Chapter 5: Locker 31

"Augustin texts you," I said. I kept my voice flat and my eyes on the ceiling. "Is she still breathing."

Enoch lay beside me in the dark, very still.

"He asks every night," he said. "He's paid for half my staff, and he wants to know what they see."

"And what do you tell him?"

"That you're breathing."

"That's all?"

"That's all that's his business."

I turned my head.

His face gave me nothing, and I decided to let it go.

For now.

"I need to go to the depot," I said. "Today. You can come or not."

"I'm coming."

"You said you can't follow me past the doors."

"I said I can't protect you," Enoch said. "I didn't say I wouldn't come."

We left at six that evening by the laundry dock, in my company's van.

Odile had moved it into the hotel garage the night I arrived, and she drove it herself.

She wore a man's flat cap, and she drove.

"Forty years," she said, when I stared at her. "You learn every exit in a city."

Enoch sat in the back on a stack of folded sheets with his gloves off, checking the clip of a black pistol.

"You carry that in a hotel," I said.

"Not in the hotel."

"Is it legal?"

"Not even a little."

Calder Union Depot was a long brick hall that smelled of diesel and wet wool.

Odile parked in the loading lane and kept the engine on.

"Ten minutes," she said. "Then I leave without you."

Locker 31 was in the back row, past the closed ticket windows.

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