- - -
The rest of Day 2 went by the way days at a new job always did: in pieces.
Polites did not go anywhere near O-03-03 until Malkuth had checked twice that every last fairy was gone. When he finally did, he came out twenty minutes later looking thoughtful and a little pink around the eyes.
"I told it about the cat," he said. "And then I kind of told it about my mom. I didn't mean to. It just... listens really well."
"Yeah," Outis said. "It does that."
The Manager split their orders after that, carefully, with long gaps between them. One work each, then a rest on the benches. Feeding for F-04-83, cleaning or confession for O-03-03. Malkuth read out every assignment twice and then a third time, "just to be safe!", and once, when Polites was ordered to the skull too soon after the fairy room, the order changed before he'd even stood up.
"Sorry, sorry! Wrong one. Wait a minute, Employee 002. The Manager says wait a minute."
Polites sat back down and looked at Outis with his eyebrows up.
"He's listening," Polites whispered. "The Manager. He listened to you."
Outis looked up at the speaker and didn't say anything. But he remembered the System's words from the white room, not careless with the people in it, and for the first time they felt less like a riddle and more like a promise.
By the end of the day, Polites had worked five times, been patted on the head by a fairy queen three times, cried once, laughed a lot, and talked almost without stopping. He talked about the elevator. He talked about the clerks and how none of them would say good morning back. He talked about the Sephirot mural ("Is it a family tree? It looks like a family tree. A family tree for robots."), and about the food on the fairy's tray ("I don't think that was meat. I think it was meat-adjacent."). He talked while they sat on the benches and while they walked down the hall and once, memorably, while Outis was trying to mop.
Outis didn't mind. He was surprised how much he didn't mind. It was like having the radio on low in the car: you didn't have to listen to every word to be glad it was there.
. . .
"Manager, the energy quota for today has been met."
Angela's voice, calm and even, from everywhere and nowhere. Polites froze mid-sentence and stared up at the ceiling.
"Who's that?"
"Angela," Outis said. "She talks to the Manager."
"She sounds like a very expensive elevator."
Outis choked on a laugh so suddenly that he had to turn it into a cough.
. . .
Polites's room was 002, right beside his.
"Neighbors!" Polites said, delighted, pointing between the two black number plates as if he'd discovered something extraordinary. "We're neighbors. That's so lucky. Out of all the rooms."
Outis looked down the long corridor at the rows of other doors, most of them dark. He didn't think luck had anything to do with it. Somebody had put the Control Team together at the end of the hall, under the little red lights, where they'd be easy to watch.
"Lucky," he agreed.
Polites went into his room. Outis went into his. The door closed. The tiny red light in the corner watched him the way it had watched him the night before.
He sat on the edge of the bed and was just about to lie back and close his eyes when he heard it.
Knock. Knock-knock.
It came from the wall. The shared one, between 001 and 002.
Outis stared at the white tile for a second. Then, slowly, he lifted his hand and knocked back.
Knock.
A pause. Then, muffled through the wall but unmistakable:
"Outis? Is that you? Can you hear me?"
Outis glanced up at the red light. The rules on the back of his door didn't say anything about talking through walls. They only said not to leave.
He scooted along the bed until his shoulder was against the tile.
"I can hear you," he said, low.
"Oh, good." Polites's voice sounded relieved. "Sorry. I just... it's really quiet in here. Is your room like mine? Mine has a drain. In the floor. Why is there a drain in the floor?"
"Don't think about it."
"I'm thinking about it so much." A rustle, then a small papery sound. "There's a pill, too. In a little cup. The sign says to take it. I was just about to."
Outis looked across his own room at the paper cup on the shelf, the single white pill still sitting where he'd left it.
He thought about telling Polites not to. He thought about how that conversation would go, under the little red light, with a sign on the door that said take your daily supplement and a department head who wrote everything down. He thought about the empty room with the yellow tie on the mattress.
He didn't know enough yet to say don't. But he knew what the pill was for. It was for the nights when you had nobody to talk to and too much to think about.
So he said, "Hey. What was the cat's name?"
A pause. "What?"
"Your neighbor's cat. The one that bit you twice."
"Oh!" Polites's voice brightened through the tile. "Biscuit. Her name was Biscuit. She was this huge orange thing, like, enormous, and she had one ear that folded over, and she hated everybody except my mom, and one time she..."
And he was off.
Outis didn't have to do much after that. He asked a question here and there. What did your mom do? Where did you live before this? Why'd you take this job? Every question opened a new door, and Polites walked through every one of them, talking and talking.
About Biscuit. About his mom's bakery, a tiny place in the Backstreets of some District whose number Outis didn't catch, where the bread came out at five every morning and the line went around the corner. About how everybody on their street was indoors before the Night started, always, no matter what.
"You don't go outside during the Night," Polites said, the way someone else might say you don't touch a hot stove. "It's dangerous. Everybody knows that."
About the tomatoes he'd tried to grow on the fire escape. About a Fixer named Gus who'd rented the room above the bakery and paid for his bread in IOUs and once, for a whole month, stood outside their door every evening for no reason he'd ever explain. About the day a letter came from L Corp, out of nowhere, offering him a job at a Wing, which was apparently the kind of thing that happened to people like Polites about as often as being struck by lightning.
"My mom cried," Polites said. "Like, the good kind. A job at a Wing means a room in a Nest. It means you get out." A pause. "I'm going to get her out, too. That's the plan. Eventually."
Outis didn't know what half of it meant. Backstreets. District. Fixer. Wing. Nest. The Night, which Polites mentioned the way you'd mention the weather if the weather could kill you. He filed every word away to ask about later and kept listening, the way the skull had listened to him. Some of it was funny. Some of it wasn't. Polites didn't seem to notice the difference.
It was the longest conversation Outis had ever had with anyone. He realized that about halfway through, and it surprised him so much that he missed an entire story about Gus and a very large dog.
Somewhere past what must have been midnight, Polites's voice started to slow down. Not blurry. Just tired. The good kind.
"...and that's why I don't trust pigeons," he finished, and yawned enormously. Then: "Oh. Huh."
"What?"
"I forgot about the pill." A little laugh. "It's still in my hand. I don't think I need it tonight, actually. I feel... okay. Is that weird? I feel kind of okay."
Outis let his head rest back against the wall.
"It's not weird," he said.
"I'll just take it tomorrow. Maybe." A crinkle of plastic. "Hey, Outis?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for today. For catching me. And for this." A pause. "Good night."
"Good night."
The wall went quiet. A few minutes later, very faint, Outis heard the slow, even breathing of someone who was actually asleep.
He lay down too, but he kept his shoulder against the tile for a long time before he closed his eyes and let the white take him.
- - -
[ You didn't tell him not to take it. ]
"No."
[ You just gave him something better to hold on to. ]
Outis sat in the warm, endless glow of the System's space with his arms around his knees.
"It's not going to work every night," he said. "Some nights there won't be anything good enough to talk about."
[ Maybe. ]
[ But the pill isn't what's going to hurt him here. The place is. The pill only decides how much of it he feels. ]
[ And tonight, he decided he wanted to feel it. Because you were there. :) ]
Outis didn't answer that. But he thought about it for a long time.
- - -
Day 3 began with a buzzer, a line of brown suits shuffling toward the elevator, and Polites stumbling out of 002 with his hair even more of a disaster than the day before.
"Morning," he mumbled. Then, with considerably more energy, as if the word had reminded him: "Morning! Day three! We survived two whole days! That's like, a streak!"
"It's a streak," Outis agreed.
Polites looked tired, the honest kind of tired, from talking half the night. But his eyes were clear. Outis didn't ask about the pill. He didn't have to.
. . .
At exactly three minutes past the start of operations, the monitors flashed yellow.
"Good morning, team! Three minutes late, which is a little bit later than two, but every day I'm late by just one more minute, so really, I'm being very consistent!" Malkuth beamed, clipboard clutched to her chest. "And guess what! Today is a very big day! A new Abnormality, and a new employee! Control Team is going to be three people!"
Polites gasped and grabbed Outis's sleeve. "Three! We're tripling!"
"That's not how..." Outis started, then gave up. "Sure. Tripling."
"He should be here any minute!" Malkuth said. "I hope he's nice. You two have been so nice. Don't tell the other departments, but you're my favorite employees."
"We're your only employees, ma'am," Outis said.
"Then it's an easy choice!"
The elevator dinged.
The footsteps that came down the hall were nothing like Polites's. They were slow and even and deliberate, the steps of someone who had decided to walk at exactly the pace he wanted and would not be hurried by anything. The man they belonged to stopped in the doorway of the Main Room, and he didn't look at the mural, or the monitors, or the clerks.
He looked at the exits.
Outis saw him do it. Left doorway. Right doorway. The hall behind him. The elevator. One quick sweep, like a man counting the windows in a burning building, and only when he'd finished did he let his eyes come to rest on the two people sitting on the bench.
He was older than both of them, late twenties at least, tall and lean in the way of someone who forgot to eat more often than he chose not to. His dark hair was cut short and neat, his jaw was shadowed with a day's stubble, and his face was all sharp angles, as if someone had started carving him and stopped before they got to the soft parts. His black suit was buttoned. His tie was knotted perfectly, dead center, not a millimeter off. The red armband with its white M sat on his sleeve as if it had been measured.
His eyes were dark and narrow and they did not blink very often.
"This is Control," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Hi!" Polites was already on his feet, hand out, smile at full brightness. "Yes! Hi! This is Control! I'm Polites, and this is Outis, he's the senior employee, he's been here since day one, and..."
The man looked at Polites's hand. He did not take it.
"Eurylochus," he said.
Polites's hand hovered in the air a moment longer, then slowly, awkwardly, retreated. His smile flickered, then came back, slightly smaller. "Eurylochus. Cool. That's a cool name. That's a lot of name."
Eurylochus didn't answer. His eyes had already moved on, to Outis. They stayed there, steady and measuring.
"Senior employee," he said. "Since day one."
"Since day one," Outis said.
"Which makes today day three."
"Yes."
"So you're the most experienced person on this team," Eurylochus said, "and you've been here for two days."
"That's right."
Something moved at the corner of the older man's mouth. It wasn't a smile. It was what a smile looked like on someone who'd decided long ago that smiling was a waste of muscle.
"Wonderful," Eurylochus said.
"Employee 003!" Malkuth chirped from every screen at once. "Welcome to the Control Team! I'm Malkuth, your department head! Congratulations on joining Lobotomy Corporation!"
Eurylochus turned his head toward the nearest monitor and studied it for a long moment: the drawn girl, the red hairband, the clipboard, the pupil-less eyes with their half-drawn shadows.
"What is that?" he said.
Polites made a small, horrified noise.
"I'm Malkuth!" Malkuth said again, slightly less certainly. "The department head!"
"I heard," Eurylochus said. "I asked what you are."
There was a pause on the screens. A very small one. For a second, the yellow frame flickered.
Outis stood up.
"She's our boss," he said. Not loud. Just level, the way he'd talk to a supervisor across a loading dock. "She's been nice to us. She keeps track of everything. Yesterday something nearly killed Polites, and she made sure the Manager knew, so it won't happen again."
Eurylochus looked at him.
"So whatever she is," Outis said, "she's on our side."
The older man held his gaze for three long seconds. Then he looked back at the monitor.
"Ma'am," he said. Flatly. Correctly. "Good morning."
On every screen, Malkuth brightened like a sunrise.
"Good morning! Oh, another ma'am! This team is perfect."
Eurylochus sat down on the far end of the bench, as far from Polites as the bench would allow, crossed his arms, and said nothing else.
Polites leaned in toward Outis and whispered, very quietly, "I don't think he likes me."
"I don't think he likes anyone," Outis whispered back. "Give him a day."
"I'll give him two," Polites said, with surprising firmness. "I'm generous."
. . .
The third containment unit was the farthest down the hall, past the blue glow of F-04-83, and the light coming through its little window was the wrong color.
It was orange. Not the warm orange of a lamp or a sunset. The thin, flickering orange of something burning in a room with no air.
F-01-02
"Our new Abnormality is a little bit more dangerous than the other two," Malkuth said from the speaker beside the door. "It's TETH level! That's one step up! But it's still very manageable. The Manager has ordered Insight work for Employee 003."
Eurylochus looked at the door. Then at the speaker. Then back at the door.
"What's in there?" he asked.
"Well, we haven't observed it very much yet..."
"So you don't know."
"We know it's TETH level!"
"That's a number," Eurylochus said. "Not an answer."
He didn't move toward the door.
Outis felt the air in the hallway change. He knew this moment. He'd watched it happen at the end of long shifts, on loading docks, in kitchens: the moment a new guy decided the job wasn't worth it, and opened his mouth to say so. He'd seen supervisors' faces when they heard it. He'd never once seen it end well.
And here, he'd heard what it cost.
Once someone says they "can't handle it," Malkuth had said, so brightly, they are no longer part of my Control Team.
Eurylochus's jaw tightened. He drew a breath.
"Hey," Outis said.
He said it quickly and lightly, the way you'd interrupt someone about to step off a curb without looking, and stepped between Eurylochus and the speaker on the wall.
"First time with one of these is rough," he said. "I did a skull on day one. I didn't know what it was either. Nobody tells you anything here." He kept his voice easy. Casual. Just one coworker to another. "Insight's just cleaning. Mop, wipe the walls, keep your head down. In and out."
Eurylochus looked at him. Something in those narrow dark eyes shifted. Not trust. Calculation. A man weighing a door he didn't want to walk through against whatever was waiting if he didn't.
Outis held his gaze and, very slightly, shook his head. Don't say it. Whatever you're about to say, don't.
He saw the exact moment Eurylochus understood that he was being warned about something. He didn't know about what. But he understood.
"In and out," Eurylochus repeated slowly.
"In and out."
The older man was quiet for a moment. Then he unbuttoned his jacket with precise, deliberate fingers, folded it once, and handed it to Outis without a word, as if Outis were a coat rack that happened to have opinions. He rolled up his sleeves, fetched a bucket and a mop from the cupboard, and pushed the door open.
The orange light washed over him.
Outis stepped up to the little window.
The room beyond was dim and hot. The air inside it seemed to waver, the way air does above a road in summer. And in the middle of the room, standing on two thin, black legs that looked like they'd snap under any weight at all, was a girl.
Or what was left of one.
She was charred. Every inch of her was blackened and cracked, like a log that had been in the fire all night, and her two small ponytails had burned down to brittle, curling stubs. Her eyes were white. Not pale. White, blank and glowing, like coals with the ash blown off. Her mouth hung open, a white hollow in her black face. And through the middle of her chest, straight through, as if she'd been pinned to the world like a moth to a board, was a single burning match.
Its tip glowed. The orange light came from it.
She didn't move when Eurylochus came in. She didn't do anything at all. She just stood there, and burned, and watched him with her white eyes.
Outis watched Eurylochus see her. He saw the older man's shoulders go stiff. He saw him stop, one step inside the door, with the mop in his hand. For one long second, Outis thought he would turn around and walk straight back out.
Then Eurylochus put his head down and started to mop.
He didn't talk to her, the way Polites would have. He didn't look at her, the way Outis might have. He kept his eyes on the floor and his back to the wall and cleaned that room the way you'd clean a crime scene: efficiently, thoroughly and without ever once turning his back on the thing in the middle of it.
It was, Outis had to admit, very good work.
But it wasn't good. Even through the window, he could feel it. The girl's white eyes followed the mop. Followed the man. Her open mouth didn't change shape, but something about the way she stood seemed to curl inward, like a dry leaf.
The small glowing cubes that drifted up toward the vent came slower here than they had in the skull's room. Fewer of them. Thin and flickering, like sparks.
"Work result: normal," Malkuth said when Eurylochus came out. She said it kindly. "That's fine! Normal is fine! Normal is very normal."
Eurylochus set the bucket down, took his jacket back from Outis, shrugged it on and buttoned it, one button at a time, all the way up. His face was the same as it had been on the bench: closed, flat, unreadable. But Outis saw that his hands were not quite steady on the last button.
"There," Eurylochus said. "In and out."
He walked back toward the Main Room without another word, and passed Polites coming the other way.
"Is he okay?" Polites whispered, jogging up to the window. "He walked past me like a ghost. Like a really well-dressed ghost." He went up on his toes to look through the glass. "What's in... oh."
Inside the orange room, the burned girl had turned. Slowly, on her thin black legs, until her white eyes were pointed straight at the little window.
Not at Outis. At Polites.
Outis felt his shoulders tighten. But nothing happened, except that the light changed. The flickering orange that had jumped and spat the whole time Eurylochus was mopping began, very slowly, to settle. It steadied into a low, warm glow, like a candle when someone cups their hands around it to keep off the wind.
Polites stared at her. Then, because he was Polites, he lifted one hand and gave her a small, careful wave.
"Hi," he said softly, through the glass. "You look cold."
He winced. "That's a weird thing to say to someone who's on fire. Sorry."
The burned girl didn't move. Her open mouth didn't change. But her head tilted, just slightly, the way a child tilts her head at a stranger who has said something unexpected and kind.
"She's lonely," Polites said quietly. He didn't sound like he was guessing. "Isn't she?"
[ That one cares how you make her feel. ]
[ Him, she likes. ]
Outis looked at the girl with the match through her heart, and at the way her white eyes stayed fixed on Polites, hungry and patient and far too still. He didn't know what it meant to be liked by something like that.
He put a hand on Polites's shoulder and steered him gently away from the glass.
"Come on," he said. "We're on the schedule."
. . .
The Manager, it turned out, was learning.
After a rest, the next order came down for Eurylochus: Instinct work on F-04-83. Feeding. Eurylochus looked at the blue door, then at Outis.
"The fairies," Outis said. "Whatever happens, when you come out, stand still until they leave. Don't go anywhere. Don't touch any doors."
"Stand still," Eurylochus repeated. He didn't ask why. That, Outis was beginning to understand, was its own kind of respect.
He was in the blue room for barely ten minutes. Through the window, Outis watched him set down the tray with steady hands, step back, and wait, arms folded, not saying a word, while the Fairy Queen ate. He didn't flinch when it drifted close. He didn't move when it reached out one of its many hands toward him, and when it patted the top of his head, he simply stood there and allowed it, like a man enduring a haircut.
"Work result: good!" Malkuth sang. "Oh, very good! Employee 003, you're so sturdy!"
Eurylochus came out wearing fairies. Dozens of them, glowing green, nestled on his shoulders and in his short hair and lined up along the knot of his perfect tie like birds on a wire. He stopped one step out of the door and went completely still, exactly as instructed, with the expression of a man standing in a beehive.
Polites clapped both hands over his mouth.
"They like you," he whispered through his fingers, delighted.
"They like the food," Eurylochus said, without moving his lips more than he had to.
"They patted you!"
"They patted me," Eurylochus agreed, in a tone that suggested he would be thinking about this for the rest of his life.
Eight seconds later, the fairies drifted away. Eurylochus brushed off his shoulders, straightened his tie by a millimeter, and walked back to the benches as if nothing had happened.
Polites watched him go with an expression of open wonder. "He did better than me," he said. Not jealous. Just amazed. "With the fairies. I talked to it the whole time and he didn't say anything, and he did better."
"You did better with the skull," Outis said. "And he didn't do great with the girl."
Polites thought about that. "So it's... different people for different things?"
"Seems like it."
[ Some people work with their hands. Some work with their hearts. ]
[ The Manager is learning which is which. ]
Outis thought about that, too. Polites, who could make a silent skull feel listened to and a burning girl feel less alone. Eurylochus, who could stand in a room with a hungry, many-armed thing and not so much as blink. Neither of them was the stronger one. They were just strong in different directions.
Like a team, he thought, and didn't say it out loud, because it sounded too much like something Malkuth would put on her list.
. . .
Then the orders started coming for him.
"Employee 001, Attachment work on O-03-03!" And when he came out, "Employee 001, Instinct work on F-04-83!" And after he'd stood his eight seconds wearing fairies, "Employee 001, after a rest, Insight work on F-01-02!"
He did them all. The skull listened. The Fairy Queen patted him. And in the orange room, when he came in with the mop, the burned girl watched him the whole time with her white eyes. He didn't talk to her the way Polites would have, and he didn't ignore her the way Eurylochus had. He just worked, carefully and well, and every so often he looked up and met her gaze and nodded, the way he'd nod to a coworker across a loading dock. I see you. I'm here. I'm not leaving until it's done.
The light in the room didn't steady for him the way it had for Polites. But it didn't spit, either.
"Work result: good!" Malkuth said when he came out, and then, in a slightly hushed, delighted voice, as if passing on a secret: "The Manager says he likes having you on the schedule, Employee 001. He says you make things easier."
Outis didn't know what to say to that, so he said, "Thank you, ma'am," and sat down on the bench.
Eurylochus was sitting at the other end. Not as far away as he'd sat that morning.
For a long while, neither of them said anything. Polites had wandered off to the far side of the room and was trying, with great patience, to get a passing clerk to say good afternoon.
"This morning," Eurylochus said at last. He didn't look at Outis. He was watching the doorways. "By the burning one's door. You stopped me from saying something."
"Yeah."
"What would have happened?"
Outis thought about lying. It would have been easier. But Eurylochus was the kind of man who checked the exits before he looked at people, and men like that always knew when they were being handed a comfortable lie.
"There's a rule," he said quietly. "Malkuth's rule. If anyone on her team says they can't handle it, they're not on her team anymore." He paused. "They resign."
Eurylochus was very still.
"The rooms downstairs," he said. "The stripped beds."
"Yeah."
The older man didn't say anything for a long time. His eyes went to the monitors, where Malkuth's face had been, and then to the speaker on the wall, and then, finally, to Outis.
It wasn't warmth. Outis didn't think warmth was something Eurylochus did. But it was something. The hard, measuring look had shifted, the way a lock shifts when the right key turns it partway.
"Then I owe you," Eurylochus said.
"You don't owe me anything."
"I always pay what I owe," Eurylochus said, as if that settled it, and went back to watching the doors.
A moment later his eyes slid, very briefly, toward the far side of the room, where Polites was still waving at a clerk who was pretending very hard not to see him. Then back to Outis. The question was plain on his face without him having to ask it.
Does he know?
Outis opened his mouth to answer, and didn't get the chance.
"I know what it means," Polites said.
Both of them turned. He'd come back across the room without either of them noticing, and he was standing a few steps from the bench with his hands in his pockets. His smile was still there. It was just quieter than usual.
"Resign," he said. "I'm not dumb. My mom's bakery closed. The Syndicate on our street tripled the protection fee, and that was that. I've seen what people's faces look like when they know they're not coming back tomorrow." He shrugged, one shoulder. "The clerks have that face. All of them. All the time."
Outis didn't know what to say. Eurylochus said nothing at all.
"So, yeah. I know." Polites sat down on the bench between them, right in the middle, without asking, and swung his feet a little. "I just figure... if everyone in this place already acts like nobody's coming back, then somebody should act like they are. Say good morning. Learn their names. Wave at the scary ones." He glanced sideways at Outis, then at Eurylochus, and his smile came back a little brighter. "Somebody's got to be the one who expects people to come back. Might as well be me."
Eurylochus looked at him for a long moment. It was the same look he gave the exits: measuring, careful, unreadable.
"That," he said finally, "is a very stupid way to live."
"Yep," Polites agreed cheerfully.
Eurylochus looked away. But he didn't get up, and he didn't move to the end of the bench. He stayed where he was, with Polites sitting right beside him, and watched the doors.
Outis looked at the two of them, the man who checked every exit and the one who said hello to everything, sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench in the worst place he'd ever worked, and something in his chest gave a slow, strange, painful squeeze.
. . .
At the end of the day, after Angela had told the Manager the quota was met, and Malkuth had told them all they'd been wonderful, and Polites had finally gotten a clerk to nod at him (he would not stop talking about it), Outis walked down the hall one last time toward the elevator.
He passed the orange window.
He shouldn't have looked. He did anyway.
The burned girl had moved. Just a few steps, from the center of the room to the front of it, right up against the door. She was standing on her thin black legs with her white eyes pressed almost to the glass, and she wasn't looking at him.
She was looking past him, down the hall, toward the Main Room. Toward the sound of Polites's laugh, bright and cracked and echoing off the gray walls.
The match in her chest burned a little brighter.