skin, and he understood, in a small precise way, that he had just made his investigation harder, not easier. The cafeteria at midday was loud the way a hospital ward is loud, which is to say busy underneath and quiet on top. Jake took his tray to a corner where he could keep his back to a wall, and he ate without tasting, and he listened. Two tables over, a fourth-year named Patel was leaning across his tray toward a boy Jake didn't know well. Patel's voice was low but the cafeteria's acoustics were generous to anyone willing to keep still. It's not random, Patel was saying. I'm telling you. Watch the Tuesday window next week. Watch what time it actually ends.

The other boy said something Jake couldn't catch. I didn't figure it out, Patel said. Somebody told me. Who. A pause. Patel looked at his tray. Then he said, You don't ask that. That's the first thing you learn. You don't ask that. Jake kept his eyes on his food. He chewed nothing for a while. Somebody told me. Three words that meant the thing he had been carrying alone under his shirt was not, in fact, being carried alone. Somebody had told Patel, and somebody had told the somebody, and the chain went back into a dark Jake could not yet see the shape of. He looked up.

Across the cafeteria, at a table near the serving line, a boy was watching him. Thin, dark-haired, a year younger maybe. Jake had never spoken to him. He could not, in that moment, recall the boy's name, and was not certain he had ever known it. The boy held his eyes. One second. Two. Three. Long enough that it stopped being an accident and became a sentence. Then, deliberately, without changing his expression, the boy lowered his gaze to Jake's chest. To the flat place under the shirt where the drive sat against his sternum. He looked at it for perhaps a half second. Then he stood, picked up his tray, and walked away toward the dish return, and did not look back.

Jake did not move. The cafeteria went on being loud around him. The drive went on being warm against his skin. Somewhere in the building, he understood now, a clock he could not see was running, and it had been running for longer than he had been awake to it.

The gymnasium hadn't been used since the renovation vote stalled in March, and the floorboards remembered it. Jake's shoes raised pale dust with every step. The smell was old leather and rope and something faintly mineral, like rain trapped in a wall. Above him, the bleachers folded into themselves in long accordion shadows. Below the high windows, the last of the corridor light leaked in at a slant that made the painted lines on the floor look like they were drawn underwater. Marcus was already there. He sat on the third row of the bleachers with his elbows on his knees, in the posture of a boy waiting for a coach to chew him out. He had asked for this meeting. Jake had said yes before he'd thought about why.

They had been friends since first form. Marcus was the one who'd shown Jake which radiator in the west wing made enough noise to cover a phone call. He was the one who'd lent Jake a tie the morning Jake's father didn't show for the parents' breakfast. There was a logic, in Jake's head, that put Marcus on a shelf separate from the rest of the building. The shelf was supposed to be load-bearing. Jake didn't sit. He stood at the edge of the free-throw line with the USB drive a hard small weight against his sternum and waited. "You found something," Marcus said. He wasn't asking. Jake didn't answer. Silence was cheaper than a lie.

Marcus unfolded a piece of paper from his blazer pocket. It was a timetable, the same kind they printed at the office every Sunday, except this one had small pencil marks in the margins. Numbers. Initials. A grid layered over the official grid. He slid it down the bench toward Jake without looking up. "Since October," Marcus said. "I've been giving Lucas windows." The word giving did a lot of work in that sentence, and Jake noted it. "Giving him what." "Times. Corridors. When the cameras drop, where they drop. He pays in protection. You know what protection means here." Marcus finally looked up. His face was tired in a way Jake hadn't clocked before, and Jake felt a small inward flinch at not having clocked it. "I'm not the only one. There's a, I don't know what to call it. A handful of us. We trade." "Trade what."

"Whatever moves. Test banks. Sign-outs. Somebody's brother brings cigarettes up from town, somebody else needs an alibi for chapel. The blackouts are the currency. Whoever knows when they happen runs the market." Jake took a breath through his nose and held it. He had come here believing he was carrying a secret. He understood now that he was carrying a rumor everyone in a certain room had already heard. "How long have you known they were engineered," he said. Marcus's mouth did something complicated. "I knew they were reliable. I didn't ask why. You don't ask why a door's open. You walk through." "Who's holding the door." "I told you. Lucas pays." "That's not what I asked." Marcus looked at his hands. "I don't know. I don't want to know. That's the deal I made with myself." He almost smiled. "You'd have made it too. If you'd been asked."

The sentence sat in the dust between them. Jake had a list of next questions and felt each one tighten as he understood it would not be answered. How many. Names. Whether the unnamed boy in the cafeteria belonged to this market or a different one. Whether Marcus had told anyone Jake was looking. Whether Marcus was telling him now because he wanted Jake in, or because someone had asked him to find out where Jake stood. Jake picked up the timetable. The pencil marks were small and neat and the handwriting was Marcus's, which he knew the shape of from years of borrowed notes. He folded the page in quarters and put it in his inside pocket, against the drive. The two pieces of paper and plastic pressed each other through the cloth like they were comparing notes. "You shouldn't have told me," Jake said. "I know."

"Why did you." Marcus looked at the high windows. "Because they're going to ask me about you. And I wanted to be able to say I told you first." There was nothing to do with that sentence. Jake left it on the bleacher. He walked the length of the gym back to the side door, his footprints stamped clean into the dust behind him, a record anyone could read. He did not look back to see whether Marcus was still sitting in the same shape. The side door let him into the east corridor. It closed behind him with the long unhurried click of a well-machined latch, and the sound carried in a way it shouldn't have, because there was nothing else in the hall to absorb it. The overhead lights were out. All of them. Not flickering, not dim. Out. The blackout window wasn't scheduled for another forty minutes.

Jake stood in the dark with his hand still on the door behind him and counted, in his head, the people who could have arranged that, and found that the list had grown since lunch.

Two in the morning at St. Ignatius sounds like nothing, which is the point. The dorms are built with the assumption that the boys inside them sleep. The walls were not designed to muffle a standoff. On the east side of the third-floor corridor, six boys. On the west side, five. Phone torches up, beams crossed in the air like the cheap geometry of a stage fight, except none of them are acting. The hands holding the phones are shaking, and the beams quiver against the wallpaper, and somewhere behind a closed door a sleeper turns over and decides, correctly, that it is safer to stay turned over.

The shouting is the kind that has been told, twice already, to keep it down. Which means it has the strangled quality of men trying to be furious in a whisper. Someone says rat. Someone says you don't know what you're talking about. Someone says Richardson, and the word lands in the corridor like a coin dropped on tile, and for a half second every torch holds still.

Jake is at the back of the east group, which is to say he is at the back of his own group, which is to say he has already begun the slow administrative process of not being part of it. He is doing the math. Three bodies needed in the server room. He has, at best count, one and a half. Marcus is the half, and Marcus is across the corridor now, on the wrong side of the torches, holding a denim jacket closed at the throat as if the cold were the problem. The USB drive is in the inside pocket of that jacket. Jake watches the pocket. He watches it the way you watch a child near a road.

There is a boy on the west side Jake doesn't recognize at first, and then does. The cafeteria boy. He hasn't said a word since he arrived in the corridor. He doesn't say one now. He just stands at Lucas's left shoulder like a footnote that has learned to breathe. Lucas, for his part, has been quiet for almost a minute. This is worth noticing. In any room Lucas is in, the silence belongs to him, and he spends it the way other people spend money. He lets the shouting find its own ceiling. He lets one of the east boys, a thin kid named Pryor, get as far as I'll go to the Head myself, I swear to God, before he moves. He moves the way a conductor lowers a baton. One step forward, hands open at his sides, palms turned out.

"Alright," he says. Just that. And eleven torches lower by maybe ten degrees, which is to say the corridor gets darker around the edges and brighter in the middle, where he's standing. "We're scaring each other," Lucas says, in the voice of someone identifying a smell. "And we're going to keep scaring each other until we name the thing we're afraid of. So let's name it. Someone in this hallway has the logs. We all know that. We all know who." He doesn't turn his head. He doesn't have to. He lifts one hand, lazily, and points down the corridor, past his own shoulder, past the east group, to the back. "Jake has them," he says. "Jake has had them since Tuesday."

It is not true anymore. It was true on Tuesday. Lucas knows it isn't true now, because Lucas is the reason it isn't true. And still, every face in the corridor turns, because the sentence was constructed to make them turn, and because Lucas is the kind of speaker whose grammar your body obeys before your brain catches up. Jake feels his own group turn. That's the part. Not the west side. The east side. The boys he walked in with. Pryor turns slowest, which is almost worse than turning fast. Somewhere two floors down, a door opens and closes. Measured footsteps cross the landing. They don't hurry. They don't need to. A voice, not raised, addressed to no one in the empty stairwell, says something about the hour, and something about by the book, and the footsteps continue along the ground-floor corridor and do not come up.

The boys in the hallway don't hear it. Jake does, the way you hear weather coming. He takes a step back. Then another. His shoulder blades find the cold push-bar of the fire-exit door at the corridor's end. He does not push it. Not yet. He stands with his back flat against it and counts the faces in the torchlight, and the count comes to twelve, and not one of them is Marcus, because Marcus has, at some point in the last ten seconds, looked down at the floor. The pocket of the denim jacket is still closed. The drive is still inside it. Jake can see the small rectangular weight of it against the fabric, or thinks he can, which at this distance is the same thing.

Lucas hasn't moved his hand. He's still pointing, loosely, the gesture gone casual now that it's done its work. He is looking at Jake the way a man looks at a chess piece he has already decided to take, with the small, almost affectionate patience of someone waiting for his opponent to see it too. Jake meets his eyes. He holds them. He keeps his hand on the push-bar and does not push. He is trying to read Marcus's face, but Marcus is still looking at the floor, and the floor, at two in the morning, has nothing to say.

Headmaster Richardson's office at five forty-six in the morning smelled like furniture polish and old paper. The USB drive sat in the center of the desk blotter, under the brass lamp, looking smaller than it had any right to look. Richardson stood at the window with his back to the room, hands clasped at the small of his spine. He had not turned when Jake came in. He had not turned when Jake sat down. The light outside was the color of wet stone. Three hours earlier, Jake had been in the basement.

It is worth saying, because the record should show it, that Jake had not gone down there to be a hero. He had gone down there because Marcus Webb, at one in the morning, had unlocked the server room door and waited. Marcus had not said anything about Lucas. Marcus had simply held out the drive, the same drive Lucas had pried from him in the corridor, and said, quietly, that he'd had a long think about who exactly was being unified, and by whom. Then he'd left. The fans were running. The door was open. Jake had what he came for and nobody in the room to perform for. He sat down at the terminal. He plugged in the drive. He started the upload.

The progress bar moved the way progress bars move when you are watching them. It got to twenty. It got to forty. At sixty-two percent, Lucas walked in. He did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, like a man arriving at a meeting he had scheduled. "You don't have the passphrase for the inner partition," Lucas said. He said it the way you'd mention the weather. "You can push the wrapper out all night. Nobody will be able to read what's inside it." Jake didn't look up. "I'll give it to you," Lucas said. "Right now. You hand me the drive, I unlock it here, we decide together what goes out. You walk out of this room and nobody knows you were ever in it. Or you keep pushing and in about a minute Richardson comes through that door and pulls the cable, and you've uploaded a brick."

The bar ticked to sixty-eight. "You engineered the windows," Jake said. It wasn't a question. "I shortened them," Lucas said. "By minutes. Nobody got hurt. Everybody got scared. Scared people need somebody to tell them what the shape of the room is." He almost smiled. "That was going to be me. Under the next administration. Whoever's running this place in two years is going to need someone who already knows where the wires go." This, in the end, was Lucas's tell. Not the charisma. The patience. He had been building a résumé for a job that didn't exist yet. Seventy. "Give me the drive, Jake."

Jake reached for the drive. Lucas's shoulders dropped, a quarter inch, the relief of a man whose model of the world had just been confirmed again. Jake pulled the drive out of the port, turned it in his fingers, and dropped it into his shirt pocket. The upload, wrapper and all, kept going. He had cloned it before he plugged it in. Lucas hadn't asked. "The passphrase is in the maintenance log header," Jake said. "Page one. The technician left it for whoever came looking. You should have read further in." Lucas's face did something then that was almost worth the entire month. It was very brief. The footsteps in the corridor were Richardson's.

Back in the office, at five forty-six, Richardson finally turned from the window. He didn't sit. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a second USB drive, identical to the first, and set it on the blotter beside Jake's. There was masking tape on the casing. A name was written on the tape in black marker. Jake didn't need to lean forward to read it. It was the technician's name. Richardson watched him read it. "He brought it to me," Richardson said, "the night before he left. I told him I would handle it through channels." A pause that wasn't quite an apology. "Channels are slow, Mr. Barnes." Jake understood, then, several things at once, and chose not to say any of them.

"Mr. Jameson will be withdrawn by his family this week," Richardson said. "Quietly. The blackout schedule will be revised. Supervision will be, gentlemen," and he caught himself, the plural meant for a room that wasn't there, "supervision will be increased. Full restoration of the window. Additional monitoring in the residential corridors. By the book." He looked at Jake the way a man looks at a tool he is deciding whether to keep. "You did the school a service. I would prefer, going forward, that you did the school no further services." The technician's name sat on the blotter between them. Nobody asked where he was. Richardson did not offer.

Jake walked out through the administrative wing as the building lights came up zone by zone, the way they did every morning, the way they had done through all of it. In the main hallway the clock above the trophy case still read three seventeen, the hands stopped at the minute the first blackout had taken them out in October. Nobody had fixed it. Nobody, he understood now, was going to. He took the back stairs down. He didn't have to. He went anyway. At the far end of the basement corridor, the emergency light above the server room door pulsed red, the same slow heartbeat it had kept the night he first went in. But the door was standing open. And the fans had stopped.