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the conference room had been changed three weeks ago, and dex still disliked it.
nobody else seemed to care. if anything, most of the office appeared to consider the renovation an improvement, which dex understood in the abstract because the old conference room had looked like it had been assembled sometime during the first bush administration and then forgotten. the walls had been a muted blue that turned almost green beneath the fluorescent lights, the carpet had contained little red and navy geometric shapes, the chairs had dark blue upholstery, and one wall had carried a framed photograph of washington that was always hanging slightly crooked because the hook behind it was loose. objectively, none of it had been particularly attractive. dex had never thought it was attractive. that wasn’t the point. the point was that it had looked that way when he arrived at the bureau in 2010, and then it had continued looking that way every single day afterward, which meant that eventually he stopped having to see it at all. he knew where everything was without looking. the table ended thirty-four inches from the eastern wall. the third chair on the window side had a loose wheel. there was a dark mark beneath the light switch where hundreds of hands had touched the paint. the clock ran forty-three seconds fast. the left fluorescent fixture occasionally flickered twice when it first came on and then remained steady for the rest of the day. these weren’t things dex had deliberately memorized; they had simply accumulated inside him through repetition until the room became a known quantity, another environment his brain no longer needed to actively solve. then somebody in facilities had apparently decided that federal law enforcement required more gray, and dex had come in one monday morning to find the entire room dismantled.
the walls were gray now, except one that was beige, although facilities called it “warm stone.” the carpet was charcoal with a faint linear pattern. the old chairs had been replaced with black ones that rolled too easily, the table was longer by seven inches and narrower by four, and the photograph of washington had disappeared entirely. the new clock was digital and therefore couldn’t be forty-three seconds fast in the familiar way the old one had been. dex had stood in the doorway that first morning for several seconds longer than necessary, looking at a room he knew was the conference room while experiencing the irritating sensation that it wasn’t. someone behind him had eventually said, “you going in, poindexter?” and he’d stepped aside without explaining himself. there wasn’t anything to explain. rooms changed. furniture got replaced. normal people didn’t require three weeks to stop noticing that a table was seven inches longer than it used to be. dex had made himself sit in a different chair during the first meeting after the renovation because he knew choosing the same relative position he’d always occupied would mean something, although he couldn’t have said exactly what. the next meeting he’d sat in his old position anyway. by the third week he knew the new dimensions. he knew which chair squeaked, which ceiling panel had been replaced slightly off-center, where the projector threw a trapezoidal shadow when it wasn’t aligned properly, and that the thermostat displayed seventy-one while the actual temperature averaged seventy-three. the room was becoming fixed again. almost.
today somebody had put a cake in it.
dex saw the cake through the glass panel in the door before he entered, which meant he had approximately two seconds to incorporate it into what he already knew was going to happen. white frosting, dark blue piping, clear plastic grocery-store container. twelve people inside. hatley at the far end of the table. stevens with a camera hanging from his neck. james lim beside the wall. ray nadeem sitting on the edge of the table despite there being four available chairs, one ankle crossed over the other and a paper cup of coffee in his hand. tim arinori was near the windows speaking to martinez, and arinori glanced toward the door before dex had even opened it completely, which meant he’d been watching for him. dex catalogued all of that before the door shut behind him, then immediately noticed that the fourth chair on the left had been pushed approximately three inches farther beneath the table than the others. his eyes stopped there. three inches. maybe two and three quarters. he could leave it. there was no reason not to leave it. nobody cared. dex took two steps into the room, altered his path by perhaps five degrees and nudged the chair outward with the side of his shoe as he passed. the front legs aligned with the neighboring chairs. something that had been faintly scraping at the back of his thoughts disappeared.
he had known about the promotion since eleven fourteen that morning, or rather, he’d known with enough certainty that pretending otherwise had become pointless. hatley had stopped beside his desk and told him she needed him upstairs at sixteen hundred, and the wording alone hadn’t been unusual, but her voice had been. hatley had several voices. there was the flat one she used when somebody had screwed up and she was deciding whether to embarrass them privately or publicly, the sharper one that meant everybody needed to stop talking because whatever came next mattered, the exhausted one that appeared around the end of particularly bad weeks, and the almost deliberately neutral one she used when she knew something the person standing in front of her didn’t. she’d used the last one. dex had looked at her for one second too long and she’d said, “four o’clock, poindexter,” before walking away. after that he’d tried to work normally and mostly succeeded, except he’d reread the same paragraph of an interview summary four times and corrected a comma that hadn’t needed correcting. at eleven twenty-three he had checked his personnel calendar. at eleven thirty-one he’d considered whether there was an outstanding administrative issue he’d forgotten. there wasn’t. at eleven forty-eight he went through his last three field reports anyway. nothing. at twelve seventeen he checked the date of his most recent performance review even though he already knew it. at twelve twenty-six he realized what he was doing and stopped. at twelve thirty-two he started again.
he had prepared for the meeting without calling it preparation. at lunch he went to the restroom and checked his tie in the mirror. it was straight. he’d adjusted it anyway, then returned it almost exactly to its original position. his hair was already neat because his hair was always neat. he’d run a damp hand over the side where one short piece had been sitting differently after he’d taken off his jacket earlier. he checked his collar, the line of his shirt beneath his jacket, the knot of his tie, his teeth, the small crease forming near his left elbow. everything was fine. he’d washed his hands and gone back to work. at two fourteen he’d wondered whether the jacket was too formal if this was only a meeting. at two sixteen he’d remembered hatley had specifically said upstairs rather than her office. at two twenty he’d decided that changing anything now would be more conspicuous than leaving it alone. at three forty-eight he’d gone to the restroom again, not because he needed to, but because there were twelve minutes remaining and twelve minutes was too long to sit at his desk thinking about four o’clock. he washed his hands again. checked the tie again. the tie was still straight. at three fifty-six he left his desk. it took two minutes and twenty seconds to reach the conference room at an ordinary pace. arriving two minutes early was appropriate. arriving five minutes early might mean standing outside waiting, which would look anxious. arriving exactly at four risked appearing late if someone else’s clock disagreed. he reached the door at three fifty-eight and thirty-seven seconds.
now everybody was looking at him.
that was worse than he’d calculated.
“poindexter,” hatley said from across the room, and twelve faces shifted toward him with the peculiar synchronization that occurred whenever one person’s name was spoken in a group. dex stopped just inside the door. he knew every face. knowing them didn’t make the attention less noticeable. ray’s expression changed first: the corner of his mouth moved upward before the rest of the smile arrived, and there was something almost smug about it, like he’d known longer than dex had and was pleased with himself for keeping quiet. lim wasn’t even attempting to hide his smile. he’d known dex since quantico, which meant he had accumulated enough experience with him to recognize when dex was uncomfortable and, unlike some people, usually had the decency not to make the discomfort worse. arinori’s expression was more neutral. not hostile exactly. arinori wasn’t hostile to dex all the time, regardless of how frequently dex found himself irritated by him, but there was a reserve there that didn’t exist with ray or lim. arinori watched him as though he were always waiting for one more piece of information before deciding what he thought. dex disliked that because it was too similar to what dex himself did to everyone else.
“ma’am,” dex said, and then became aware of his hands.
they were at his sides.
was that where they were supposed to be?
hatley’s hands weren’t at her sides, but she had a folder. ray had one hand wrapped around his coffee. lim’s arms were folded. arinori had put both hands into his pockets. carter had one hand on the back of a chair. there was no consistent sample. dex left his arms where they were, then became aware of how straight his elbows were and relaxed them. too much. he straightened them slightly. his shoulders felt too square. he lowered them. that felt like slouching. he corrected his posture and immediately wondered whether he looked like he was standing at attention. he shifted his weight onto his right foot because people generally didn’t distribute their weight perfectly evenly during casual conversation, except now he was thinking about weight distribution and therefore the movement wasn’t casual at all. he moved it back toward center. stop. he had been standing since infancy. there was no reason twelve people looking at him should suddenly make standing an activity requiring conscious supervision.
“come up here,” hatley said.
walking was worse.
dex crossed the room while trying not to think about walking, which guaranteed that he thought about nothing else. heel, sole, toe, transfer, opposite leg. had his arms always moved like that? yes. obviously. he knew how everyone else in the office walked without consciously trying to know it. ray’s stride shortened when he was tired. lim favored his left side slightly after sitting too long. arinori walked faster than necessary almost everywhere, as though the destination had personally challenged him. hatley shortened her steps when she was irritated because she became more controlled rather than less. dex could identify several coworkers by footsteps alone from the corridor outside his desk, could tell when someone was approaching with a question from the hesitation before they entered his peripheral vision, could notice a change in someone’s breathing from across a quiet room, and somehow possessed no reliable internal picture of what he looked like while moving. perhaps his left arm swung farther than his right. perhaps his stride was too long. perhaps everyone had noticed something about the way he walked years ago and simply never told him because mentioning another person’s strange walk would be rude. by the time he reached hatley, he was annoyed enough with himself that the anxiety briefly disappeared beneath the irritation.
ray moved his feet out of dex’s path without being asked. “look at you,” he said.
dex looked at him.
“what?”
ray’s smile widened. “nothing.”
that wasn’t true. there was clearly something.
lim rescued him without appearing to. “nadeem’s been insufferable for twenty minutes. don’t encourage him.”
“i’ve been supportive.”
“you ate some of the frosting before he got here.”
“that was supportive.”
dex glanced at the cake. the smear against the inside of the plastic container was on the side closest to where ray had been sitting.
“i thought that was carter.”
carter looked down at the blue frosting on his cuff. “why am i catching strays?”
ray laughed, and dex felt the room loosen around him. that was probably what lim had intended. dex looked at him briefly. lim was already looking away, giving him the courtesy of pretending he hadn’t done anything. they’d met at quantico, back when dex had still been trying to understand the difference between being good at training and looking like somebody who belonged among the people being trained. lim had been one of the first people there who could sit beside him in silence without eventually trying to fill it. dex had liked that before he’d realized liking it was what he was doing.
hatley tapped the folder against her palm once. the room quieted. dex looked at it and felt his heart rate increase again. caffeine, he thought automatically. he’d had coffee at two thirty-seven. the room was warm. there were more people than usual. he’d skipped most of lunch. several explanations. anxiety was only one possibility. excitement was another, although dex wasn’t sure how excitement was supposed to feel when it wasn’t attached to something immediate and physical. he understood that this was good. promotion was good. he’d worked for the fbi since 2010, long enough that the bureau had stopped feeling like a place he’d entered and started feeling like the architecture around his life. before that there had been the army in 2005, when he was nineteen and relieved to discover an entire institution willing to tell him when to wake, what to wear, where to stand, how to make a bed, how to move, what success looked like and exactly how badly he’d failed when he didn’t achieve it. he’d left in 2008 and discovered that civilian life contained far fewer instructions than he’d remembered. the hotline in 2009 had given him scripts, shifts, protocols, a voice on the other end of a phone and a defined purpose for however long the call lasted. then came the bureau in 2010, and suddenly there were rules again, only this time the rules came with work he was exceptionally good at.
hatley began with the formal language. performance evaluations. field work. judgment under pressure. firearms qualifications. situational awareness. reliability. dex listened closely even though he’d seen versions of most of those phrases in writing before. he liked evaluation language because evaluation language was measurable. “consistently exceeds expectations” meant there was an expectation and he had exceeded it. “exceptional firearms proficiency” meant there were scores underneath the adjective. “situational awareness” could be demonstrated. response time could be measured. accuracy could be recorded. a report could be correct or incorrect. evidence was either where it belonged or it wasn’t. a target was hit or missed. dex trusted things with edges. he trusted numbers because numbers did not wake up one morning and decide that what they’d told him yesterday meant something different today.
“effective today,” hatley said, “benjamin poindexter is being promoted to special agent.”
everyone applauded.
dex had known they would. he’d watched other promotions. he knew the sequence: announcement, applause, handshake, photograph, congratulations, cake, conversation, return to work. knowing the sequence did not make the sound of twelve people clapping in the newly renovated conference room any less abrupt. the gray walls seemed to return the noise differently than the old blue ones had. dex smiled because he knew he was supposed to smile and then immediately wondered whether he’d started smiling too quickly. he could feel his mouth, which was a terrible development because mouths were easier to operate when you weren’t monitoring them. teeth or no teeth? ray showed teeth when he smiled. lim did sometimes. hatley wasn’t. martinez was. insufficient data. dex kept the expression he’d already chosen because changing it now would be more noticeable. then he became aware of blinking. he blinked. had that been too soon after the previous blink? he had no idea. suddenly the automatic processes of his own face seemed like tasks he’d been negligently performing his entire life without learning the rules.
hatley continued once the applause faded, explaining the change in responsibilities and then the pay increase that came with the promotion. somebody behind dex made an approving noise at the salary figure, and ray murmured, “now we’re talking,” loudly enough that several people laughed. dex smiled because they did, but the number itself passed through his mind without catching on anything. more money was better than less money. obviously. he understood arithmetic. it would go into his account, most of it would stay there, and the number on the statement would become larger. rent was predictable. utilities were predictable. groceries varied within a range he could estimate. he didn’t collect expensive things. he replaced clothes when they wore out and equipment when it broke. he had never understood people who received more money and immediately responded by inventing more things they needed to buy. if the bureau had offered him the title with exactly the same salary, he would have wanted it anyway, although he knew better than to say that aloud. i don’t do it for the money sounded like something a person said because he wanted everyone to admire how little he cared about money. dex didn’t want anyone asking what he did it for.
the answer was too difficult to explain without sounding wrong.
he did it because he was good at it. because the bureau took things about him that had never fit cleanly anywhere else and assigned them names that sounded useful. precision. awareness. response. discipline. the first time somebody at quantico had watched him shoot and called him exceptional, dex had felt something inside him become very quiet. he’d always known what his hands could do. he’d known distance instinctively before anybody taught him formulas for it. he could look at a room and see where an object would go if it left his hand at a particular angle, could feel force and trajectory as naturally as other people seemed to feel conversation. before the army, before quantico, those abilities had existed without a purpose large enough to contain them. institutions had given them boundaries. the army had said do this here, not there. the fbi had said use this for us. there was relief in being useful that he had never learned how to discuss.
hatley finished, closed the folder and extended her hand.
handshake.
easy.
dex took it. he knew handshakes. match pressure, firm without competing, eye contact, one controlled movement. “congratulations, special agent poindexter,” she said, and something shifted behind his ribs when she used the title. he couldn’t identify it immediately, which irritated him because hatley’s expression was perfectly legible. she was proud. not broadly emotional about it, because she was still his superior and there were twelve people watching, but there was warmth at the corners of her eyes and a slight release in her jaw that wasn’t present when she was merely performing professionalism. dex knew she meant it. he knew ray was pleased. he knew lim was pleased. he knew arinori was watching with an expression that suggested he accepted the promotion as deserved even if he wasn’t about to become sentimental about it. dex knew what everybody in the room felt about him. what he felt about himself remained a shapeless pressure somewhere beneath his sternum.
then stevens raised the camera, and dex’s entire understanding of the situation collapsed into the awareness that he had a body.
“hold that,” stevens said.
hatley kept his hand in hers.
dex went still.
“look over here.”
he turned toward the camera. stevens stood approximately eight feet away. nikon body. standard zoom lens. right index finger already resting on the shutter. dex registered all of that immediately because looking at the equipment was easier than thinking about what the equipment was looking at. he couldn’t see his own face. that was the problem. other people’s faces supplied information constantly; his own was invisible unless reflected. he could tell that ray was trying not to laugh because ray had already noticed dex’s discomfort. he could tell lim had noticed too because lim had deliberately stopped looking directly at him. he could tell arinori had noticed because one eyebrow had moved upward by perhaps two millimeters. dex couldn’t tell whether he looked uncomfortable. he only knew that his jaw felt tight, which meant it probably looked tight, so he loosened it. his shoulders might be too high. lower them. too low. raise them slightly. his free hand hung beside his thigh. was that normal? hatley’s free hand was at her side. good. mirror that. except her fingers were naturally curved while his were too straight. relax fingers. not that much. his thumb looked strange. had his thumb always looked like that?
“poindexter,” hatley said quietly.
his eyes moved toward her.
“breathe.”
“i am breathing.”
ray made a sound that was suspiciously close to a laugh.
dex looked at him.
“don’t,” dex said.
that made ray actually laugh, which made three other people laugh, which made dex’s face warmer. he knew they weren’t laughing at him in the cruel sense. he could distinguish cruelty. none of their bodies contained it. ray’s shoulders were loose, his smile genuine. lim had dropped his head because he was trying not to make it worse. even arinori’s expression had softened slightly. dex knew all of that. knowledge didn’t prevent the immediate thought that he’d done something wrong. was he standing wrong? yes, apparently, or hatley wouldn’t have told him to breathe. was he smiling wrong? probably. blinking wrong? impossible, except now he was thinking about blinking again. he blinked and hated that he knew he’d chosen to.
“smile,” stevens said.
dex smiled.
the flash fired.
“wow,” ray said.
dex’s head turned toward him immediately.
ray raised both hands. “i didn’t say anything.”
“you said wow.”
“that’s technically something,” lim said.
“thank you, james.”
arinori looked toward the camera. “did you get one where he doesn’t look like he’s waiting for sentencing?”
dex stared at him. arinori looked back.
there it was. exactly why they didn’t get along.
“helpful,” dex said.
“i’m trying.”
“you’re not.”
ray coughed into his coffee cup. lim turned away entirely. hatley closed her eyes for approximately half a second, the expression of a woman reconsidering every personnel decision that had brought all four of them into the same room. “we’re taking another picture.”
another picture meant the first one had been wrong.
the thought arrived instantly and with far more force than it deserved.
dex knew it was only a photograph. he knew nobody would care tomorrow. he knew stevens probably took three or four of these every time someone received a promotion because people blinked and cameras misfocused and somebody inevitably looked away. none of those facts mattered to the small precise mechanism in his head that had already converted we’re taking another into you failed the first attempt.
“just relax,” lim said, and unlike arinori, he said it gently.
dex looked at him.
lim gave him the smallest shrug. no teasing now. just you’re fine. they’d known each other since quantico. lim knew when to stop. ray caught dex’s eye next and smiled, but this time there was no joke in it either. “you earned it, man.”
that was worse somehow. dex looked back toward the camera. the lens was circular. circles were easier than people. he found its center.
eight feet. stevens was five ten, perhaps five eleven in shoes. lens held slightly below eye level. dex could see the rectangular reflection of the ceiling fixture bent across the curvature of the glass. behind that, aperture. concentric rings. geometry. center point. his breathing slowed without instruction. the room rearranged itself into lines: edge of table, seam in carpet, vertical frame of the glass wall, ninety-degree corner behind stevens, diagonal from lens to dex’s eyes. the gray and beige stopped being new colors and became surfaces. the people stopped being twelve sets of eyes and became positions in space. ray three feet to the left. lim five feet behind. arinori near the window. hatley beside him, hand still in his.
numbers didn’t care whether he looked normal.
“ready?” stevens asked.
dex didn’t answer.
the flash fired.
“got it.”
hatley released his hand, and dex became aware that he’d been gripping hers slightly harder than he intended. not enough to hurt. enough to notice. had she noticed? almost certainly. she noticed everything worth noticing. she didn’t mention it. instead she gave his upper arm a brief pat and said, “congratulations again, poindexter.”
“thank you, ma’am.”
established response. easy.
then the room broke apart into smaller conversations, and dex almost preferred having everyone stare at him because at least the ceremony had contained a sequence. this didn’t. people approached individually to congratulate him, and every interaction required a slightly different response because repeating thank you with identical tone would eventually sound strange. carter said he’d deserved it. dex said he appreciated that. martinez told him not to spend the raise all at once. dex said he wouldn’t. dalton asked whether he was buying drinks. dex said he hadn’t planned to. dalton stared at him for a second, laughed and said, “of course you haven’t,” which dex assumed was affectionate because the alternative didn’t fit the expression. somebody handed him cake. he accepted it despite not wanting cake because declining cake at your own promotion celebration would invite questions, and questions were worse than cake.
ray found him near the newly gray wall ten minutes later. “you know,” he said, “most people are happy when they get promoted.”
“i am happy.”
“you look like you’re reviewing evidence.”
dex looked down at the cake.
he had, without noticing, divided the square into four almost equal sections with the side of his fork.
ray followed his eyes.
“don’t.”
“i didn’t say anything.”
“you were going to.”
“i was thinking something.”
“same thing with you.”
ray grinned and leaned against the wall. dex didn’t. the paint was new enough that he could still detect it underneath the smell of coffee and frosting if he paid attention, and he didn’t want anything on the back of his jacket. ray watched him for a moment, then glanced toward the rest of the room. “seriously, though. good for you.”
dex looked at him.
ray meant it.
that shouldn’t have required analysis, but dex analyzed it anyway. no sarcasm in the mouth. no tension around the eyes. no glance toward anybody else to see whether they were listening. genuine.
“thanks.”
“you’re welcome.”
ray ate a piece of dex’s cake directly off the plate with his fingers.
dex stared at him.
“what?”
“there’s an entire cake.”
“this one was closer.”
“you touched mine.”
“you weren’t eating it.”
“i was.”
“you were dissecting it.”
dex looked down at the four equal sections.
ray walked away before dex could answer.
lim replaced him several minutes later, although lim stood beside him rather than directly in front of him, which dex appreciated. “you okay?”
“yes.”
“good.”
lim didn’t ask again.
that was another reason dex liked him.
they stood quietly for a while, watching ray argue with carter about whether taking frosting with a finger constituted stealing if the cake belonged collectively to the office. arinori passed them on his way toward the door and stopped just long enough to look at dex.
“congratulations.”
dex waited for the second part.
there wasn’t one.
“thank you.”
arinori nodded once and left.
dex watched him go.
“see?” lim said. “he likes you.”
“no, he doesn’t.”
“i didn’t say very much.”
dex looked at him.
lim smiled into his coffee.
by five thirty the office had returned to itself. the cake was in the refrigerator. the conference room lights were off. people had gone back to reports and phone calls and whatever they’d been doing before somebody decided benjamin poindexter required frosting and applause. dex sat at his desk with his monitor centered exactly parallel to the desk edge, keyboard centered beneath it, active files stacked on the left, completed files on the right, two pens aligned beside his notebook. there was an email from human resources confirming the promotion and salary adjustment. he read it once. then again. the first reading was information; the second verified the first. he filed it into the correct folder, opened his email signature and changed his title.
special agent benjamin poindexter.
he stared at it.
deleted it.
typed it again.
the letters were identical.
it looked better.
at six twelve stevens sent the photograph.
dex opened it immediately and regretted doing so before the image had finished loading.
hatley looked completely normal. naturally. her posture was relaxed without being informal, expression warm but restrained, body angled toward the camera in a way that appeared effortless. dex looked like someone had explained the concept of a promotion photograph to him thirty seconds before it was taken. it wasn’t terrible. that almost made it worse because there was nothing obviously wrong that he could correct. his left shoulder was perhaps half an inch higher than the right. his smile was asymmetrical. his free hand looked stiff. one side of his jacket had folded slightly where his arm met his torso. his eyes looked too focused on the lens, although he had no idea what the correct amount of focus was supposed to be when looking directly at a camera. he zoomed in. immediately recognized that as a mistake. zoomed out. minimized the image. reopened it seventeen seconds later.
he examined everyone except himself this time.
hatley was pleased.
ray was visible behind them, blurred slightly because he’d moved just before the shutter, but dex could still identify the shape of his smile. lim was farther back, looking at dex instead of the camera. arinori was near the edge of the frame, arms folded, expression almost unreadable to anybody who didn’t know what his face normally looked like, but dex knew the difference. carter was clapping. martinez was smiling. nobody looked uncomfortable. nobody looked embarrassed for him. nobody appeared to be examining whether his left shoulder was half an inch higher than his right.
dex understood this.
he looked back at himself anyway.
there had been photographs before, obviously. army photographs in which everyone was supposed to look the same. quantico photographs in which he could disappear into rows of people wearing nearly identical expressions. identification photographs that had rules: face forward, neutral expression, plain background. those were easy. this was different because this photograph was supposed to capture something about him at a moment when something had happened to him. happiness, accomplishment, pride. whatever expression people made when they wanted to preserve evidence that they had been happy.
he tried to remember what he’d been thinking when the flash went off.
center of lens. angle of ceiling reflection. distance. stevens’s index finger. hatley’s hand. don’t blink. don’t move. stand normally. smile normally.
nothing about being happy.
that bothered him until he realized he’d been happy before the camera appeared.
the realization came quietly enough that he almost missed it.
hatley had said special agent poindexter, and something had happened in his chest. ray had told him he’d earned it and dex had needed to look away. lim had smiled at him before the announcement because lim had known what it meant. even arinori had congratulated him without adding anything irritating afterward. the salary figure was already gone from dex’s immediate memory because he’d never cared enough to keep it there, but he remembered the exact cadence of hatley’s voice when she’d said earned. he remembered the first time at quantico somebody had written exceptional beside his score. he remembered arriving at the bureau in 2010 and learning the building floor by floor, procedure by procedure, person by person, until something unfamiliar had become fixed enough to feel safe. he remembered the army before that, and the hotline between them, different structures built around different versions of himself. he remembered how often he’d wondered, without ever phrasing the thought directly, whether everyone else could tell there was something about him that hadn’t been assembled correctly.
the promotion was evidence against that.
not proof. dex knew better than to confuse evidence with proof.
but evidence.
somebody had watched him for years and decided to trust him with more.
he minimized the photograph and returned to his report, but five minutes later he opened it again. his shoulder was still too high. his hand still looked stiff. the gray conference room behind him still looked wrong compared with the blue one that existed in his memory, and he suspected it would continue looking wrong until enough ordinary days accumulated over it that the new version became the one his mind expected. ray was still blurred in the background. lim was still watching him. hatley was still smiling. arinori, annoyingly, looked completely normal in photographs without appearing to put any effort into it.
dex saved the image.
he created a folder for it rather than leaving it in downloads, named the file with the date and event, checked the filename twice, then closed everything except the report he was supposed to finish. the office around him had settled into its evening rhythm, quieter now, ventilation humming overhead, occasional footsteps passing in the corridor, a telephone ringing twice somewhere beyond the partition before somebody answered. familiar sounds arranged themselves around him. his desk was straight. his files were straight. the promotion letter was filed where it belonged. tomorrow he’d arrive at the same time, take the same route to his desk and do almost exactly the same work he’d done yesterday, except his email signature would contain two new words and the people around him would expect slightly more from him than they had before. strangely, that didn’t frighten him. expectations he could understand. expectations came with parameters. there were things to accomplish and ways to know whether he’d accomplished them.
what frightened him, although he would never have used that word, was the photograph. not because it was bad, and not because anyone else would see anything remarkable in it. years from now, someone could have looked at it and seen exactly what it was supposed to show: a relatively young fbi agent standing beside his superior during a promotion, neat suit, neat hair, awkward smile, coworkers gathered behind him. they wouldn’t know he’d spent the morning checking for reasons he might secretly be in trouble. they wouldn’t know he’d adjusted his tie twice, calculated the correct time to leave his desk, corrected a chair on his way into the room, forgotten how to stand when everyone looked at him, or found the exact center of a camera lens because geometry was easier than being seen. they wouldn’t know the salary increase meant almost nothing to him while the word earned meant enough that he still remembered precisely how hatley had said it.
and dex, looking at the photograph, wouldn’t have known how to explain that distinction either. he could identify the angle of his shoulders, the tension in his fingers, the people behind him and what each of their expressions meant. he could reconstruct the room from the photograph down to distances and positions, could tell exactly where stevens had been standing and approximately where the flash had reflected against the new gray paint. he could read everyone in the frame except the person at its center, because perception had always worked outward for him far better than it worked inward. so he would keep seeing the awkwardness first. the hand held too stiffly, the smile that didn’t quite know what shape it was supposed to make, the posture of somebody trying too hard to appear natural. what he wouldn’t see, no matter how many times he enlarged the image and searched it for mistakes, was the simplest thing the photograph had captured.
benjamin poindexter was proud of himself.
and because nobody had ever taught him how that was supposed to look, he mistook it for anxiety.