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He did, after a couple of seconds, cracking the door and eyeing her distastefully but letting her in anyway. There was again a book in his hand--it seemed like this was always the case when he was in his room--and he glanced away from it long enough to register her burden as he collapsed into his chair. The storm was louder than it should have been: where his window had been was a sheet of plywood that rattled in the occasional gust.

"No vacancies," he said bluntly, turning back to his page.

"What? Can't get Bas--"

But Bashmet was flooded out too, of course. He distractedly gnawed a thumbnail without looking up.

"You're going running in this?" he asked finally, indicating the window with his elbow. It wasn't a no, but it wasn't a yes, either.

"Mark is full of s**t and just wants to organize an informal wet T-shirt contest," he said, "and as agreeable as the thought may be..." he trailed off as another gust of wind rattled the plywood.

"Anyway," he said, as he opened the book again, "if your usual method of getting in your exercise is failing you for some reason, the bottom drawer's almost empty. How long are you gonna be gone? I got kitchen duty in an hour and I'm not leaving my door unlocked but I can leave you the key, if you need it."

He gave her a hard look over the top of the page. "One, this is not just some rain, this is some ********, typhoon, I don't know. Two, this is not just some island, I don't need to tell you that. There's s**t loose everywhere, has been since the shields went down. You think it's really a good idea to look for detours and surprises, given the circumstances?"

He hesitated, running his tongue over his teeth with his eyes unfocused and vaguely worried, before he hid behind the act of reading once again.

"Whatever gets you off. Check in, and maybe tell someone else you're going, because search and rescue isn't exactly my division." A pause, and a grudging: "Be careful. Please."

He waited until he was sure she was gone--checking the time on his phone and waiting until ten minutes had elapsed--and then disregarded Fiona's half-hearted protests as he checked the lock on the door and folded himself up in front of his dresser, leaning back against the foot of his bed and lifting her belonging out of the drawer and into his lap.

He examined the knot on the scarf to make sure it was one he could duplicate, and when he opened the coat made a careful note of the order of everything in it, or at least as much as order as the situation permitted. It would be easier to loot through this than a neatly-packed suitcase. He permitted himself a noise of angry frustration at the fact that her phone was in the bundle: a needless risk, a stupid lack of precaution that he wouldn't be able to harangue her about because he wasn't supposed to know about it.

He examined the books--the one looked like a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew type mystery and was rapidly dismissed after a quick skim to find out what was so compelling about it that it was in the condition it was (nothing he could find), and the other was one he'd already had a look at but which he re-examined anyway, poring over a few pages and remaining carefully detached. To my daughter.

He briefly opened the album, but the act of looking at pictures of a tiny smiling America--of proud catches of tiny fish and bigger ones later, of fond smiles among Christmas decorations--felt invasive even by his standards, and he stopped, setting it aside.

Which left her phone. He unlocked it and began a thorough investigation of it contents, starting with text messages and working his way through Twitter. He read, absently and without guilt, through Bashmet's conversations with her: read the detached assessments of his health and his bad attitude, and swallowed the rising anger and humiliation at Kostya's careful but first drafts of spreadsheets indicating recommended caloric intake: the estimations of his height and weight meticulously considered, the rationed numbers according to what was likely rather than what was optimistic. Obadiah Thompson, broken down into a mathematical problem to be solved, a simple series of numbers.

Feeling nauseated, he wrapped up his prying through her Twitter history and moved on to her photo gallery, and his initial gratification at a series of cheesecake-y selfies gave way to irritation and no small amount of surprise at the lack of anything more gratuitous. She had seemed so much like the sort of girls who had been happy to dispatch n***s to Taym's pre-Island inboxes after very little wheedling, and the lack of any evidence that she'd been up to something similar with the targets of her inscrutable HOT notes was a disappointment. He expressionlessly watched a video of her and an orange-haired girl he took to be Pandora drunkenly attempting a sing-along, and then briefly considered and dismissed the idea of sending what selfies she did have to himself for further perusal at a later date.

He closed the phone; he carefully packed away the books and tossed the phone back on top. After neatly stowing the bundle away again he leaned back, gazing at the ceiling, no closer to understanding her, no closer to being satisfied, no less angry at her or Konstantin. A wasted effort.

A shrieking gust of wind strained against the makeshift plywood window, and Taym glanced at the clock again, and he worried, but he kept it to himself.