- - -
On the morning of Day 4, Malkuth was four minutes late, and for the first time, somebody else noticed.
"Malkuth."
Angela's voice came from the ceiling, calm and even, at the exact moment every monitor in the Main Room flashed yellow. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
"Operations began four minutes ago."
On the screens, Malkuth froze with her clipboard halfway to her chest.
"I know! I know. I'm sorry. I'm here now! Four minutes is only..." She stopped. Her pen hovered over the page. "It won't happen again."
"Noted," said Angela, and that was all.
The speaker clicked off. Malkuth stayed very still for a moment, in her yellow frame, looking at nothing. Then she shook herself, the way a bird shakes off rain, and her smile came back on like a switch.
"Good morning, team! I have such good news today!"
Polites leaned over to Outis. "Is she in trouble?"
"I don't know," Outis said quietly. He was still looking at the speaker in the ceiling. Noted. It had sounded less like a reply and more like a line being written in a book. "Maybe a little."
Eurylochus, at the far end of the bench, said nothing. But Outis saw his eyes go to the speaker, and stay there a moment longer than they needed to.
. . .
"So!" Malkuth flipped a page with a flourish. "Over the last three days, the Manager has collected enough energy and observations to unlock our first files. That means we finally get to know their real names! Isn't that exciting? It's like meeting someone properly."
She cleared her throat, a strange, small sound from something that might not have a throat.
"O-03-03," she read. "One Sin and Hundreds of Good Deeds."
Polites's mouth fell open. "Wait. The skull? I've been confessing to something called One Sin?"
"And Hundreds of Good Deeds," Outis pointed out.
"That makes it better," Polites decided after a moment. "That makes it way better. One sin, hundreds of good deeds. That's a pretty good ratio." He paused. "I hope that's about us and not about it."
"F-04-83," Malkuth went on. "Fairy Festival!"
"That's so pretty," Polites said. "For something that tried to eat me."
"And the work guidelines say: never send an employee to work on any Abnormality while the fairies are still with them." Malkuth tapped the clipboard proudly with her pen. "That one's from us! From our team! It's official now. It's in the file."
Outis felt something warm and small settle in his chest, and didn't know what to do with it, so he ignored it.
"And F-01-02..." Malkuth's voice softened, just slightly. "Scorched Girl."
The Main Room was quiet.
"Oh," Polites said. Just that. He looked down at his hands. "That's... that's so sad. That's just what she is, isn't it. Somebody looked at her and that was the only name they could think of."
Eurylochus shifted on the bench. "It's a label," he said. "That's all."
"Labels are names when nobody gives you a real one," Polites said quietly, and nobody had anything to say to that.
Outis thought about Employee 001. About a name read between two other names at a graduation and forgotten eleven seconds later.
He didn't say anything either.
. . .
The new Abnormality arrived just before noon, in the fourth containment unit, and its sign said only T-04-06.
"It's an HE!" Malkuth announced, and then, as if worried she'd frightened them: "That's two steps above the lowest! But we don't know much about it yet. It's brand new. No name, no files. The Manager has ordered Attachment work for Employee 002."
Polites stood up, smoothed down his crooked tie, and looked at Outis.
"Ask first," he said.
"Good," Outis said. "Go look. Tell me what you see."
Polites went to the little window and stood on his toes. He was quiet for so long that Outis got up and went to look over his shoulder.
It was a teddy bear.
A big one, nearly as tall as a man, slumped in the corner of the white room the way a toy slumps when somebody drops it and walks away. It was old. Very old. Its brown fur was matted flat in places and worn through to the cloth in others. One ear looked like it had been chewed by a dog. One eye was a shiny black button; where the other should have been, there was only a loose thread and an empty socket. A faded green bowtie hung crooked at its neck. In a few places, the seams had split, and white stuffing bulged out of them like something trying to escape.
It wasn't moving. It was just sitting there, with its arms open, as if it had been waiting a long time for someone to come back for a hug.
"Oh, buddy," Polites whispered. "Look at you."
"Polites," Outis said.
"I know. I know. I'll be careful." He took a breath. "It's just... it looks like it got left behind."
He went in.
Outis watched through the window. Polites crossed the room slowly, talking the whole time, his voice muffled through the door but warm. He sat down on the floor in front of the bear, cross-legged, and kept talking. After a minute, he reached out and gently straightened its bowtie.
The bear's head tilted, very slightly. Its one button eye caught the light.
Then, slowly, its arms closed.
Outis's hand went to the door handle.
But it was just a hug. A big, soft, careful hug, the kind a kid gives a parent who's been gone all week. Polites went stiff for half a second, then laughed, a muffled, surprised sound, and hugged it back.
"Work result: good!" Malkuth cheered.
The bear let go.
Slowly. Too slowly, maybe. Its worn paws slid down Polites's back as he stood up, and stayed in the air a moment after he'd stepped away, as if they hadn't quite decided to let him leave.
Polites came out beaming, with brown fuzz all over his suit.
"It hugged me," he said. "Outis, it hugged me. It's so soft. It smells like an old closet. I love it."
"You love everything," Eurylochus said from behind them.
"I love most things," Polites corrected.
Outis didn't answer. He was still looking through the window.
The bear had gone back to its corner. It had slumped down again, exactly as it had been before. But its arms were still open, a little wider than before, and its one button eye was turned toward the door.
Toward where Polites had gone.
[ ... ]
The window opened in the corner of his vision and said nothing at all. Just three dots, sitting there, and then it closed again.
"What," Outis said under his breath.
[ Nothing yet. Just... keep an eye on that one. ]
"You say that about everything."
[ I say that about the ones that matter. ]
. . .
The champagne came in the late afternoon.
They were sitting on the benches between works, Polites in the middle, Eurylochus at one end, Outis at the other, when Angela's voice filled the Main Room. It wasn't addressed to them. It never was.
"Manager, I have an update for you. An employee loss has been recorded. A clerk, in one of the lower hallways."
Polites's head came up.
"This is the first loss since you joined us," Angela went on, in the same calm, even tone she used for energy quotas and work orders. "Allow me to congratulate you. Every great work requires sacrifice. This is the first step."
There was a pause.
Then, faint and tinny from the speakers, unmistakable: the soft pop of a cork leaving a bottle. The fizz of something being poured.
"To the first of many," Angela said.
The speaker clicked off.
Nobody on the bench said anything.
Polites was staring at the ceiling. His face had gone very still, the same stillness it had when the fairies had shown their teeth. Eurylochus's jaw was tight, his eyes on the floor. Outis found that his hands had closed into fists on his knees, and he didn't remember closing them.
A clerk. Brown suit, yellow tie, no armband. Somewhere out of sight, in a hallway they'd never walked down. He thought about the young woman with the shaking hands. The older man who'd walked the same way through the Main Room twice. He didn't know which one it had been. He didn't know if it had been either of them.
He realized, with a slow, cold feeling, that he would never know. There was no one to ask. That was the point.
"Congratulations," Eurylochus said finally, very quietly. It wasn't a question. It was the word, held up to the light so they could all see what was wrong with it.
Polites took a breath. Let it out. Then, slowly, he stood up.
"Where are you going?" Outis asked.
"Nowhere." Polites's voice was steady, but only just. "I just... I'm going to go say good afternoon to the clerk by the files. The one who nodded at me yesterday." He tried to smile and didn't quite get there. "In case."
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
Outis watched him cross the room, toward a man in a brown suit who was sorting papers by the far wall. Watched him say something, small and kind. Watched the clerk look up, startled, and after a long moment, nod.
Outis let out a breath.
[ He's going to keep doing that. ]
"I know," Outis said.
[ Even when it costs him. ]
"I know."
. . .
The Manager sent him to One Sin not long after, and Outis was glad.
He didn't confess anything this time. He just sat on the floor with his back to the wall the way he had on the first day, and looked up at the skull with its crown of thorns, and let it listen to him not saying anything at all. It didn't seem to mind. The cubes still came, slow and steady, and the cool draft still found its way into his chest.
"Work result: good!"
And then, a moment later, from the ceiling, not for him:
"Manager. Employee 001 has completed eleven works today with no result below good." A pause, a little too long, as if the voice had been about to move on and then hadn't. "An unusually efficient employee."
That was all. The speaker clicked off.
Outis stood in the hallway outside the skull's door and looked up at the speaker for a long time.
It was a compliment. Probably. It had the shape of one.
But it had sounded like something else, too. Like a person reading the same line in a book they'd read a thousand times, and stopping, for just a second, because one of the words had changed.
. . .
Polites knocked on the wall that night, the way he had the night before.
Knock. Knock-knock.
Outis knocked back.
They didn't talk about the champagne. Polites didn't bring it up, and Outis didn't either. Instead, after a while, Outis asked the question he'd been holding onto since the night before.
"Hey. Which District did you say you were from? You told me the bakery was in the Backstreets, but I missed the number."
"Oh! Twenty-three." Polites sounded pleased to be asked. "District 23. W Corp's District, the one with the WARP trains, so basically everybody in the City passes through. Best food in the whole City. Seriously, people come from all over just to eat there. There are restaurants in 23 that are so famous you have to know somebody to get in."
"Sounds nice."
"It is! Mostly. Also it's probably the most dangerous Backstreets in the City, but, you know. Mostly." A pause. "Rule one of District 23, though: never eat anything if you don't know what it is. Especially the meat pies. Like, especially. My mom used to say there are two kinds of chefs in 23, the ones who cook food and the ones who cook customers, and you can't always tell from the menu."
Outis was quiet for a second.
"The food on the fairy's tray," he said slowly. "You said it was meat-adjacent."
"Yes," said Polites, with great feeling. "Thank you. Somebody gets it."
Outis laughed despite himself, short and surprised. On the other side of the wall, Polites laughed too, and for a minute they were just two people laughing in two small tiled rooms, under two small red lights.
"Did you take the pill?" Outis asked eventually.
"Half," Polites admitted. "I broke it. I figured half was a compromise." A yawn. "It's sort of like... I want to feel things. I do. But after today, I wanted to feel things a little bit less. Is that bad?"
"No," Outis said. He meant it. "That's not bad."
"Okay." A crinkle of plastic. "Night, Outis."
"Night."
- - -
[ You want to ask me something. ]
Outis sat in the warm white with his legs stretched out in front of him. "A lot of things."
[ Start with one. :) ]
"Polites keeps saying words like they're normal. The Backstreets. Wings. Nests. The Night. Fixers. Syndicates." He counted them on his fingers. "I've been nodding like I know what they mean. I don't."
[ That's fair. Where should I start? ]
"The City. Why does everyone say it like that?"
The window dimmed, the way it did when the System was choosing what to say and what not to.
[ Because for the people there, it's the only one. The City is enormous. It's split into Districts, each with its own number. Outside of it, there are the Outskirts, and nobody goes there if they can help it. ]
[ Inside, the ones in charge are the Wings. They're corporations, but bigger than anything you'd recognize. Each one owns something called a Singularity: a technology so powerful nobody else is allowed to have it. ]
"Like this place."
[ Like this place. L Corp is a Wing. Its Singularity is the energy you've been helping make. ]
A pause. Then, smaller:
[ At least, that's what everyone believes. ]
Outis looked at the window. The window didn't elaborate.
"And the Nests?"
[ The areas around each Wing. Clean streets, working lights, rules that are actually enforced. If you live in a Nest, you're mostly safe. People who live there are sometimes called feathers. ]
Outis thought about that. A job at a Wing means a room in a Nest. It means you get out.
"And the Backstreets are everywhere else."
[ Everything between the Nests. No one's in charge there, so everyone is. Gangs called Syndicates. Hired swords called Fixers, who'll do almost anything if you can pay. Some of them are good people. Some of them very much are not. ]
"Gus was a Fixer," Outis said. "The one who lived above the bakery."
[ Then Polites was lucky. ]
"And the Night? He said it's dangerous to be outside. Dangerous how?"
The window took a long time to answer.
[ Every night, in the Backstreets, there's a time when everyone goes inside and locks the door. That's the Night. ]
[ The Sweepers come out then. They clean the streets. ]
[ Of anyone still on them. ]
Outis sat with that for a long moment.
"And that's just... normal? Everyone just accepts that?"
[ For a very long time, yes. ]
[ There's someone above all of it, too. Above the Wings. People call them the Head. They make the rules that nobody's allowed to break. ]
[ You don't want their attention. Nobody does. ]
Outis lay back on the glowing floor and stared up at nothing.
"This world," he said, "is awful."
[ Yes. ]
"And Polites grew up in it, and he still says good morning to everybody."
[ Yes. ]
[ That's why it matters that he does. ]
- - -
On the morning of Day 5, Malkuth was five minutes late.
"Malkuth."
"I know." Her voice was small. "I'm sorry."
"Five minutes," Angela said. "Noted."
When Malkuth's face came up on the monitors, her smile took a full second longer to arrive than it usually did. And when it did, it was a little too wide, the way a smile gets when someone is holding it up with both hands.
"Good morning, team!"
"Good morning, ma'am," the three of them said, almost together. Even Eurylochus.
Malkuth blinked. Then her smile softened into something real.
"Oh," she said. "Good morning." She looked down at her clipboard. "And... we have a new employee today! Control Team is going to be four!"
Polites lit up like someone had plugged him in. "Four! We're quadrupling!"
"We are not," said Eurylochus.
"We're doubling the double!"
Eurylochus closed his eyes, as if praying for patience from a god he didn't believe in.
The elevator dinged.
Nobody came out.
They waited. The doors stayed open. After about ten seconds, they started to slide closed, then jerked back open again, as if something were in the way.
Outis got up and walked down the hall.
There was a young man in the elevator. He was sitting on the floor in the corner, his back against the wall and his long legs sprawled across the doorway, which was what kept tripping the doors. His head had dropped forward onto his chest. His black suit was rumpled. His tie was undone, hanging loose around his collar like a scarf someone had given up on. A red armband with a white M had slid halfway down his sleeve.
He was asleep.
Outis looked at him for a moment. Then he crouched down and tapped him on the shoulder.
"Hey."
Nothing.
"Hey. You're on the Control Team?"
The young man snorted, jerked, and opened his eyes. They were brown and heavy-lidded and not quite pointed at anything. He looked up at Outis, then at the elevator, then at the hallway beyond it, in the slow, unhurried way of someone who'd just woken up somewhere unexpected and was deciding not to worry about it.
"Oh," he said. His voice was rough with sleep. "Did I get here?"
"You got here."
"Cool." He yawned enormously. "The elevator was really slow. And it was warm. And it kind of hums, you know? Like a fridge. I love a fridge." He squinted. "Are you Control?"
"I'm Control."
"Cool," he said again, and made no move to get up.
Outis held out a hand. After a moment, the young man looked at it, as if he wasn't sure what it was for, and then took it and let himself be hauled to his feet. He was taller than Outis, and so thin he looked like he'd been drawn with a ruler: all long arms and long legs and a neck that seemed to have been stretched to fit. He couldn't have been older than nineteen.
"Elpenor," he said, and offered a sleepy, crooked grin. "Hi."
"Outis."
"Outis," Elpenor repeated, nodding slowly, as if storing it somewhere. Then he frowned. "Wait, sorry, what was it?"
"Outis."
"Outis. Right. Cool. I'm bad with names. I'm bad with most things, honestly." He said it cheerfully, with no apparent shame at all. "I'm really good at sleeping, though."
"Noted," Outis said, and then winced, because that was Angela's word.
They walked back toward the Main Room together. Halfway down the hall, Outis noticed that Elpenor was fiddling with something: a stubby wooden pencil, worn down almost to nothing, chewed at the end, with flat, smoothed sides like a tiny paddle. He kept rolling it between his long fingers without looking at it.
"Lucky pencil?" Outis asked.
"Huh? Oh." Elpenor looked down at it as if he'd forgotten it was there. "My dad's. He used to write stuff down with it. Lists and things. He said if you write your name on something, somebody will find it someday and know you were there." He shrugged. "I never write anything with it. I just like holding it."
Outis looked at the worn little pencil, then at the young man carrying it, and felt something he couldn't put a name to.
"Hold onto it," he said.
"I always do," Elpenor said, and almost dropped it.
. . .
Polites adopted him within about thirty seconds.
"Elpenor! Hi! I'm Polites! This is Eurylochus, he's grumpy, but he's nice underneath, like, really underneath. Have you been here before? Do you know anything? Do you want to sit down? You look like you want to sit down."
"I always want to sit down," Elpenor said gratefully, and sat. Then he lay down, stretching his long body across the bench until his feet were nearly in Eurylochus's lap.
Eurylochus looked at the feet. Then at Elpenor. Then at Outis, with an expression of pure, silent suffering.
"Employee 004!" Malkuth said from the screens, sounding delighted. "Welcome to the Control Team! I'm Malkuth, your department head! Congratulations on joining Lobotomy Corporation!"
"Oh, hi," said Elpenor to the ceiling, without getting up. "You're a screen. Cool. Were you late today too?"
There was a tiny pause.
"Only a little," Malkuth said.
"Same," said Elpenor. "Elevators, right?"
On every monitor, Malkuth looked at him for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. It was a small, surprised sound, as if it had slipped out before she could check it against her list.
"Right," she said. "Elevators."
Outis looked between the two of them, the girl on the screen who was late a little more every day, and the kid on the bench who'd been late by falling asleep, and thought, for no reason he could name, that Elpenor was going to be fine here, because he simply didn't seem to notice that anything was wrong.
He wasn't sure if that was a comfort or a warning.
. . .
Day 5 was the calmest day yet. That was what Outis would remember about it, afterward.
The Manager rotated them carefully. Polites to the skull. Eurylochus to the fairies. Outis to Scorched Girl, where the light in the orange room held steady and didn't spit. Elpenor, for his first work, to the fairies too, after Eurylochus had stood out his eight seconds. He came out covered in tiny green glowing things and simply stood there, swaying slightly, until they left. He didn't seem to mind them at all.
"They're warm," he reported. "Like a blanket."
"They're carnivorous," said Eurylochus.
"Warm carnivorous blanket," Elpenor amended, and yawned.
Later, Polites went to the teddy bear again. Eurylochus had taken the last work on it the evening before, and had come out looking like a man who had been hugged against his will. Polites came out hugged and fuzzy and happy. Then Outis went, the next time, and the bear hugged him too: gently, carefully, its one button eye on his face the whole time. It didn't want to let go. He felt that in the way its worn paws pressed against his back, in the long second they stayed there after he'd started to stand.
He went back out without looking behind him. But he felt that button eye on his back all the way to the door.
[ Outis. ]
"I know," he said quietly. "It doesn't like it when people leave."
[ No. It doesn't. ]
[ Remember that. ]
Between works, Elpenor napped. He napped on the bench. He napped sitting up against the wall in the hallway. Once, Outis couldn't find him at all, and walked the whole floor twice with a cold feeling growing in his stomach, until he found him curled up asleep in the narrow supply cupboard next to the containment doors, between the mop bucket and a stack of folded cloths, his worn pencil in his loose fingers.
"It's quiet in here," Elpenor explained, blinking up at him. "And it's dark. And nobody looks for you."
"I looked for you," Outis said.
Elpenor seemed to think about that for a while.
"Huh," he said finally. "Okay. Thanks."
That night, Outis lay on his crinkling mattress under the tiny red light and listened to the building hum. On one side of the wall, Polites was asleep. He'd taken half the pill again, and said goodnight twice. Across the corridor, in 003, Eurylochus was probably lying perfectly still with his eyes open, watching his own door. And in 004, next to him, Elpenor had taken his whole pill and asked, cheerfully, through his door and loudly enough for half the corridor to hear, whether anyone was using theirs.
Nobody had answered him. Outis's was still sitting in its paper cup on the shelf, untouched, where it had been since the first night.
"Tomorrow is a very big day!" Malkuth had said, at the end of operations. "A whole new department opens, right below ours! The Information Team! Yesod's team! We're going to have neighbors!" And she had smiled, and it had been almost real.
Outis closed his eyes.
[ Outis. ]
He didn't open them. "Yeah?"
The window was quiet for a long moment.
[ Tomorrow, pay attention. ]
[ To everything. To everyone. ]
[ And whatever happens... remember it. ]
He opened his eyes and looked at the window, glowing pale blue in the dark of his little room.
"What's going to happen?"
[ I can't tell you that. ]
[ But I'll be here. The whole time. ]
[ I promise. ]
The window closed.
Outis lay there in the dark for a long time, listening to Polites breathe through the wall, and to the hum of the building, and to the silence where the System had been. Somewhere far above him, or far below, a match was burning in a small hot room, and a bear with one eye was holding its arms open in the dark, and something in the City outside was beginning, very slowly, to stir.
Day 6 was coming.
He didn't sleep. He didn't need to. He just lay there, and waited for the buzzer, and tried to memorize the sound of everyone he had left.