The invaders had fled, but they’d vented their rage everywhere. I sidled into the back, saw my daybed had been tossed, the copy machine disassembled. I skirted the upended drawers and went behind the partition where my desk stood. Those drawers had been flung to the floor hard enough to crack the wood. The same violent hands had dismembered my reference manuals. Pages of the Illinois Criminal Code were strewn like remains of a victory parade. The frames of my mother’s engraving of the Uffizi and my Nell Choate Jones print had been pried apart and splintered, the pictures lying under the shards of glass.

I squatted on my haunches and picked up the Uffizi, cradling it like a child. After a time, my frozen brain started to work. Don’t touch stuff, just in case an evidence team takes it seriously.

And what about Tessa, my lease-mate? I crossed to the studio where Tessa welds big metal chunks into space-age sculptures, but everything there was in order. She must have been here this afternoon—a faint sour-sharp smell of solder lingered in the air. I sat at her drafting table, hands sweaty, heart pounding, all those signs of fear and anger, and waited there for the cops.

When I heard the siren, I went out front to meet them. A squad car pulled up, its strobes staining the twilit streets a ghostly blue. Two cops bounced out, a young woman and a middle-aged guy with a gut.

I stopped them at the entrance to show them the keypad. Someone who knew the combination had been here or someone with a sophisticated bypass device. The guy with the gut made a note. He asked how many people knew the code.

“My lease-mate. A couple of people who work for me. I don’t know who Ms. Reynolds—my lease-mate—has given the combination.”

“What about the rear exit?” the woman asked.

I led them down the hall to the back door. It was self-locking, with no exterior keyhole or pad. The woman shone her flashlight around the concrete slab outside the door.

I saw a white band on the slab—one of those rubber bracelets that the kids wear these days to show their support of everything from breast-cancer research to their college field-hockey teams. I knelt to pick it up, but I knew before I looked at it what it would say: ONE. When you looked at it, you were supposed to want to work for a planet unified in love, fighting AIDS and poverty as one. My cousin Petra owned a bracelet like this. It was big on her, and, when she was excited, it flew off her arm.

Petra. Petra here in this office while the tornado from hell whirled through it. My vision blurred, and I found myself sprawling on the concrete slab.

The two cops got me back on my feet, back inside, and asked me what I’d found.