The One That Comes Before

by Livia Llewellyn

  Alex stuffs her empty mug into her bag and slips her mask back on. This time, she also inserts the dense foam earplugs that hang at each side of the mask like feeding tentacles. Half the people on the tram are doing the same, as it begins its lurching ascent up the right side of the bridge, slowing down to a snail’s pace as commuters drop off it like fleas. The humidity here is as unbearable as the constant din, almost unbreathable, and the masks help filter the moisture away. Other commuters begin removing their masks, small slits along the sides of their throats opening ever so slightly in the water-saturated air. Alex doesn’t hate being fully human, but more and more in Obsidia, with every passing generation, it has its distinct disadvantages. Then again, those are the people who work in the buildings that line the outer edge of the bridge—in them or under them, repairing and shoring up the continual degradation that the water inflicts on the land. Alex slips off at the last stop, almost exactly halfway across the bridge, and crosses the street during a lull in traffic to the middle island, where a thick line of offices divides the right section of the avenue from the left. The thirty-seventh building, the last and the highest on the spur before it morphs from office park into a ten-lane toll highway to Obsidia, is where she’s headed. Erected by Rucapillán, the corporation that owns all of the riverfront property, it’s an impossibly ancient-looking, monstrous grey and silver ziggurat rising forty stories high. Someone once jokingly said it’s been here since before the dinosaurs roamed the continent. Others whisper that it was brought up from the dreaming city. She half believes both stories.

  Ten on the nose, her slender wristwatch says. Not bad for a late start. Alex reaches into her bag for her building ID. Her fingers touch something soft at the bottom. She pulls it out. “What the fuck?” She holds up a small dish towel, neatly folded into a rectangle.

  The first dish towel. The warning. The one that always gets moved first, before the others.

  For one brief, wild moment, she wants to run, run along the wide, crowded sidewalks, run across and over the bridge, run onto real land, into the real city, as far away from Becher District as possible, all the way up the city, up the entire length of the southern continent, up through the remains of the United States to the cold Arctic north, up and beyond into the dark of the sky, the dark of space, until the river is less than an eyelash-thin mote in the sun’s bright eye. A hard wave of nausea washes over her, nausea and brittle terror as the buildings press down, the heat presses down, the air chokes and clogs in her throat, because every person born in Obsidia knows the precise moment when they will die, that’s what they’re all supposed to believe. And she is going to die here, at the end of this day, in this building, on this bridge. She is going to die, broken and screaming and alone.

  And it passes.

  The moment is gone, and the workday has begun, and what a bunch of superstitious bullshit—now she’s even later than before. Her paycheck on Friday. Her apartment, warm and silent in the day’s golden glow. The vodka in her locked file drawer. These are things to live for, and she’s going to live a long, long time. Alex shoves the towel back down into her bag, and lets herself be swallowed up in the endless slow spin of the revolving brass doors.

  10:23 am

  Alex stares at her desk. At the mounds of manila envelopes waiting to be opened and rejected because the hopeful writers don’t understand that Lenkiewicz Belanger Apostolicum Press isn’t an actual publishing company. At the semi-sentient ivory-toothed typewriter, black and brooding at the corner of a rickety desk that is nothing more than a massive plank of shipwreck wood held up by rusting metal file cabinets. At the wall-to-ceiling glass doors of the elevator lobby, weeping with black rivulets of condensation and grime. At the hulking shoggoth-powered air conditioner that runs the length of the right wall, its pneumatic accordion tubes silent and still. She knew something was off the minute the sticky, vomit-warm air of the white marble lobby hit her face as she rolled through the revolving doors. M37 isn’t one of those crumbling brick buildings on either side of the avenue. It’s supposed to be the always modern, always perfect flagship of the North Spur where nothing ever breaks down. But now everything is breaking down—she barely made it off the last working elevator before the doors closed and she heard it plummet back down into the lobby. It feels like the entire building is sinking, and dragging them all with it into the bottomless silt of the Becher.

  And another unsettling mystery—as she shrugs and wiggles her way out of her damp jacket, Alex notices something off-kilter about the door of the Ministry of Information-issued, refrigerator-sized safe just behind her desk. Leaving her jacket hanging like seaweed on the back of her chair, she steps over and grabs the thick brass handle. The door is heavy as fuck, but it swings open to empty shelves.

  “What the hell?”

  A single bright-pink Post-It is stuck to the middle shelf—has she been pink-slipped, with an actual pink slip of paper? It would be just like Quartus, the single member of their Personnel & Payroll Department. Alex plucks it off and reads his neat handwriting.

  ALL DELIVERIES

  HAVE BEEN COMPLETED

  BY THE MINISTRY

  EXCEPT ONE

  ~WE HAVE FAITH IN YOU~

  A cold little spark of anxiety explodes in her heart. The safe is where each night she deposits the editors’ finished copies of ultra-rare grimoires and scrolls, each one hand-duplicated down to the very last archaic inkblot, insect part, demon print, and blood spatter by both magic and their well-trained hands. It’s Alex’s job to collect the books, to lock the safe at night, and to send them out every morning to select bio-thaumaturgical scientists and mages throughout the continent while Felix Pitts, LBA’s lone editorial assistant, messengers the originals back to the addressless, ultra-secret Ministry Library in the heart of Obsidia. Last Friday afternoon there were seventeen completed books ready to be packaged up. No one notified her that the Ministry would be stopping by. Did she miss their call? Did she do something wrong? What last delivery are they talking about—the safe is empty. And what the fuck does “we have faith in you” mean?

  “I’ve never worked at a place where the receptionist was the last to arrive. It kind of looks unprofessional, you know.”

  Vecula Threadneedle hovers at the edges of the reception room, paper-cut thin, diamond-pierced gills rippling along the sides of her pale-green throat. Vecula holds her usual eggshell porcelain cup of organic white seaweed tea, a rare blend her father, the billionaire owner of some massive shipping corporation, harvests and sends up yearly from private plantations deep in the Southern Ocean. Vecula’s a typical trust fund creature—young, pretty, earnest, a truly dedicated and passionate lover of the intellectual mystique of the publishing world, who has never spent a single minute of her nine-month apprenticeship at LBA Press working on anything other than her escape from the gross pedestrian reality of it. Alex has been in the business for close to thirty years, and none of the boys and girls are any different or unique from Vecula. They come and go in windswept clouds of youthful dreams and ambitions, dispensing lofty and well-meaning advice to the full-time employees in the few moments each week that they emerge from feverish bouts of planning complex shopping trips in Marketside and extended vacations at their ancestral estancias located in the northernmost, pollution-free stretches of Obsidia.

  “You’ve never worked?” Alex asks. “Is that what you said? Because, that I believe.”

  “The funny thing is, you didn’t have to come in at all. Didn’t you see the email? It’s so stupid.”

  “What email? Why did you get one and not me?” Alex points to the safe. “Do you know about this? Am I being fired?”

  Vecula looks more confused than usual. “What are you talking about? No one’s being fired, although half of you should be. The building people sent out an email on Sunday, something about building repairs fucking everything up, but Quartus didn’t send out his email telling us not to come in until half an hour ago. By then it was too late.”

&nbs
p; “What about the safe?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You said—” Alex pauses only slightly, not long enough for Vecula to notice, but long enough to imagine pushing the slender girl to the ground, sitting on her chest, and slowly sewing her bedazzled gills shut while giving her long cigarette kisses that leave a soft cloud of dry air in her land-modified deep ocean lungs. But her father is powerful and old—Vecula isn’t like the other apprentices, with no families to wonder why their sons and daughters remained in Becher long after their apprenticeship ended and never returned home, so—

  “—never mind.”

  Alex sits down and flips open a wide ink pad augmented with Vampyroteuthis infernalis mucus, specially created for the magically challenged office assistant. After pressing her hand against it for several seconds, she places her sticky palm against the warm computer screen and gently rubs. It seems like it takes forever for the grey snow drifting across the curved screen to dissipate, slowly revealing a small scroll of emails from late Friday and throughout the weekend. The usual spam offers for printing and paper services; cute rescue cat pictures from Marie, their copy editor; an updated publishing schedule and three requests from editorial to restock ink supplies in the work rooms; the email from Quartus; and an email from building management sent out on Sunday afternoon. Nothing from the Ministry saying they would be by to empty the safe.

  “This is weird,” Alex mutters. She glances over at the black answering machine. No flashing lights. “I don’t understand.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Never mind.” Alex leans back in her chair. The air in the office is deathly hot, like breathing through layers of wool blankets. Even her apartment would be better than this. “Quartus usually calls ahead of time if the office is going to be closed. Did he try to call anyone? Did he call you?”

  Vecula stares into her cup.

  “I’m sorry, please remind me which apprentice is working for Quartus?”

  “It was the weekend. I got a message, but I deleted it. I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Yes, well. Come over here.” Alex adjusts the small desk fan directly at her neck and breasts while Vecula slowly shuffles her bejeweled, sandal-clad feet across the worn rugs. She stops at the edge of Alex’s desk, a look of determined stupidity locking her round eyes into place.

  “Look at this.” Alex rubs the tip of her index finger against a small pad of aubergine ink, then moves the arrow cursor over the email timestamp, almost hidden in the constant snow drifting across the cathode-ray tube screen that serves as a makeshift computer. Slowly the original time wells up from the faked early morning numbers, scrubbed away by her flesh and the prickly leviathan ink.

  “Quartus sent this email on Sunday, at four p.m.” Alex looks up at Vecula. “Something corrupted it, changed the date so we wouldn’t get it until after we’d opened today.”

  Vecula shrugs and takes another sip of her tea. “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know. You don’t have that kind of power.”

  “That’s not my fault. HR is boring. Quartus is so old, and he smells really bad, and he doesn’t teach me any magic at all. I don’t think he even knows how to. Honestly, I don’t think any of you do. If my father owned this company—”

  Alex stands up. Vecula takes a timid step backward.

  “Yes, you are absolutely right. Everyone at LBA is a fucking moron who can’t perform the simplest spell. Almost nothing works on us or for us, we’re total freaks, and the most we can do is reproduce the spellwork of others. And that’s why we work in publishing!”

  Alex pauses, long enough that Vecula can feel the sharpness of it.

  “Including you. Which is why your father dumped you here.”

  A slightly pink mortification washes over Vecula’s seafoam scaled face. Alex smirks. If there’s one kind of magic she does have, it’s the ability to shut that bitch right up.

  “EDITORIAL meeting in THIRTY minutes.” Bartram Knapp, LBA’s senior editor, stumbles out of one of the hallways, clutching the side of the wall and panting as if he can barely breathe.

  “Bartram, are you—?” Alex stops mid-sentence. The dark wet patch running down his shirt isn’t perspiration, as she first thought. It’s vomit.

  “In the CONFERENCE room. You too—” He snaps his fingers, over and over.

  “I’m Vecula.”

  “VECULA.” Bartram coughs heavily and runs a trembling hand across his mouth. Alex flinches and turns away, her stomach churning slightly. If he vomits, I’m going to burn him alive.

  “YOU’RE taking notes. WHAT is with those GOD-FUCKING sirens?!” With a faltering push and a tortured groan, Bartram propels himself down the adjacent hallway, mumbling nonsensical obscenities at the bookshelves that linger in the dead air.

  “He did not look well at all.”

  “He must mean you,” Vecula states. “I don’t do notes.”

  “I know you don’t, dear. Everyone knows that.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Alex lets out a whisper of a sigh as she shoves her tote bag into a lower desk drawer. They’ve all been told to be nice to Vecula, even if she never does a single useful thing—or any single thing at all. Apparently her father really is that powerful. “I mean everyone knows your talents lie elsewhere. You’re far too important to be wasting your time taking notes.”

  A slight tremor reverberates throughout the building, sending dust and fly wings off the shelves in feathery plumes. Alex freezes, her fingers gripping the top of the file drawer.

  “Ugh. When are they going to finish?” Vecula mutters as she wanders off, a slender hand covering her teacup. “So annoying.”

  Overhead, the light fixtures rattle and sway. They’ve never done that before. The spurs are as solid as mountains, or they’re supposed to be. Alex stares out the window. From her perch on the top floor of M37, across the thick mist of the Becher, the turrets, towers, and elevated railroads of Obsidia float in a gold-brown industrial haze, jagged and graceful outlines rising from the fog in all the shades of darkness one could imagine, as though the city is made of nothing more substantial than toxic mists and memories. She could be there right now, on the other side of the river. That little niggling thought still wafts about her brain, the thought that she should have just kept walking…

  Alex lets out another sigh, long and loud this time, as she finishes closing the drawer. Get your shit together, girl. Automatically, she fishes a key out of the bottom of a cup of paper clips, and unlocks the bottom file drawer to the left of her. In a series of subconscious and well-practiced moves, she pops the top off her commuter mug, places it down in the drawer, grabs the bottle of vodka and unscrews the cap, pouring a good third of the bottle into the mug. She knows exactly how long the process takes, how her body must be positioned specifically so that no one passing through the numerous hallways that open into reception will see; and she knows exactly what to say and do if anyone does happen to linger and catch a glance. With the cap on again, she slides the bottle back onto its bed of cafeteria napkins, grabs the mug and a small bottle of Coca-Cola, her mixer of choice, and closes the drawer with her foot. Everyone at the press thinks she’s a hopeless caffeine addict. They’re not wrong. She loves caffeine, too.

  10:56 am

  Alex never quite knows which way to go to get to Editorial’s conference room—she just knows, like everyone else, if she wanders long enough she’ll find it, almost as if the room moves into line of sight only and exactly when it knows it’s needed. The entire floor that LBA occupies has been turned over the years into a vertigo-inducing layout of strangely angled hallways and odd rooms with extra walls that completely defy maps or directions. You open a door or head down a corridor never knowing quite where you’ll end up. A long-departed art director once told her that the floor plan was a mechanical diagram of some sort, that he had figured out the design of the interior space, but not
the purpose. He went a bit insane not too long after that, spending his last month of work doing nothing but sleeping in closets and slithering through the ceiling crawl spaces; and then late one evening, security found a portion of his head and half a leg in one of the emergency stairwells, resting on a pile of sopping wet blank legal pads, and an uneven number of fingers scattered across reception. The police never did admit that they couldn’t find the rest of the body, although the massive stains all up and down the stairwell might have clued them in on the fact that there was little left to find. Then again, maybe those missing pieces were filed away for later use, the editors still love to say to the gullible apprentices, pointing to the glass cabinets and bookcases lining every available inch of hallway and office space, all crammed with boxes, caskets, phials, and jars filled with every arcane ingredient necessary to perfectly duplicate the grimoires and tomes the press is sent. Ground ivory bones, inky brown blood, spongy viscera that leave lovely feather marks against the pages, beautiful bright skeins of arteries and veins that unwind into cursive missives from the void. Soft, cured leather skin. Alex’s mouth forms a wide, toothy smile around her straw. Her coworkers have so many gifts, so many talents. Despite her massive deficiency, she does have one gift of her own.

  “What are you smiling about? It’s a hundred and twenty fucking degrees of sweet moist hell in here.” Felix Pitts sidles through a two-foot-wide closet door with several dusty books clutched to his chest and joins her in the narrow hallway.

  “I was thinking of Federico.”

  “Oh good grief. That was hilarious. Bartram still bitches about the blood stains on the sofa, and it was almost ten years ago.”

  Alex deepens her voice. “Tell me, ALEX, what the GOD-FUCK does it say about us as a PROFESSIONAL press that we can DUPLICATE the most powerful books in the WORLD, but can’t get HALF A QUART of blood out of a CUSHION?”