On her way back to her room, she had another fright when she encountered one of the guards on the dark stairway. First she gasped, but then she laughed, because it was him, it was her guard. In relief and surprise, she kissed him again. Again, his mouth was soft and urgent and his hands had the same effect. To her astonishment, they ended up back on the schoolroom floor. Lovisa couldn’t believe her own body.

After he’d gone away the second time, she stood outside her brothers’ bedroom doors, trying to understand herself. Needing an anchor, she peeked in again on Vikti, who was still snoring evenly. It helped to see him there, stuffy-nosed and familiar. Then she peeked in on Erita.

In Erita’s bed, Erita and Viri were sleeping together, Viri curled in a tiny ball, Erita curled around him, as if Viri were his treasure. Lovisa was so surprised that she turned her lamp on briefly, to make sure.

Yes. That was Erita and Viri. They would get in trouble for sleeping together like that, if anyone found them. And something about their smallness in the bed, the tightness with which they were wrapped together, made her feel small too. Involuntarily, she touched her hair, which was bound into the usual twists around her head that framed her face and made her look young and unthreatening. Her hair had weathered tonight’s activities well.

What was she doing? Standing here, staring at her brothers, thinking about her hair, when she’d done what she’d done tonight? She hadn’t expected to like that guard so much. A sick feeling inside her, a kind of discomfort about having used him was starting to turn into a misery on which she didn’t want to dwell. She would learn from whatever happened, but she wouldn’t dwell. And next time she needed an alibi she would choose someone she didn’t like the way she was starting to like that guard.

If Viri wasn’t in the attic room . . . then, what was that light? That clunking sound? She realized now that she’d been trying to solve the wrong puzzle. This was about that snatch of conversation between her parents, that day weeks ago, when her father had come to campus looking for her mother. Some storage problem Benni had. “Could I store it in the attic room?” he’d asked Ferla. “It would be in a banker’s box. No one would look twice at it. We don’t have a good place in the house for these kinds of valuables.”

“I don’t love that idea,” Ferla had replied. “We’ll discuss it later.”

Now the snake inside Lovisa touched its tongue to the air, mildly curious. Benni shipped fuels, metals—but gold and silver, too, and sometimes even jewels. Did he have something others wanted to steal? Something interesting? The secrecy of the thing tugged at her.