Victor was standing.
He had been sitting — the desk was there, the lamp, the notebook open to the page he had been writing on when the surveillance monitor had shown him small in the camera's wide angle — but he was standing now, which meant he had known they were coming, had been told by the thing in the room with him before the sounds in the corridor had reached him.
He looked at the group filling the doorway and the scholar's eyes moved across them with the quick precision of a man reading a situation that he had prepared for versions of but not this specific version.
He looked at William.
Something moved through his expression.
"William," he said.
William looked at him.
"Victor," he said.
Four years of it in one word on each side. The entirety of the operation and the proximity and the specific relationship of a man who had believed he was using someone and the someone who had known he was being used and had used the using in return.
Victor looked at Thomas.
"Thomas Riverside," Victor said.
"Victor Glass," Thomas said.
Victor looked at Katherine.
He looked at her for a long moment — the dark element in her cycling at its combat speed, the power responding to what was in the room with the particular urgency of something that recognized its opposite and was preparing for it.
"The dark element chosen one," Victor said. "Dean Duke's daughter." He looked at Dean. "The branch that left." Something moved through his expression that was not quite the scholar's recalibration. Something more personal. "My grandfather called your branch the lost line. He spent thirty years looking for it. He never found it." He paused. "I found it in Katherine."
"You found more than that," Dean said. Even. Flat. The voice that carried everything it needed to carry without raising itself.
"Yes," Victor said. "More than that."
He looked at the room.
Not at the group. At the room itself — the walls, the lamp, the desk, the notebook. The room he had been working in with the specific quality of a man who understood that the work was about to change and was looking at the last of the before.
"She knew you were coming," he said. "She told me before your corridor engagement. The dark element — she has been aware of it since you entered the building." He looked at Katherine. "She is interested in you specifically." A pause. "I would take that as the warning it is."
"Where is she," Thomas said.
Victor looked at the corner of the room.
The corner that the lamp's light did not fully reach.
The corner that had been shadow in the surveillance camera's image, the part of the room the wide angle had not shown.
The group looked at it.
The shadow moved.