by Mark Johnson
In Armer the social classes, political groups and religious denominations segregated themselves into neighborhoods of similar status. Houses and buildings were grouped together and linked by common design.
There was nothing like that here. Sumad’s dwellings and workspaces were jumbled and random. An empty stretch of broken buildings inhabited by powerheads and homeless sat next to what must have been a building full of middle-class tradesmen’s families, where a barricaded, barbed courtyard contained children playing during the daytime. A mercenary gang lived in an ugly square box fortified to the point of satire, next to an ornate and elaborate upper-class domicile with fountains, spires taller than Sumad Reach and even such extravagance as a lawn. She’d wondered how those elements lived so close to each other until one day she’d observed Street Keepers—Polis Sumad’s police force—chasing a thief. There was very little thief left by the time they finished.
The scent of oxen manure hung in the air. Below, wagons rattled and tram bells dinged. Miles south of the chapterhouse walls, apartment buildings slowly sank lower until the only habitations were the rough shacks that bordered the wastelands.
She reached the fortress’s upper edge, where watchkeepers walked Sumad Reach’s walls, their backs illuminated from the courtyards below. All carried large, flat glass lens mechanisms for detecting chaos energy fluxes, which were more prevalent at night.
“I’m pleased they recognized how good your eyes are, Toornan,” she said to a plated figure staring intently at the glistening lens held to his face.
Toornan jerked around, his eyes wide. “Terese? When’d you get back?”
“Just now. I thought I’d come see you. I just wanted to let you know… everything is all right.”
“The renegades?”
“Gone. The last sightings have them trying to come north. The bounty hunter had bad intel and wasted our time chasing phantoms.” She slipped irritation into her voice, though saying those words aloud felt good. Almost safe. “What are they saying about that odd workshop?”
“They’ve passed it off as an anomaly. But… I’m just… confused.”
A pair of watchkeepers passed behind them.
She shook her head and raised a finger to her lips. It was possible that some of the vibrations floating about the roof came from surveillance devices.
Toornan took time to fashion his reply. “I’m glad you made it back in one piece.”
“As am I. I spoke to Keeper Lijjen. He’s taken me off the renegades. Now I have an exciting opportunity to work on the rosters until we go home.”
Another ponderous pause. “That’s an improvement, then.”
“Yes, I thought you’d like to know.”
“Thanks for telling me.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Let me know if you need any help… with the rostering.”
She almost sagged to hear a kind offer. “Thanks, Toornan. But for now, I have a lot to learn. If I learn enough, I’ll tell you… all about it.” She remembered something that had confused her at the roster board. “Do you know where Jools is assigned? I should tell her I’ve returned but I didn’t see her name on the boards.”
Toornan shrugged. “Haven’t seen much of her. She was transferred after someone in her complement was promoted.”
Terese left Toornan to his watchkeeping over Polis Sumad.
The tall clock in the hall chimed eleven times as she turned the key in her room’s lock. The female officers’ steam bath felt like heaven, and washing her hair with oils made her feel like a new woman. When that was done, she spent her remaining energy filing and lacquering her nails with her ‘ordinary’ polish. For the rest of her time in Sumad Reach she’d have to maintain appearances.
11
The rostering office was a long, thin room with one smudged-glass window. It was crammed with desks, filing cabinets, bookshelves, wall calendars and wobbling, uneven chairs. The window didn’t open, exacerbating the ripening odor of unwashed bodies, moldering paper and the occasional unfinished lunch. A line of ants marched with implacable determination across one corner of the ceiling.
On her first day, Terese entered the office with a pretend smile and cheery, ‘Good morning’. None of her three co-workers replied. They stared at her until the man she’d come to know as ‘Mr Sniffles’ asked why she was there. Evidently, her predecessor, Head Chuddar, hadn’t told them he was leaving.
She’d been pointed at a desk in the corner furthest from the window, which she’d initially thought to be a table for spare files. There was very little space and the work seemed to follow an in-tray/out-tray model, but she couldn’t be certain.
“Ah,” she ventured, directing her voice at her three new colleagues, studiously ignoring her. “I’m new at this. I was only promoted just before I left Polis Armer. Could someone please just help me figure this out?”
No one moved. It was like she hadn’t spoken.
She slipped over to Mr Sniffles and bent to look him in the eyes.
“Help me. Please.”
The man looked at Terese, then back to her desk, as if trying to tell her with his eyes that her desk was over there and how could she possibly be confused about that? When she didn’t move, the man sighed heavily and walked to her corner, glumly pointing out the various features of her desk.
“Those are… the drawers. That’s your ink pot, the pins for the cork board, and that’s Chuddar’s tea mug.”
“It’s still got tea in it,” she said.
“That’s unusual. He liked finishing his tea.”
She rubbed her forehead. “All right. The job. How exactly do I do it?”
“I don’t know.” The man refused to look her in the face. He sniffed then snorted loudly, and she had to wait until he was finished.
“You don’t know?”
“No.” He returned to his seat.
She plunged into the pile. It seemed there was no need for names in the rostering office, since there were four explicit rostering roles. Regular, Extraordinary, Replacement and Incoming. Terese’s corner had a bronze plaque overhead with the word Incoming stamped in capital letters, and by lunchtime she’d gained little understanding of what was required of her. Only that she was to co-ordinate part of the other three roster-makers’ work and that she was to monitor the outgoing rosters. But to gain a better understanding, she’d have to speak to Mr Sniffles, Mr Tapper or Miss Hung Over. She wasn’t certain if the graying woman was ‘Mrs Hung Over’ or ‘Miss Hung Over’. Clearly though, the woman would never be Miss Sunshine.
It was possible the other three Heads were here on something like punishment detail. Or possibly their rotation had come up and they simply wanted to be done with the job before they moved onto something like mentoring, training or expedition.
She didn’t ask.
That first night, Terese alternately cried and laughed herself to sleep. She’d somehow escaped persecution but ended up buried beneath mounds of incomprehensible work she barely understood. Of course it had been deliberate. Lijjen’s plan was clearly to keep her too busy to ask questions. It wasn’t a bad plan, she had to admit. Which her Uncle Morten would have told her was all part of ‘the plan’.
Every family had that one uncle with the crazy ideas, and the Saarg family had Uncle Morten. He believed every office ever made was designed deliberately, and specifically, to crush the spirit of every person trapped within. He claimed to have worked out ‘their’ system of ‘behavior and mind control’ that made otherwise good and decent human beings spend decades in offices lying about their superiors to the public. When her father’s family met every few months, he would eagerly explain the latest detail of his evolving theory.
For years, the Saargs had smiled through his ravings on why people who did not work with their hands were more likely to suffer ‘illness of the soul’. A career such as his—in a workshop—was the most noble of all workplaces, though he’d been pressed to admit after some careless words that being Seeker was also a decent occupation.
>
Just so long as they kept out of offices.
Perhaps Uncle Morten had been on to something.
Miles and months from home, the glum similarities between the rostering offices was a marvel. Well, if she were stuck in this rectangular gray room for eight months with the same three people, perhaps she could personalize it. Make her gray corner of the world a little more colorful and give her less reason to spend her evenings sobbing into a pillow.
The first few weeks in rostering were all fevered guesswork and late nights. She would return to her apartment for a glass of wine or two while listening to her wave receiver. She’d settled into a pattern. Not a likeable pattern, but tolerable.
It took a month to learn that rostering was surprisingly easy, once you understood what you were supposed to be doing. It was the small, fiddly bits that absorbed her time. She lost herself in the numbing, monotonous tasks that comprised her day, keeping her attention from homesickness and wondering what she’d write in her next letter to Pella.
The first day of her second month, she brought in a drawing Pella had mailed her. It was a colored-wax drawing intended to remind Terese of home. As she pinned Pella’s picture to her desk, she realized she had only seven months left in Polis Sumad, though she was no closer to uncovering what Sumad Reach had been doing in the Refugee Territories. Somewhere in the fortress, someone would have left a trail to the truth.
But where to start and who or what to ask?
She dared not ask anyone for help, for she’d earned her burden and dared not endanger anyone by sharing it. Not poor, sweet Toornan, and certainly not Jools Teeber, whose good intentions would land Terese in more trouble than Terese could make herself.
Jools Teeber?
Stopping mid-yawn, Terese’s head shot up. She gazed at Pella’s colored rendering of the view from Terese’s parents’ apartment. She closed her eyes to help shut out Mr Sniffles’ tracheal symphony.
Jools’s roster hasn’t come past my desk once.
That wasn’t odd in itself, given the chaotic nature of roster balancing. Any one of the other three Heads could have dealt with Jools exclusively for any number of mundane reasons.
But after returning from the Wastes, Terese had seen her only once, visiting the apartment Jools shared with another Missionary. Jools had made tea and produced Sumadan biscuits while they caught up, listening to music wafting from the wave device. Jools had been evasive about her new complement, saying they were covert and investigative, tasked with following up on vibrational and chaotic fluctuations out northwest, verging on another chapterhouse’s territory. Terese hadn’t pushed for details because of the unspoken awkwardness: That Terese should have been leading Jools and the rest of their complement on excursions.
Terese’s eyes dropped back to her desk. Student names cut into paper clippings in one hand, spots of blue adhesive clay in the other. A sonorous sniffle erupted behind her.
When all else failed, a Seeker followed her hunches.
Mr Sniffles ignored her when she took a large manila folder from his desk. Miss Hung Over glared at her and Mr Tapper drummed his fingers. Rostering folders were communal, probably so they wouldn’t need to speak to one another. Combing through three files this size would set back her leaving time, but Terese had no plans that night. Or any night.
The sun dimmed. Her co-workers left. The admin building quietened.
She slammed the final folder shut, the thick slap echoing. She steepled her fingers and rested them against her nose, staring at the room’s calendar. Scents of dusty paper tickled her nose. Dried ink stains had forced the whorls of her fingerprints from hiding. Her chair screeched as she pushed it back. She walked to the window, placed her hands on the sill and her forehead against the glass, eyes closed against the mostly sunken sun.
There had been no mention of Jools Teeber in the other heads’ folders.
Jools. Smart—in her own way—and slightly ambitious, good memory and a capable fighter. She was the type to round out her experience as best she could before attempting anything higher than her pay grade. Unlike Terese, who—looking back, she had to admit—leapt at each opportunity like a starving dog after scraps of meat.
Jools was more of a ‘smell the roses’ Seeker who wanted to maximize each experience before looking for her next promotion. Just so long as she could explore new buildings and city designs, she’d be satisfied by a slow climb of the career ladder.
The woman could possibly make Keeper; she was reliable enough. But perhaps a little too obedient and gullible. She was one to abide by the letter of the rule when confused or rushed, not usually considering the spirit of the rule. Terese wasn’t opposed to breaking the rules to get the desired result, so long as none knew.
Terese knew what to look for. A group of Heads or Missionaries kept unusually sequestered. Correspondence of personnel matters stovepiped directly to the Keeper responsible and not following due process. Jools would have easier access to artifacts and rest days than normal Missionaries, and Terese wagered the woman’s chapterhouse account would have more access to discretionary funding than most. Jools may have taken to living with or near other Missionaries in the same squad or complement, and begun attending confidential meetings with them.
All these minor details were a matter of record, available to any officer. But that officer would have to know what she was looking for across different departments. That was how the Armer Immersion Chamber Project had been hidden in plain sight. Terese had lived in official secrecy too long to not recognize the signs.
Show me the way, she’d prayed of Sumad weeks earlier.
A Seeker was sworn to do what they thought right. To admit they were limited by their own knowledge.
‘Quiet moments’, the Seeker’s Charter said. Quiet moments allowed one’s inner voice to speak, to guide one to do what they thought right. Being good, according to that ancient scroll, was doing right things, even in the face of superiors doing wrong things.
She bared her teeth. It would be so easy to let her suspicion rest. To pretend Sumad Reach had nothing to do with the Immersion Chamber. To pretend Jools was in no danger of being fooled into something evil. She just had to replace the three folders at their respective desks, go back to her apartment and have some wine.
Since returning from the Wastes, she no longer slept with a figurative eye open. Just as she’d wanted, the chapterhouse had forgotten her. But she’d asked Polis what to do and He’d shown her a thread to pull. And now she’d started, she couldn’t turn her back on Him.
Few choices in life came so neatly defined. Do something, do nothing.
Finding the make-up of Jools’s days would not be difficult. All she needed was the central office keys in Mr Tapper’s desk. No one would notice her walking to the central admin chamber with folders under her arm; hundreds of officers entered with folders every day. With what was mentioned and unmentioned in requisitions forms, personnel records and profile details, perhaps Terese could unravel Sumad Reach’s secret.
Or, she could do nothing.
The longer she pondered, the louder her inner voice spoke through layers of doubt.
Distant footsteps echoed through the corridors. The sun warmed her forehead on the glass.
She decided, and picked the folders from her desk, rifled through Mr Tapper’s desk drawer and marched toward Sumad Reach’s admin block.
Armed with keys.
12
Terese found Toornan in a small corner of the officers’ courtyard, sitting on a towel and reading a book. Her satchel thumped down beside his head, and he started. She lowered herself to the ground, resting her back against a slender palm tree.
“Lovely day,” she said.
“I’ve never seen so much blue as here in Sumad,” Toornan said, putting down his book. “There’s so little rain it makes me nervous, but I’ll miss the blue skies when we get home.”
She pointed at his small pack. “What’s in there?”
Toornan took her meanin
g and shook his head. “Another book, a banana, some nuts and some clothes.”
She closed her eyes and checked. There were no vibrations nearby. “We’re safe.”
Toornan exhaled heavily. “Well, we’re alive. That’s good, right?”
“What can you tell me about Jools? What do you know about her life, recently?”
He blinked as he thought. “She’s struck up a romance with a Head–Kedden. You know him?”
“I’ve seen him, never spoken to him.”
“She seems taken with him,” said Toornan, “and I suppose it’s mutual. She was transferred into another complement—not his. I don’t know which came first, the romance or the transfer.”
She must have frowned because Toornan swore quietly. “What’s Jools gotten herself into, and how do I explain it to her?” He rolled his shoulders unconsciously, and a passing dark-eyed Sumadan girl in a two-piece swimsuit took a longer look than necessary. The man was good-looking, although not Terese’s type. Too much talking in public might set tongues wagging, but there’d be even more gossip if they were spotted meeting in secret.
“She’s part of something that’s happening off-record,” Terese continued. “I couldn’t find her on the normal rosters, so I went hunting.”
He raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Terese, you have to know some Missionaries can’t be rostered regularly because their rotations fluctuate.”
She lowered her voice further. “How many of those Missionaries get undisclosed discretionary funding? Why isn’t she actually in a head’s complement, but instead in a specialist squad? What particular skills does she have that would be useful in Sumad Reach?” She reached into his bag of pistachio nuts, in the hope that eating would make her look more relaxed.
Toornan frowned. “Well, I’ll admit it sounds odd. But crime? Isn’t that a bit unlikely for Jools?”
“No, she’d never do anything wrong. But why are there no apprentices or assistants in her squad?”
“Only missionaries and higher get dark ops,” he said, eyes widening. “And it’s rare.”
