By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The Nine A.M. Habit

A Synthetic Truth bonus scene — Priya Anand's POV

Priya Anand's badge scanned green at eight fifty-one, and the sound it made was exactly the sound it had always made, and she still flinched.

She'd told herself she wouldn't. She'd rehearsed the walk from the parking garage three separate times in her head the night before, the way she used to rehearse a difficult finding before she presented it to a bank's board. Elevator. Ninth floor. Left past the break room. Her own desk, third from the window, the one with the slightly loose drawer she'd meant to report for two years and never had. She had the sequence memorized. She had not memorized what her body would do when the reader chirped and the light turned green and nothing happened. No hold. No security escort. No second look from anyone standing at the coffee station.

Just a door, opening, the way it was supposed to.

The floor was quieter than she remembered a Tuesday being. Or maybe she was quieter. She caught herself cataloguing details the way she used to catalogue a file before she trusted it — who was at their desk, who wasn't, whether anyone's posture changed when she passed. Whitfield's office door was open. He looked up once, said nothing, and went back to his screen, and she understood that as its own kind of mercy. Nobody wanted to perform relief at her. They just wanted the floor to go back to being a floor.

Her desk was exactly as she'd left it, which she hadn't expected. Someone — she never found out who — had kept her plant alive. A small, stubborn pothos in a chipped mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST EXAMINER, a gift from a colleague three Secret Santas ago. It had new growth. Somebody had been watering it on a schedule, quietly, for nine weeks, without being asked and without saying anything about it after.

She sat down. The chair still had the give in the left armrest that she'd complained about in a facilities ticket eighteen months earlier and that had never gotten fixed. Some things, apparently, the record couldn't touch, because nobody had ever bothered to correct them in the first place. She almost laughed. She didn't, because she wasn't sure the sound that came out would land the way she meant it.

Her monitor took its time waking up. When it did, her old queue loaded exactly where she'd left it — the Halstead file at the top, marked pending, untouched, as if nine weeks were nothing, as if a woman's whole professional life hadn't quietly detonated and been quietly rebuilt in the space between one Tuesday and the next. She read the header twice. Capital adequacy reconciliation — Halstead Federal — filed by P. Anand. Her own name, in her own case-management system, attached to the finding that had cost her everything and then, eventually, cost Dorian Kessler considerably more.

She opened the file and didn't touch anything for a full minute. Just looked at it. The way you look at a scar to make sure it's actually closed before you trust it with weight again.

A woman she half recognized stopped by her desk around nine fifteen — a junior examiner two cubicles over, someone Priya had trained briefly a year ago and mostly forgotten. She was holding a mug of her own, steam still rising off it, and she didn't sit down, just stood there for a second like she was deciding whether the gesture she'd planned still made sense now that she was standing in front of it.

"I kept the plant alive," the woman said. "I didn't know if that was — I didn't know if you'd want to know that. But I did it."

"You did it," Priya said, and something in her chest loosened by a fraction she hadn't known was still tight. "Thank you."

"I believed you," the woman said, abruptly, like she'd been holding the sentence since Priya walked in and had run out of small talk to hide it behind. "The whole time. I want you to know that. I didn't say anything, because I didn't know what there was to say that would help, and I'm sorry that isn't the same as saying it out loud when it mattered."

Priya thought about Eleanor Vass, a woman she'd never met and probably never would, whose sworn testimony had done more to clear her name than anyone in this building had managed in nine weeks of silent, careful, well-intentioned belief. I let a year pass in silence because silence felt, at the time, like the safer failure. It wasn't a failure of information. It was a failure of will. She'd read the transcript twice. She understood, now, in a way she hadn't before any of this happened, that belief without a signature attached to it was a kindness, not a defense.

"It's all right," Priya said, and meant something more complicated than that, and let the simpler version stand, because the junior examiner looked like she needed it to. "You watered the plant. That's not nothing."

The woman nodded, relieved, and went back to her desk, and Priya sat with the Halstead file open in front of her and didn't touch it for another minute.

She thought about the day planner. It was still in the safe deposit box where Alex Morgan had told her to put it, and some part of her suspected it would stay there indefinitely, the way you keep the smoke detector battery that saved your life instead of ever using it again. She thought about ink on paper, a technology old enough that nobody had ever thought to build a verification layer for it, because nobody had imagined a machine sophisticated enough to need one.

She opened her desk drawer — the loose one, the one that stuck a little on the left runner — and took out a legal pad she'd bought at the drugstore two days after Reeves first called her, back when she still didn't fully understand why a federal agent wanted to talk about her handwriting. She'd been keeping it since. Not evidence, not this time. Just a record, in her own hand, of an ordinary Tuesday, so that if the world ever tried to tell her otherwise again, she'd have something that hadn't been anywhere near a network to hand back.

Nine-fifteen, she wrote. Back at my desk. The plant is alive. Someone believed me the whole time and is sorry she didn't say so.

She capped the pen. She pulled the Halstead file toward her, for real this time, and began, the way she always had, by reading it once, cold, to make sure it still said exactly what she remembered it saying.

It did.

She kept reading anyway. Some habits, she'd learned, were worth keeping even after the reason for them stopped being an emergency. Especially then.

Her phone buzzed at eleven, a text from a number she'd saved under a single initial. A. No last name. She'd asked, once, whether that was for security or habit, and Alex Morgan had said it was both, which had told Priya everything she needed to know about the kind of year the woman had had.

How's the desk, it read.

Priya looked at the pothos, at the loose drawer, at the Halstead file sitting open with her own name at the top of it, exactly where it had always belonged.

Still mine, she typed back. Somebody kept the plant alive.

Good, came the reply, thirty seconds later. Then, after a pause long enough that Priya pictured her reading it twice before sending it, the way she'd later learn was Alex's habit with anything that mattered: That's the whole job. Making sure the small true things survive long enough to matter.

Priya didn't answer that one. She didn't think it needed one. She set the phone face-down beside the legal pad, picked her pen back up, and turned to a fresh page — not because the old one was full, but because some part of her wanted this particular Tuesday to start clean, in her own hand, on paper nothing had ever touched but her.

Nine-fifteen, she wrote again, the way she'd write it every morning now, out of a habit she suspected would outlast the reason for it by years. Back at my desk. Everything on it is mine.

Outside, the floor kept doing the ordinary business of an ordinary Tuesday — badges scanning green, coffee going cold, a hundred small facts nobody would ever think to correct because nobody had any reason to. Priya Anand read the Halstead file a second time, then a third, the old way, cold, the way she'd read every file that had ever left her hands since her first year on the job.

It still said exactly what she remembered it saying. She wrote that down too, just to be sure she'd always have it, in ink, in her own hand, whatever anyone's database eventually decided to say instead.