Page 65 of The Number of Love
But the doorway was blocked by Dilly Knox, who stepped inside with raised brows. “Is DID angry with you, De Wilde? To assign you tohim?”
Margot grinned. “No. He just knows I’m not going to butt heads with him like a ram, as the rest of you do.”
“Mm.” Dilly glared at Camden for a moment and then held up a paper in his hands, his eyes softening back to normal when he looked again to her. “I could use your help, if you have a moment. This just came in. I haven’t compared it to all our codebooks yet, but it doesn’t look to me as though it’s in the usual ones, and I was afraid it would be another of those that seem to be in that new code. You hold the lot of them in your head better than I do, so I thought perhaps you could...?”
“Ah, fun.” It was something like holding up a random piece andtrying to determine which of five puzzles it belonged to. One had to look past the portion of image that was so incomplete, the colors that could belong in any of the blank spots, and instead look at the shape of the thing.
Behind her, the chair scraped. “Wait just a blighted moment. Do you mean to tell me—”
“Do shut up, Camden. My feeble feminine intelligence requires a bit of quiet for such tasks.” Margot read through the page and then let her eyes slide shut. Let the organization of it turn into numbers in her mind, let the numbers shift and slide until their patterns matched up with others.
When she opened her eyes again, she found Dilly to be the one wearing a smirk, directed at the grounded pilot.
Margot handed the paper back. “I believe it’s a variation of 2310. You’ll need to determine the variance, of course, but that seems to be its pattern.”
“Ah. Good man, De Wilde. You’ve saved me a few hours of trial and error.” He stepped back into the corridor with a mock salute. “Best of luck with your delinquent.”
“Much appreciated.” She turned back to said delinquent with raised brows. “Any questions before I go?”
He held up a pencil, bemusement on his face. “You’re a codebreaker?”
Not quite as insightful as the ones Drake tended to ask. But then, they were old friends, not identical twins. “Obviously.”
“But you’re a woman.”
“Excellent powers of deduction. What was your first clue?”
He sighed, and a fair bit of his bravado seeped out with it. He looked ... tired. And maybe a bit broken.
Margot decided to take pity on him. A little, anyway. “It’s like this, Camden. DID will hire whoever can do the job. A banker. A music critic. A girl. A supposed criminal. It doesn’t matter what you were outside these halls. In here, all that matters is that you can do the job. So do the job. All right?”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “It’s been ... a nasty week.”
“I imagine.” The papers hadn’t been very clear on exactly what he was being blamed for, but it involved the deaths of members of his squadron. That kind of horror gave a man an excuse for surliness. What she didn’t quite know was how to reach out to him through it.
Drake would know. He’d have a clever question to ask, one to poke through the resistance and get to the heart of the matter. The heart of his old friend.
All Margot could do was draw in a breath and say, “My mother died three weeks ago.”
He looked up, shoulders still stooped but combativeness gone. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
She heaved out the breath she’d drawn in, wishing for just a bit of Drake’s ability to communicate. “I didn’t say it for sympathy. Just ... the work helps. Helps me, I mean. Maybe it’ll help you too. Give you something positive to focus on. A way to let go of all that nastiness, at least for a few hours at a clip.”
He leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “Probably. But I don’t know that I’m ready to let go of it.”
Margot nudged a few boxes over and sat on them. “We haven’t the luxury of that indulgence just now. You’re an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Flying Corp. It’s your duty to do your bit.” She tapped a finger to the papers on the table. “And right now,thisis your bit.”
For a long moment, he just sat unmoving, staring at the papers. Probably seeing something far different, far removed from a storage room in the OB. Then he blinked, nodded, and pulled the papers forward. “All right, then. I’ll save the moping for my own time. Show me what I’m doing here, Mademoiselle Codebreaker.”
She smiled, happy enough to get down to business.
20
Drake knew well his sister—and his doctor—would have his head if they could see him now. But that sure knowledge hadn’t stopped him from slipping on his overcoat, planting a hat onto his head, and wishing this building had a lift as he slowly took one step after another until he was on the ground floor, out the back door, and on the blessed street.
Fresh air was a heady thing. For a second, he could do nothing but breathe it in, forgetting his purpose in hobbling down here. Forgetting the way Dot would fret. The way the physician would scold. None of that mattered. It smelled of cold and rain and the exhaust of the car that had just rattled past. Of the bread baking in the shop down the street. It smelled of London and offreedom.
He might never go back inside again.
