The room was clean. Like, brochure clean. Sure, Jenny’s overload of computers were still in evidence, and there was a pile of unopened mail on her desk, but the cascade of papers and tangle of wires were nowhere in sight. The floor was swept and smelled faintly of lemon Pledge. Her bed displayed hospital corners.

“See?” said the dean. “Everything’s fine. Go leave your note.”

So I did, and while Poe distracted the dean with more chitchat, I dropped off her keys and phone and furtively searched the desktop for any clue as to what may have happened in this room in the last eighteen hours. Nothing. Not an illegible Post-it note, not a stray syllabus, not a scribble on the latest page of her Scripture-a-Day calendar (which, I might add, was turned to Friday’s date). There was a neat mug filled with pens, a neat tower of library books, and a neat stack of the aforementioned junk mail. Her walls held the same posters of Impressionist art and Victorian portraiture. The altar in the corner looked fresh and shiny. Shivers flew up and down my spine, and didn’t neglect my extremities, either.

What had happened here?

“Ready to go?” the dean prompted, and, like a zombie, I toddled out.

Wait. Wait, stop. Guys, something really weird is going on. Listen to me! Listen to me! The words welled up in my throat and I opened my mouth.

Poe grabbed my elbow.

At the base of the tower, Poe bade the dean a cheery adieu and steered me down the steps and across the courtyard. As soon as the dean vanished into his office, I whirled away.

“How…dare…you…” I spluttered.

“I got us in the room, didn’t I?” he said.

“Yes. By treating Jenny and me like idiot girls! It was humiliating.”

Poe sighed. “You know, Amy, if you’d just step back for a minute in the middle of all your feminist ranting, you’d see that sometimes acting like an idiot—girl or otherwise—in matters of espionage can be a good way to get things accomplished. You’re the Literature major. Did you skip The Scarlet Pimpernel?”

“Then you act the fool, Sir Percy.”

He shook his head. “Not in that situation. Had the dean been a woman, I’d have been happy to play the worried lover to your concerned Cupid, but it wouldn’t have budged that guy.”

Yeah, especially considering one would first have to buy Poe as boyfriend material (nice shoulders aside).

“Don’t tell me you’ve never put on an act to get what you wanted.”

He had me there.

“Maybe your problem was that the chosen act hit a little too close to home.”

“Maybe my problem was that it gave you another chance to act chauvinistic and superior.”

And apparently that remark hit a little too close to home as well. Poe was silent for a moment, then regrouped. “Amy, grow up. I did a little good-old-boy talk, and we got in. Get over your indignation.”

Poe stuck his hands in his pockets and kept walking. I stood there for a moment, seething, my mouth opening and closing like a fish. Easy for him to say. Easy for him not to get up in arms every time he was taken for a moron, because he chose when it would happen. When you deal with dismissive attitudes every day, playing the fool grates a hell of a lot more. I was treated like a lesser being several times a week when I wasn’t feigning stupidity, merely by virtue of…of what? In the general population, it was because I was a woman, in the world of Eli it was because I was a “soft” Literature major, and in my own secret society it was because I held a slight historical tendency toward paranoia.

But I was not an idiot, and I was not wrong about this. Any of it. There was something monumentally weird happening in the case of Jenny Santos, and I was going to prove it.

I caught up to Poe as he headed down the steps into the graduate school’s main building. “Okay, fine,” I said. “I agree to put aside our partisan politics in favor of the greater good. Yes, we got into her room. Thank you. And I know you aren’t going to believe me, but that place was a disaster last night. It looked like a bomb had gone off in there.”

Poe closed the door behind us and stood there for one long moment, his hand on the knob, his faced downturned. Then he looked at me, his gray eyes sad and full of concern. “I believe you,” he said at last. “I think she may be in danger.”

I hereby confess:

I’m not above feeling smug.

Why did Poe’s proclamation chill me the way it did? After all, I’d been saying as much all day. But by this point, I’d gotten used to people not believing me. So when someone did—someone who, up until this point, seemed to have one purpose in life and that was proving me wrong—I didn’t feel vindicated. At least, not right away. No, my immediate reaction was terror.

Then triumph. Natch.

“What?” I exclaimed. “If you believe me, then we should be running to tell the police what we know.”

“Not without any evidence of wrongdoing. Not for an adult who’s been gone one day. No one would see a clean room as a sign of a kidnapping.”

“When were you going to tell me about your change of heart?” We’d been together for the past half hour and he’d given me no indication he felt any differently.

“How about not in front of the Edison dean?”

“How about yes in front of him! How long were you planning on keeping me on the hook?”

“I wanted more information first. I wanted to confirm the facts.”

Because he couldn’t just believe me. “Why wouldn’t you let me speak back in the tower? You saw that room. You know that’s not the way it was.”

“That’s not the only thing I know.” Poe checked the surrounding area, then backed me into a tiny chantry, leaned his head close to me, and started whispering. “After class today, I called Mr. Gehry.”

“You did? I thought you said he wouldn’t speak to you.”

But apparently it was a matter of what, exactly, the disgraced Poe had to offer. “I told him we believe Jennifer Santos is responsible for the leak.”

“And?”

“He didn’t act surprised. Which in itself is not noteworthy. But then he said he’d ‘taken care of it’ and ‘seen to it that people like her were no longer a threat to the organization.’” Poe pushed off the wall and turned away. “I thought I knew what he meant by that, but…her room! It’s like it had been sanitized.”

I didn’t know how to deal with this Poe. The angry, smug, holier-than-thou Poe I was used to. Not the one who looked worried, or friendly, or…frightened. This was the Poe Malcolm actually liked. And I had no idea how to react to him.

He sat down on the bench and folded his hands before him. “You said that last night you thought her bedroom had been trashed. Maybe they were looking for something. And after seeing the room today, I’d say they found it.” I digested this, and Poe watched me with clear, gray eyes. “Amy, are you sure there was no one else in that room with you last night?”

Oddly enough, the of course response failed to fall from my lips. It might be because I’d suddenly started shivering. This stone enclave was cold, and dark, and a little damp. And I may be in serious shit.

“I don’t know. There was so much crap in there. I don’t know where someone would have been hiding—” Except behind the computer table, or in the closet, or even under the bed, blocked from sight by the balled-up duvet. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. “If someone was there, and they saw me…”

“Then they probably think you have the info, too. They may be following us right now. They may be searching your room next.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense!” I realized my voice had gone up an octave and a few decibels, and I brought it back to a whisper. “Who would be following me? Every Digger on the planet knows the information Jenny’s been spilling to the site. Of course I have the info. We all have it. That’s never been of concern.”