Page 84 of Born for Starlight

What I didn't stop noticing was the quiet.

A building with supposedly over one-hundred-and-fifty girls should have been loud, or at least at a low hum during class hours. Shoes on stairs, a door banging somewhere, one girl crying and another one laughing, some adult saying stop running. Aurora at one twenty sounded like an empty church.

We passed a classroom with a big window into the hall, two dozen small heads bent over paper, a teacher at the front, nobody moving. The next room, the same. It was the kind of order that didn't come from good behavior. It came from fear. Deke didn’t photograph, and Ferraz clocked it. Nodded to himself, satisfied.

Somewhere off to the left, thin and far away, a piano started, and children's voices came in over it. The song from her movie. Six weeks they practiced. The voices were sweet and small. One-hundred-and-fifty girls, and only eleven singers? It made no sense.

"The choir," Ferraz said. "They rehearse for the Senhorita."

"She'll love it."

Cameras were mounted at the hallway junctions, new ones, good ones. I counted them without moving my head to look at them, then I took note of what they covered, and that was the second thing wrong with Aurora. The lenses aimed down the children's corridors, at the dormitory doors, at the classroom wings.

There were three times as many cameras watching the children as there were watching the exterior. They were watching their product, making sure it stayed put.

We came around the end of the east corridor, and Ferraz gestured left when the route wanted to go right. "This way, senhor. The west wing is closed. Renovation."

The west wing ran off behind double doors with a chain through the handles. The chain was new and so was the padlock. And the padlock hung on our side of the doors. The entire time I’ve dealt with locks and locked buildings, I’ve noticed one thing. You mount them on the side the threat comes from. A renovation gets locked from outside to keep kids away from tools and holes in the floor, sure. But there were hasps like it on the next three doors down that hallway too, single doors, room doors, every one of them lockable from the corridor.

“Are all of the girls doubling up in the east wing during the renovation?” I asked.

“No, there are parts of the west wing that are still habitable, and the girls are still living there,” Ferraz answered.

That was the answer I’d been afraid of. Because you don't lock rooms from the outside to protect what's in them. You lock them from the outside to keep what's in them from leaving.

I asked Ferraz how long the renovation had left to run. Harmless question, budget-minded American keeping his principal away from wet paint.

"Another week." It came out smooth and instant, a man reciting, not remembering. "Plumbing. Very old pipes."

"Old buildings," I agreed. We walked on, and I filed the west wing under things I'd be coming back for.

The route finished at the service yard behind the kitchen, because I'd asked to see where deliveries came in during the visit window. A reasonable request. Standard. Ferraz didn't even hesitate.

The yard held the honest traffic of any institution. A laundry van with a company name and a phone number on the side, back doors open, carts on the ramp. A produce truck, a kid in an apron stacking crates. A propane truck with its driver leaning on the fender working a toothpick. Two food-delivery trucks. Ordinary trucks doing ordinary work, everybody's doors open, everybody's business on display.

And nosed in at the end of the line, tight against the west wing wall, a shipping container.

Full-size. Steel. Fresh gray paint and no markings, no shipping line, no company, no numbers anybody could call. It sat dropped on a chassis with no tractor attached, which meant a tractor was coming back for it. The doors faced the building, close enough to the west wing wall that nothing those doors did would ever be visible from the fence or the drive. And that was the third thing wrong with Aurora, because schools didn't ship anything in containers. Food came in vans. Laundry came in vans. Donations came in vans. A sealed steel box that needed a semi to move it and a port to receive it had one job, and that job was somewhere else, far away, no stops.

Up near the top rail, a row of small drilled holes ran the length of the box. Neat. Evenly spaced.

Cargo doesn't breathe.

I looked at that container for a grand total of four seconds, all of it sideways, while I nodded along to Ferraz explaining the delivery schedules. Deke shot the service entrance twice, wide and dull, the kind of frames an advance team took of any door their principal might pass. The container stood in the background of both. The two most valuable photographs of the day.

Then a door opened across the yard and a line of children came out, small ones, each carrying a watering can toward the garden, a woman in front and a woman behind.

"Deke," I said.

The camera was already going into his pocket. Faces of minors, Costa's own rule, and my people followed the rules everyone could see. I put my empty hands behind my back, the picture of respectful distance.

Ferraz relaxed.

A clean man didn't do that. A clean man never tightened up in the first place.

"You'll have the route to yourself from three o’clock," Ferraz said at the gates. "My men will hold the positions we discussed. Senhor Costa is very pleased."

"It's a well-run facility." I shook his dry, correct hand. "See you at one."