When I opened my eyes, there was little indication that time had passed. The world outside my curtains still loomed darkly, any greying promises of dawn invisible from my room. Two warm lumps rustled under the bed sheets as I stirred—one by my foot, and the other draped over my side—followed by the curled-up dragon on the pillow next to me. I propped my head up on my hand and blinked sleep from my eyes.
“Good morning.” Cal yawned, leisurely blinking his glowing golden eyes.
At my more direct movement, the lump on my side resolved itself into its proper kitten shape and scrambled off the bed. The one by my foot couldn’t be bothered, kicking slightly against me as if to say I was invading its personal space.
Under normal circumstances, this would have been an unexpectedly idyllic way to wake up, cozy under my covers and shielded from the dreary day outside. Instead, my system buzzed with the tired, empty feeling of mediocre sleep after adrenaline, and my arms throbbed and stung respectively. All that aside, the moment my brain registered consciousness it went back to the question I had tried so hard to ignore last night, for my own sanity: why would anyone steal Talsic’s case file?
“Good morning,” I murmured back to Cal, and sat up, staring unseeingly at the distant, shadowed wall.
Did the intruders know about Talsic, or had it been a coincidence? Were they just trying to spy on him—or rather, us? Did they know I was a CENCA agent? Maybe they’d been hoping to snatch a random file and get a lead to something sellable on the black market. Were they black market ops, or more of a purist group? Such staunch believers in a human-only world were rare but they did exist. That didn’t strike me as the right answer, though. If the intruder had been one of those, I would expect it to be planned as a statement; conversely, he hadn’t shown any radical leanings. He’d inflicted minimal property damage, resorted to violence only when discovered, and all without speaking a word. Too quiet and low-key.
The arm that had blocked Green Hood’s strike probably wouldn’t agree, but—
I looked down, reexamining my arms. The bruised one ached, and the cut one had glued my skin to my sleeve with dried blood. Of course, I had rinsed off the wound last night, but I hadn’t done much besides that; it was going to be a chore to deal with now. Stress and adrenaline had messed up my priorities, I supposed. Leveraging myself up with a sigh and resisting the ponderous urge to lie back down and sleep, I headed to the bathroom to patch myself up.
It wasn’t a bad wound, but it still stung like fire as I peeled the shirt off of it and scrubbed the area with an alcohol pad. I did what I had to with much clenching of teeth, and spent several minutes grappling with gauze and antiseptic, and trying to arrange the bandages so that they would fit discreetly under any long sleeved shirts. One more thing to keep hidden. My shirt from the night before would have to be thrown out, too, since there was no way I was taking it to a thrift store as it was, torn and covered in blood.
Swallowing an aspirin, I headed back to the bedroom and rifled through my meager collection of clothes for a change, then fished the kittens out of covers and half-made the bed. Cal yawned again.
“I think you’re way too active for this early in the morning,” he said through his yawn. “And I expected you to be more tired from last night.”
“No time to be tired,” I replied, banishing regretful thoughts of blankets from my mind. “Because of last night, I have even more to do than normal.”
I re-settled my pillow on the bed, trying to form a proper list in my head of what needed doing. The slip of paper from the intruder was in the gun case, right? So I should check that out, check in with Cal and see if he had any extra information that we hadn’t had time for last night, get breakfast—no, feed the kittens, then breakfast—check in with Talsic; but if he was already asleep, I’d search the house, except maybe I’d better do that before breakfast—
“You’re not getting some kind of delayed reaction to the break-in, are you?” Cal asked, watching me stare off into space, one hand resting loosely on the pillow I’d set down.
Shaking myself out of it, shivering slightly in the cold pre-dawn air, I flopped down into a sitting position on the bed. “I don’t think so? I’m not sure. Never been good at understanding that sort of thing. Mostly I just feel like I have to get to doing something, you know? That I need to be ready, for whatever happens next, or to fix what already happened.”
Cal fluffed his wings out in agreement. “The house doesn’t feel quite as safe this morning.”
Now there was another thing I’d been avoiding thinking about. It was a problem without solution—it wasn’t like I could move right now. Though, maybe I’d just need to solve this case to feel better, or change careers or something, or try to go to college. Not that I actually wanted to do any of the above (minus solving the case), but… it helped to feel like I had options. It let me know that I wasn’t as trapped as I felt.
“How are you doing?” I asked Cal.
He flared his wings out with a jerk, then tucked them close around his body. “I… I don’t like that it happened,” he said quietly. “Something so sudden breaking into our safe place. It reminded me of… you know. When I had to leave the Citadel.”
Right. I hadn’t even thought of that, had I? How the invasion must have felt to someone who’d had to run away from their own home. I reached out a hand, and he dropped his muzzle onto it.
“I know we’ve been worried about people coming and finding out about me, but it’s been like that for long enough that I’d kind of forgotten that here was still dangerous, you know? Because I knew—know—you have my back.”
I scratched gently under his chin. “At least, as best as I possibly can. And you did great last night. Really. If you hadn’t got me my gun, I’m not sure what would have happened.”
His lips curling back over vicious teeth in what looked like a grimace, but what was actually, I knew, an expression of trust and comfort—smiling wasn’t something dragons did easily. It was easy to forget that, if he’d been human, he would have been young, barely more than a kid, younger than I was when I ran away from my childhood home.
“You never did tell me much about how you got out,” I said. “Of the Citadel, I mean. You said a dragon named Vyla helped you get out after she found you at the scene of the crime. Did she help you get out of Skailorn’s dimension, or just the Citadel?” He had told me the basics, but I hadn’t pried further beyond a few clarifying questions. Sometimes, people didn’t want to talk about their past, and that was fine with me. But I did want to know, and knowing might help the both of us. So I took my chance.
“It’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest,” Cal said after a pause. “She said she’d distract anyone that came looking for me, and told me how to get out of the Citadel. It was nice of her, even though I don’t think it did much good. She wasn’t a very high-ranking dragon, a bit on the small and weak side, and not from our part of Skailorn. So I don’t know how much weight her word had. Especially with all the… everything.”
I made a mental note that if I ever met this Vyla, I should try to thank her. It was unlikely that I would just casually run into a dragon, but you never knew. I ran into Cal, after all.
“But I made it out before being pursued,” Cal continued, “and then I just… didn’t know what to do. I think I was going to wait for a bit and see what happened, hoping that it would be enough that I wasn’t there. But alarms were raised, so I ran, like I said. And then I hid out for a while in a different dimension—a cold, dark one that I didn’t like. Lots of tunnels. I think I was hiding in some kind of massive prison structure. And then I got through a portal and ended up here.”
The Catacombs, from Dimension 307? Possibly. But maybe I just thought that because I’d been there once myself. Not a pleasant memory, but potential context.
“How exactly did you come here?” I asked. “Or get to the other, dark dimension?”
He raised his head off my hand and cocked it quizzically, wings mirroring the tilt. “What do you mean?”
“Did you find a portal to get away? Or did you make your own? Maybe hitch a ride with someone else?”
“I—” he frowned. “I don’t… I don’t remember.” He sat up suddenly, and turned large, white-rimmed eyes up at me. “That can’t be right.”
“You can’t remember either time?” I asked. Suffice to say, this was not the answer I had anticipated. I had assumed he hadn’t talked about it because he hadn’t wanted to.
“No, I remember coming here,” he said. “Someone had opened up a portal in the tunnels recently, so even though I didn’t have proper equipment, I was able to use Mithae to re-open the portal. The old one hadn’t fully sealed yet, so I basically just slipped through.”
Another reason that people had been terrified of dragons in the old times—besides being the apex of size, strength, and mithecal power, they also had an affinity for interdimensional travel. Drake had theorized to me once that this was actually a result of their mithecal power, and made some kind of cross-referential point to vaenons that I didn’t fully understand.
But if Cal had been in the Catacombs, how on earth was there just… a random, unsecured portal. The implications of that—escaped convicts, loose monsters, black market mafia activity, a breach in the Catacombs security system—were larger than I could think about right now. Later, I’d have to confirm which dimension he had, in fact, ended up in.
“Do you know if, when you re-opened that portal, you came through to its original destination?” I asked. An escaped convict from the Catacombs was a problem, but not one I’d have to worry about. An escaped convict that had been hiding, undetected, under CENCA’s nose, in my province, was very much something I’d have to worry about.
Cal’s wings were stiff, and he answered me with eyes not fully focused. “I don’t think so. Maybe. It wouldn’t have to be the same, at least, since it was something I reopened while the rift was sealing. I think it probably took me to a different dimension along the same path, or something like that. I’m not sure. I hadn’t got around to really learning about portals yet, since that was for older dragons. But… why can’t I remember?” His large, gold-and-copper eyes had never looked so much like a lost puppy’s.
“Well, bad experiences can do strange things to your mind,” I offered, unsure what other answer to give. “It’s possible that your brain locked it away so you wouldn’t have to think about it. At least, that’s something that can happen with humans.”
Cal shook his head, wings shivering, and lay back down. “That doesn’t sound right. I mean, not that it can’t happen, but in my mind it feels more like… there’s a hole there. I know I left the Citadel, and that I ran for a while down the river and towards the forest, and then I remember getting to the forest, and then… the best I can say, now, is that I almost seemed to run straight into that other dimension. But… that’s not right. It… it feels like… it feels like that’s what my mind is telling me because it’s trying to fill over something that’s missing, making up an explanation.”
And why did you not even realize that you didn’t know how you’d changed dimensions until I asked? I added in my head.
“Well, thank you for telling me,” I said, stroking his head. “It might help with the investigation. And speaking of which…” I glanced at my phone and grimaced. “I’d better get a move-on.”
He nodded forlornly, and rested his head on his pillow.
I spent the rest of the morning in a rush, what with breakfast, kittens, and everything else. But there were three interesting tidbits to note down by the time I made it out the door.
First, Talsic stopped to check in on me before going to bed, and answered a few questions. He said that he’d neither heard nor sensed any further movement during the remainder of the night. He did, however, remember hearing someone the night before, walking outside and stopping at the kitchen door before moving on. Assuming at the time that it had just been someone out for a walk, he hadn’t thought it suspicious.
Second, while looking over the house for any kind of clue, I found everything was mostly normal (not counting the new bullet holes in the basement)—except in the dining room, where there were signs of… activity. I wasn’t sure what activity exactly, but it looked like the intruder had been measuring something, and there was a very faint X scratched in front of the fireplace.
Third, the paper we’d found. It had been torn off of a larger piece, and had only one thing written on it, a name, Theodore Bradyr, scrawled in fancy-looking ink. Unfortunately, I had no clue who that was. But more fortunately, I had resources at my cubicle that might. I took a picture of the name so I could reference the spelling, but decided to leave the paper itself at home. Wouldn’t want it falling out of my pocket and bringing up hard-hitting questions like “what is that?” or “how’d you get that?”
And so, it was time to head to CENCA and hope for another day of investigating under their watchful but, hopefully, blind eye. Not exactly a confidence-inspiring thought. But I had work to do, and so I had to go anyway.
* * *
Since winter was still deepening, every morning I woke to find the sky a little darker and every dawn a little later, and that became ever clearer as I drove up to CENCA. The empty maple trees lining the corporation’s driveway looked as cold as I felt, thin and shivering in the breeze. Walking into the building felt like getting swallowed; as warm as it was inside, the buzzing of the fluorescents highlighted how artificial the light was, tinging the morning with a feeling of unreality—as if I needed any more of that, since, now that I was in a separate familiar context, the attack from last night seemed like a dream.
I wondered if I’d get a glimpse of the real sun when I got off work. It was enough to make one pine for such simple luxuries as windows to the outside.
But here I was, and here I would remain, and here I would start uncovering answers. Or so I told myself, firmly, with a mental sensation like gritted teeth. As I settled into my cubicle and pulled out my notepad, my progress was arrested by the sticky notes on my monitor, gleaming neon in the sickly lighting.
Meeting w/ Drake Welder, 10:30am
Set up appt with Dr. Laurent
I sighed, leaning back against my desk chair. Due to my brain getting scrambled in the kerfuffle from last night, I’d forgotten about both of those. I blessed past me for the sticky notes (despite the horrors one of them promised), and moved them from monitor to desk, and tried to get back into the rhythm I’d vaguely begun.
Instead, I found myself staring down at my notepad, tapping my pen against the desk, awash in a sudden wave of disorientation. It wasn’t like I’d had that solid of a plan for my day (I’d meant to work it out when I got to my desk), but still. The unremembered mid-morning meeting was an upset, even if it was with Drake, and the addition of it cracked open a tiny fracture in my composure, allowing a burst of repressed feelings to spurt through, hot and fast and choking.
An unexpected meeting, first, and, second, I didn’t want to think about Dr. Holley Laurent more than I had to. But I did have to think about her, because I might as well have been put on probation by the Board. And then, with the attack from last night, I now had a second case that I could tell no one about, a case that had already hit a little too close to home—literally. The cut on my arm stung, and for a second the too-sharp shadows loomed over me like specters, watching, waiting to attack.
Resting my elbows on the table, my forehead falling into my hands, I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on taking four slow, long breaths. It makes sense to be stressed, I told myself. There’s a lot going on. But there’s no time to be stressed out now. Focus on what’s in front of you. Do what you have to do to clear your mind.
The snarky part of my brain suggested I bang my head against the desk until unconsciousness, but that was unlikely to do anything except both prolong the pain. Instead, I took another sticky note, and wrote:
- Meeting with Drake at 10:30.
- Schedule appointment.
- Investigate Talsic’s case
- Look into the new name that has come up
See, I said, as firmly as I could, that’s only four things. Five if you count Cal’s case, and I can’t right now, not really. This is not too much to handle.
And, as I stared at the list, sucking in air carefully through my nose, a more straightforward way to investigate the name occurred to me. It was simple. I could just say that Talsic had told me about it, and be as open about the search as I liked. Talsic had seen the name (assuming he could read English), and he also seemed invested in keeping CENCA out of our private affairs—meaning that he’d back me up if questioned. I hoped. I’d have to trust him. True, carrying a mutual secret with someone whose motivations towards secrecy were, well, secret, wasn’t what I’d call ideal. Or comfortable. But right now a half-truth was better than a full lie; it was a start, a straw to grasp at.
Fixing the sticky note to the desk space under my monitor, I turned back to my notepad, wrote down Areas of interest, underlined the title twice, and regarded the bleakly blank yellow pages for a few seconds longer.
Plus meeting later, I added to the title in parentheses, as extra security against possible memory loss.
After a few minutes, I had gotten this much down:
Areas of interest: (plus meeting later)
- Look into black market activity?
- What about kidnappings of non-humans/extra-normals (or maybe humans, too? not sure how easy it would be to search police records without contacting someone)
- Double-check recent reports of portals and/or interdimensional travel
- Go through all recent records and files for interdimensional travel in this district and maybe others? (I scratched out the “and maybe others?” adding: would need to jump through too many hoops. needs more proper justification first)
- Have there been any recent reports of illegal mithae use?
- How did Talsic get here? Connected to how Calernon got here? Both lack clear evidence about their entry site.
- Have we found Talsic’s entry site? (Check reports, I think Stanton had someone working on it?)
- Neighboring dimensions—what are the nearest ones, and could there be something in one of the records that could help us identify Silveries or “Cregdündracu?”
- Silveries? Could they be recorded in our dimension maybe under a different name?
- Name: Theodore Bradyr (a contact? informant? Mithae user?). Start with local databases
I didn’t feel quite so put together as yesterday (a depressingly low bar to have failed), and this haphazard list showed that clearly enough.
I badly wanted to put down the main tidbit buzzing in my head: Cal couldn’t remember the first interdimensional portal trip. But what little I had already written about Cal (as Calernon) felt risky enough on its own. Anyone looking at my notes could assume I was drawing parallels between the two cases, but once I started recording exclusive knowledge I’d obtained privately, there would be no avoiding suspicion.
All that aside, what did his memory gap mean? Could I use it to help solve his case? Unlikely, since investigating what had happened happened in another dimension was nearly impossible to do secretly, but what did it mean? Had he maybe been knocked out or drugged? Drugged would be more likely than knocked out, considering his lack of recollection, but who knew what could drug a dragon or even how much of a drug to use? Did maybe some slip-up or an overdose explain why he’d never thought about it again? Either way, all this pointed further towards our theory that he’d been framed, either deliberately or as a convenient patsy.
Assuming he’s telling the truth, an unhelpful part of me whispered, but I shut it down. Excessive paranoia wasn’t going to do me any favors. I’d made the decision to trust Cal, and I did, so there was no point in second-guessing things now on negligible evidence.
I had a sudden urge to start a fresh wall of sticky notes and scribbles with all the information I had about Cal’s case, but that would be too visible, too suspicious. Even if it didn’t automatically indicate collaboration with a wanted criminal, it would hardly do me any favours with either the Board or Stanton to apparently still be obsessing over the case I’d been kicked off of.
So, instead, I’d have to focus on what I had in front of me, and find some other way to keep track of the case. And it wasn’t too long until my meeting with Drake Welder.
Which, sadly, meant I should face the proverbial bull and schedule an appointment with Dr. Holley Laurent. I filled out the form and submitted a request for an appointment the following morning, putting it as early as I could manage (9:30). No point in deliberately dangling that threat over my head all day.
For now, it was time to get back to investigating dimensions—in particular Dimension 198, which had almost no information on it—as well as the Catacombs. Eventually, I’d want to look more into Dimension 188 as a whole, since if what Cal said was related to the Catacombs it’d help to know as much as possible about the area. Besides, it would ease my mind to make sure they hadn’t let any criminals loose to lurk in our woods.
Somehow, the realization that I could be as open and nosy about dimensional research as I wanted flooded me with relief. This was something I actually should be looking into, for Talsic, so I didn’t need to be looking over my shoulder the whole time—even researching the Catacombs was fair game, since it was an odd place where flotsam and jetsam from around Mithaedrir ended up, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented that I could find a clue there. And yeah, I’d need higher clearance from Stanton to access some of the files, but I wouldn’t have to invent any convoluted reason to ask. Besides, my own authorization would be enough to start out.
As a first step, I opened the logs for the Gate, to see what records we had of dimensional travel from today backward. Unlikely for our Gates to be involved, but leave no stone unturned, etc. There had been some maintenance scheduled for the portals this afternoon, but no jumps. And yesterday—
I frowned. What with the break-in and the kittens, yesterday afternoon felt like aeons ago. But no, it had definitely been yesterday afternoon that I’d seen someone going down to the Gates. Except the Gates had been “cordoned off” for the day.
Hesitantly, I refreshed the page. In a fit of mixed frustration and worry, I went so far as to restart my computer, and spent the next several minutes tapping my pen like a stuttering drumstick against the desk. But no, nothing changed. The log listed that the Gates had been cordoned off, absolutely no access allowed, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.—the restricted access would have ended an hour after I’d seen the unidentified agent.
I leaned back in my chair, finally letting my pen rest against the desk. The Gates getting shut down or going into restricted access usually called for an office-wide memo. They were, after all, the heart of CENCA’s existence, at least symbolically if not in actual practice. There were exceptions to the memo “rule”, but, all that aside, restricted access meant restricted access. Whether or not everyone knew about the Gates being temporarily shut down, there shouldn’t have been any way for anyone to go down there without CEO level clearance. And yet, I had seen someone go down to the Gates, opening the locked access port like it was his front door.
I clicked on the log entry, hoping for more information, but there was none. Just that the Gates were closed. There wasn’t even anyone listed as having given the order. Maybe somewhere in the code I could find out who had made the log entry, but I wasn’t computer savvy, and even if I was, hacking into the CENCA computer system over such a small detail would mean a death sentence for my career, if not me.
Stanton would know what this discrepancy meant. He wasn’t actually in charge of the Gates, but he might as well be since he was in charge of anyone who would go through them. I could ask him what was going on, who had gone down there, and why the Gates had been shut down without notice. But I didn’t have any proof that any of this had truly happened, except this odd log entry.
What if it was a glitch, and I was blowing this out of proportion? Insisting that deception lurked in every keystroke of the computer?
The longer my charade with Cal went on, the harder it was becoming to tell which of my knee-jerk thoughts were reasonable caution and which were panic-fueled conspiracy theory.
Pressing my lips into a firm line, I took a screenshot of the log entry and sent it to myself. If nothing else, it’d let me know that I hadn’t imagined it. And part of me was convinced that, if I did take this to Stanton, the log would show up normal, like none of this had ever happened.
I closed my eyes for a second and took stock. Approaching this find rationally, what did it really mean? All I knew was that the Gates had been quietly, almost secretly, declared off-limits, and that I had seen someone (hiding their face) go down there that same day. There could be a completely innocent explanation. Maybe it was an extension of the maintenance scheduled for today. Yes, it did feel suspicious, but that didn’t mean for sure that it was. I would take this to Stanton, but later, calmly, once I’d gotten my head back on straight. I would ask, calmly, what was going on with the log, and it would be because I was investigating whether or not the Gates and their interdimensional travel could give any clue to Talsic’s case—not just because I was paranoid.
However, even as I continued down the (rather sparse) log, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It lurked there, making every perfectly routine entry seem like a hidden menace. But beyond my own over-active imagination, there was nothing else out of the ordinary. Drake had been slated to help with maintenance a few times, which was really only tangentially related to his job—but that was because he was “the Mithae guy” and he never said no to projects. Several times, the Gates were listed as having been activated, but that was a known glitch that came up during maintenance runs. So maybe they had sent someone somewhere, or maybe it had just registered that way because the tech was sensitive and didn’t fully understand Mithae. That was another detail I could ask questions about, and soothe my startled wits. At the insistence of the mistrustful whisper in my head, and in the interest of thoroughness, I noted down where the Gates had supposedly been connected to. 198 was one, which was almost certainly a glitch because CENCA was barely present there, and our branch wasn’t involved at all. 200, 189, 199 (our dimension), 203, 195, 188, and 307.
That last one was odd, and I underscored it. I wasn’t familiar with that dimension, but it was a wildly improbable glitch. Glitches usually registered access to dimensions within 12 marks of the home dimension. 307 was over a hundred marks off. And yet, no travelers or visitors were registered, either to or from.
Something else to bring to Stanton, I decided. Or Drake, since he was more familiar with the Gates.
I also underlined two other listings: 188 and 199. 188 was the dimension where the Catacombs were, which felt oddly serendipitous considering my recent interest towards it. 199 was this dimension, which was a signature that supposedly only registered when someone came to our dimension. The glitch had taken place five weeks prior, so even if it was a real visitor, it was almost 100% not connected to Talsic—but it gave me an idea. Sometimes the glitches during maintenance were due to the tech involved, sometimes they were due to the Mithae. If a less controlled and grounded portal had glitched and flared up somewhere else, could that have sucked someone to our dimension?
A sudden memory of Cal and I’s failed portal came to mind, but I dismissed it. It hadn’t even opened, and Cal, as a dragon, would have been pretty well in control of it all. So it was highly unlikely we’d had anything to do with Talsic’s mysterious appearance—but I filed away the thought, just in case.
Questions about the Gate glitches were also wise to ask of Drake, and, conveniently, I was scheduled to talk with him in about 15 minutes.
Going back to the log, there hadn’t been any un-glitch-related, registered Gate jumps since almost a year prior. Which made sense. This branch of CENCA was not important enough to get high rates of traffic. Our job predominately consisted of quietly policing extra-normal activity in our little neighborhoods.
But before I logged out for my meeting with Drake, I scribbled down a record of another oddity. It likely didn’t mean anything, but, well, investigations were meant to be thorough, and I might as well bring as many questions to Drake as I could in one go. It would distract him from anything particularly important (such as the hypothetical third kitten), and also make things more streamlined for me. What I’d noticed amounted to this: maintenance seemed to be scheduled consistently for once a month, usually every second Friday—or so it had been since last year to about late September this year. Then the maintenance had ticked up to be almost every week, with one gap in late October. But if the Gates were doing poorly, or had suddenly deteriorated, shouldn’t there have been a notice about it? Or was it simply a different department and not my problem? But at least back at actual HQ we’d gotten stuff like that mentioned in more emails than we really needed. I knew things were more lax in this district (which was honestly a relief), but every month since I’d been here, I could remember getting an updated notice about the maintenance. So why the break in pattern?
I’d have to pull up my email history to make sure I wasn’t imposing my imagination over the facts, but I was positive I’d seen at least one notice of the kind.
On a whim, I skimmed down the almost barren Gate log for another several years, and, just as I was about to tap out, I noticed a similar cluster of maintenance sessions a little over ten years ago. Drake, Stanton, and I were both too young to have been here when that happened (unless Drake had started his career here at 16), so it was unlikely I could find anything out about that. But it was… odd. Right? Or did the pattern mean that this was normal? I wondered if Mrs. Mei had been here back then, and if she remembered anything unusual.
There had been a similar numbers of glitches during maintenance, too, with similar dimensional signatures—including another theoretical jump to D.307.
So was this all just a systematic pattern the glitches took?
Glancing at the time, it was clear that I’d have to speculate about that later. I shut down my computer, grabbed my notepad, and headed down to the Basement.
Normally, Drake kept to labs in the Research sector, with occasional forays into his office across the room from mine. Most of the heavily Mithae-focused labs were underground, since the placement seemed to have a steadying effect on the processes. It had been theorized that, since Mithae bonded best with dense materials, it was also affected by its surroundings, and being further underground made the atmosphere itself “dense,” so to speak, and so more conducive to Mithae.
I could believe it, if for no other reason than that “dense” felt like a good way to describe the Basement. Dense, damp, and chilly.
The part of the Basement I was heading towards lay under the Research and Corporate sector, in the middle of the base, and it housed the deepest layers of this branch of CENCA—like some sort of reverse pyramid. As I wound my way down the first side stair and had to start counting the doors, I was reminded that, as much as I thought I knew this building, I didn’t. The underground portion was arguably double the size of the overground building, and I almost never had cause to come down here.
In my gut stirred a dull approximation of the curiosity that used to drive me, that had pushed me into this career to begin with. It reminded me that I had all the keys to the building and Mrs. Mei wasn’t going to be back for who knew how long.
But that thought was only a whisper of old memories. I was too tired for something like that now, and, anyway, it wasn’t like I had a lot of unsupervised time to gad about, even if I wasn’t already busy. I’d have to account for all my movements to someone at some point, and I had no good reason to be down here beyond my brief meeting with Drake. “Well you see, I wanted to know what was down there” probably wouldn’t fly with the Board if they found out.
Still, I wondered how far I deeply I would know this building if I had come here first—back when I was more alive and excited about my job—instead of the highly regulated and overbearing CENCA HQ.
Similar to the overground portion of the building, the Basement felt empty and little used, like CENCA was visiting here instead of inhabiting the building—the main difference down here was that it looked even more deserted. I passed no one as I walked, keeping track of the signs and the map in my head, and I only once saw other people once, through a tinted glass window. One of the labs, I assumed, though I couldn’t understand what the ludicrously abbreviated sign meant; the people inside neither saw nor acknowledged me.
The directions were becoming ever more confusing and harder to read, following some esoteric designation system foreign to me. The idea that I’d gotten myself lost in a labyrinth of concrete and cheap carpet was steadily increasing its pressure in my head, when I saw the sign that Drake had told me to look for: R-M&T 504.
I approached the solid-looking metal door and, unsure what to else to do, rapped out a polite staccato of greeting. There was a replying clatter from beyond the door’s barrier, accompanied by a low mumble that may have been cursing, and a few seconds later the door swung open, the dim interior lighting making him glow against a shadowy background in the hallway’s flourescents.
Despite the clatter and apparent disorganization behind him, and his abrupt arrival, Drake looked neat and proper, sporting what I assumed was a stylish combination of a cream button-up shirt and tastefully de-saturated red sweater. He was only slightly older than me, and tall, taller than Stanton, but lankier and more angled. He had a sharp nose that tilted up to a point, cheekbones, and a hairstyle and beard that, while well-groomed, looked curled almost deliberately into barbs. Considering that he both saw the sun less than the rest of us and had an Irish background, he was concerningly pale, with brown freckles that stood out in sharp relief against skin you could swear was transparent. He was so pale that the silver of his small hooped earrings almost blended in to his ears under his reddish-brown hair, and he looked like he’d burn if he came under any particularly bright light-bulbs. But he had a pleasant, friendly air to him, and a solidly calm presence only slightly undercut by bright, sharp eyes.
I had to admit, it was a relief to have this meeting with him instead of any of my other co-workers. With Cyrus Croft, I felt like I needed to be constantly at attention, ready to prove I was neither lazy or undisciplined. Beside Moira, I felt childish, scruffy and ungainly. Ffloyd Martins was too unpredictable to relax around. Dr. Holley looked like she somehow knew every mistake you’d ever made since you’d been born.
Mrs. Mei and Stanton, of course, were different from the others in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.
But Drake was… just a guy. He was a comforting mix of awkward and chill, seemed genuinely interested in any and every conversation, and had an endless passion about Mithae that felt inspiring—as if his enthusiasm could be catching. We weren’t friends, really, but, as a further point in his favor, he never acted as though he held that against me. So as much the threats and questions of all the past month hung heavy over my head, I could at least say that this wouldn’t be as terrible as it could have been. Probably.
Of course, this also meant I’d be lying to yet another person I held in high regard.
Oblivious the churning in my head and the unsettled breakfast in my gut, Drake smiled and stood aside for me to enter. I did so with a nod of gratitude.
“Welcome to the underworld,” he said with an ironic chuckle, and closed the door behind me.
To be continued…