Word and Breath Read Free Page A

defense as he had the previous day, when he’d defended her claim that the diary in question couldn’t possibly hold a hidden code.
     
    When Jenson saw her now, he flashed her a private, ironic smile—and she felt an unfamiliar sense of appreciation.

    Flustered by being the center of attention for two days in a row, Riana settled back at her desk. Her desktop was nearly empty, with only an inbox spilling over with texts to read, a mug full of pencils, a notepad, and a framed photograph. Everyone else had personalized their cubicles, but she had never bothered.
     
    She picked up the next text from her inbox. A crumpled piece of lined paper with a bulleted list scribbled on it—maybe torn from the school notebook of a student back when schools taught children to read and write.

    The first word she landed on sent off warning bells in her mind. She stared at the word on the wrinkled page. It was probably just a coincidence, but all of her instincts screamed there was something important here.
     
    She glanced over at the one photo on her desk—she’d been fourteen, just after she’d taken this job, and Jannie was eight. Both girls were grinning like maniacs into the camera. Before her sister had gotten sick.

    It wasn’t even nine in the morning. Many more hours until she could go home to Jannie.
     
    She saw again Mikel’s handsome face. He’d said he lived in her neighborhood. Maybe she would see him again.

    She shook away the thought. She shouldn’t waste her time daydreaming about such things. She might as well figure out this anomaly so she wouldn’t get in trouble again.
     
    Snatching up the page, she left the main office and hurried into the hallway.

    Local Readers should be housed in the main Union administration building in Newtown, but they’d been moved a few years ago when the administrative offices had run out of room. The new building, on the north edge of downtown, was officially named after a previous Union President, but everyone just called it the Annex. Riana had liked the old building better, even though it was constantly under construction. The clean walls and shiny floors of the Annex always struck her as stark and barren.
     
    As she turned the corner to reach the elevators, she saw a familiar face.

    “Hi, Ghent,” she said to the stringy-haired young man who was waiting to go down. Ghent worked in the Regional Archives, the fancy building a few blocks away. They’d met several times, and he’d always been friendly. In fact, she suspected he might have a crush on her. “What brings you over here?”

    Ghent glanced over at her greeting but then turned away as the elevator doors slid open. He didn’t smile. Didn’t even acknowledge her presence. When Riana stared at him in confusion, he purposefully looked away.

    She’d just been snubbed. For absolutely no reason. They weren’t close friends, but she’d thought Ghent liked her, and she had no idea why that might have changed.
     
    It left her feeling oddly hurt, so she forced the feeling aside the way she always did when something made her uncomfortable. She visualized squeezing the discomfort and embarrassment into a tiny space at the back of her chest until it just poofed away.

    It worked—at least well enough to focus again on her purpose. She went the rest of the way down the hall to the storage room, where completed texts were filed or discarded. She quickly flipped through the stack of texts that had been sorted that week, the ones important enough for the Union to archive. It didn’t take her long to find the one she was looking for—the copy of one of the speeches from an election ten years ago.
     
    She scanned the speech and saw the word just as she had expected to see it.

    Then she went to the bin in the far corner and started digging through the pages that had been discarded recently. They were kept for at least two weeks before they were recycled so Union officials could do their random checks of the