Inside the room—which was larger than I had assumed—the fluorescence held more stable than it had in the corridors, and washed the tables, desks, and workbenches with white. Here, though, some enterprising scientist had set up a scattered assortment of lamps, adding a softer touch of yellow to the glare. Scraps of metal in varying hues and stages of shininess lay scattered throughout, along with pens and styluses, humming bits of rewrites, incomprehensible sketches and diagrams, stacks of forms and files, bits of paper and sticky notes affixed to every available surface. On one wall was a cork-board, with what looked like chores and assignments outlined in neat handwriting—a clear space in a swamp of competing lists, notes, drawings, and plans.
It was safe to say that I understood nothing in the room.
Drake waved me further in, plunging into the labyrinth without hesitation. I caught a few glimpses of files as I passed: “Mithecal Resonance Enhancement,” “Secure Telelesche Foundations,” “Mithetech Synergistic Stabilizer” (which had a hand-scrawled note beside it that said “AKA, the Blender,” complete with sparkles), and other such unfamiliar phrases. Drake completed his trek beside a wooden table along the furthest wall, heaped with much of the same style of odds and ends as the rest of the room.
The great bulk of this table, though, was taken up by a heavy-looking device of some kind of metallic alloy, highlighted oddly where different metals took precedence in a purer form. It was shaped more or less like a flying saucer, but with a flat base, and the circular middle was raised up in a claw-like structure of gears and pulleys that slowly rotated it. On closer inspection, the middle wasn’t circular at all, but made up of tiny angles and planes and divots. Every inch of it was covered in a rewrites so fine I couldn’t distinguish any individual lines until I was within a foot of it. They glowed and sparkled in a variety of golds, reds, and oranges.
The claw system was hooked up to a monitor with lines of buttons, dials, and what looked like a Mithae keyboard, each key corresponding to a rewrite stroke. I wasn’t sure how that worked, since, as far as high school mithaelogy had taught me, the act of drawing the strokes was itself part of the magic. But then again, I wasn’t an expert. Maybe the keyboard was just to create a template that could be gone over late, or maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about.
“I’m assuming this is the device I’ve been hearing about,” I said.
Drake nodded, patting it with the obvious air of a parent (unsuccessfully) trying to hide their pride for their child. “We’re still naming it, but I’m partial to ‘the Deprehender.’ It’s from a Latin word,” he added upon seeing my blank expression. “We collectively decided that ‘the All-Seeing Eye’ was a little too creepy.” He winked at me.
“Ha, yeah, I can see why,” I replied in an admirably normal tone. “It doesn’t really see, though, does it?” That is what I’d been given to understand, and I resisted the urge to cross my fingers as I waited for Drake to respond. If I was wrong about that tiny little detail, I might as well turn myself in now.
“No, not really,” he replied, beaming, switching on the monitor and waiting for it to power up. “It doesn’t capture image readings, or sounds, or whatever. It was a pretty complicated process to figure out, but we managed to simultaneously trim down and increase its capacity with some finagling and mithaelongating. So now you could say that it mostly just detects anomalies. But only sort of. It’s hard to explain. Moira said I might as well be talking full-on in ancient Greek when I really get into the details, so I’ll try and spare you.” He chuckled, rubbing one of the claw arms. “The short of it is that once we calibrate this puppy to adapt to an area, within supplementary parameters, it will have a day or two, at worst three—we’re still getting exact data—to measure what normal movement and heat signatures and sounds and all that are. It’s kind of like… uh… sonar, in how it can create a map of sorts. But also it’s not that at all. You see, it’s mostly reliant on sensing movement, but there are other factors, too, like sound. And really abnormal temperature changes, but that sensor is more sensitive, so due to its touchiness it’s less reliable.”
I let the excited torrent of words wash over me, and fumbled around for the basic meaning of it. “So it’s not going to be watching me so much as it’s going to just send alerts if I’m being really different from normal?” I hazarded. “Like if I stop moving for too long it might call an ambulance, in a manner of speaking? Or call the police if there’s more movement from more people than normal during the night?”
“Yeah, kind of. But not exactly. But that could be a helpful way to view it for now. We’re still working on it, too, and this is a brand new prototype, so it is on a pretty hair-trigger alarm system right now. You don’t have any rats in your walls, do you?”
Ah yes, wonderful. An overly-touchy motion sensor, determined to report everything it saw to the authorities—just what my house had been needing. “Rats? None that I know of.” Maybe I could use this to my advantage? Make up some rats later that had somehow been missed, call the accuracy of this thing into question? But if I skewed data around too much, there was a higher chance they’d decide something was off with my prototype and follow up with more poking and prodding.
Drake chuckled. “Well, now you’ll know if you do. We’re working on figuring out a way to differentiate menial stuff like rats from actual, significant deviations, but we haven’t done a lot of field testing yet. Plus, there has been a lot of discussion about whether or not it would be more helpful to know all of those tiny details. You know how the team can get.”
I did not, in fact; I rarely interacted with the scientists and mithecists—which was surprising, in a way, considering the Research program was our district’s one claim to fame. But I was aware of office politics, both from past experiences and listening to other people talk. “Ah, yeah. Bet extra interference doesn’t help, from, y’know.” I pointed ceiling-ward to indicate the higher-ups. If they had enough time to make me go to therapy, I couldn’t imagine them keeping their fingers out of Research.
Drake stopped his fiddling for a second, thinking, before smiling back at me. “Can’t tell which is worse, come to think of it—the team, or the outside meddlers.”
“Alas, the joys of the bureaucracy.”
“Will they never cease,” he replied with a chuckle.
I looked around the room, trying to figure out how to start a natural and unsuspicious conversation geared towards my own inquiries, or whether I should save my questions about portal maintenance until after the motion sensor was taken care of.
“You said you have three cats now, right?” he said, typing something.
“Kittens, yeah,” I replied, snapping back to attention. “I’m still deciding if I’ll keep them, but they’ll be with me for a bit, I think. Things are a bit busy right now, and I want to do more research on where I’d take them if I didn’t keep them.” I did like the kittens, more than I thought I would, but I still didn’t know if it would be a good idea to keep them.
Drake kept typing away. “You should ask Moira about all that. She can’t have a cat right now because of lease stuff or something, but she’s talked about getting one. She seems to like them a lot and knows a lot about them, too.”
“Good to know,” I said, hoping she’d never find out about the kittens. Fewer people knowing about them meant fewer people asking awkward questions, like “can I see all three together in the same room.”
“And then there’s that rocky looking guy, right? I don’t know anything about it, myself, but rumor says that he refused to stay in the Guesthouse.”
“Yeah,” I said. I handed him the note I’d made of Talsic’s size and weight, taken from his file. I’d done that yesterday, thankfully, which meant I still had time to figure out how to replace the stolen file without it being immediately obvious I’d lost it. I didn’t know if there was any way to track how many copies had been made of a file, so hypothetically I should be fine to just print off a second copy on the office printer. But what if someone caught me doing it? It would be suspicious, and losing potentially sensitive information (such as a case file) was frowned upon by everyone. There was also the consideration that—
“What age are the kittens, and what breed?” Drake asked. He’d been typing away diligently, oblivious of how my mind had spiraled.
Focus on one thing at a time, I told myself sternly. “Um. I don’t know. They can take solid-ish food, like tuna. And they’re… fluffy. I don’t know if that helps.”
Drake glanced at me sideways. “You haven’t just been feeding them tuna, have you?”
I flushed. That had been my first thought on getting them home, but it’d been Talsic, actually, who had warned against it. “No, I looked up a few homemade kitten food recipes and I’ve been trying out a few things. I, uh, haven’t gone out shopping in a bit, so since I’ll need to go soon, anyway, I thought I’d get food then.”
Drake raised an eyebrow.
“I cross-referenced my sources to make sure the homemade food was still safe and nutritious for them,” I said defensively, crossing my arms. “And they should be fine for at least a few days. And, anyway, I still need to research what food to buy them, since I don’t know enough about cats to just start buying things willy-nilly.”
He smiled like he was trying not to laugh. “You’ve never had pets before, have you?”
“No, not really. Well, I mean, just no. I haven’t.” Considering Cal was a sapient dragon who could help support himself, and was technically my roommate, I didn’t think he counted. “But to answer your relevant questions—” he gave an amused snort—”they’re like, this big—” I gestured with my hands—”and fluffy. I couldn’t tell what breed they were.” I suspected they were “Ragamuffins” from a quick internet search, but I was not confident enough to say that out loud.
Maybe a vet could tell me? Which reminded me that I needed to take them to the vet. But the vet records would say there were only two kittens, so I’d have to wait until reality and records could line up.
Apparently satisfied enough with my loose measurements, Drake twisted a couple of dials and tapped at the keyboard. “Where did you even get them? I didn’t know you were in the market for pets.”
“I didn’t, either. Mrs. Mei found them in the Basement, so she asked me to take them.” I didn’t want to go into any further detail, and risk getting Mrs. Mei in trouble. Besides, what I’d said was true enough.
“Mrs. Mei?”
“One of the janitors.”
“Ah.”
Maybe this was the chance I’d been waiting for. I knew the transition would be awkward as soon as I opened my mouth, but I focused on a coil of wire on the table and plunged ahead anyway. “So, um, yeah. Mrs. Mei left them for me to pick up near where she keeps her supplies. Which meant I ended up seeing something a little odd happening? Since where the kittens were led me, like, right by the Gates.”
I was trying to be subtle, I really was, but I couldn’t help watching him with the intensity of a rabbit watching a fox. And so I caught it: the faintest widening of eyes, an involuntary, sideways flick of his gaze—followed immediately by an expletive and a glitch fluttering across the device’s screen.
My insides flip-flopped, like someone had reached down my throat and pulled my stomach inside out.
“Hold on,” Drake said, tensing, “I messed up some numbers. This will take a second to fix.”
No. No way. No. Not a chance.
The reaction didn’t—couldn’t—mean anything. Of course he had glanced at me; it was a natural response to me mentioning something he was involved in. And it was perfectly reasonable to assume he could make some simple mistake in his calibrations—this device was super complicated, and I was distracting him.
That’s all there was to it.
Besides, he couldn’t have been the hooded figure I saw. He was too tall. Right? I summoned the memory to mind, but I couldn’t decide if my impression of the figure being hunched was a new, added detail, or something that had been obvious from the beginning.
“Got it,” he said quickly, like he suddenly wanted this task to be done. “So, three kittens, still small, still young. Lots of variables, but I think I got something workable up and going. Is Talsic—I mean, the silverie guy—is he very active?”
Looking down, I twisted part of the wire coil around my finger so tightly the flesh around it went white, forcing my shoulders to relax. There was nothing weird about him knowing Talsic’s name, or that he was a silverie. Of course there wasn’t. Drake was good friends with Moira, so she’d probably told him. And yeah, he’d called Talsic ‘that rocky looking guy’ earlier, but that didn’t mean he could never call him anything else.
I was making a blizzard out of a drifting snowflake, and giving myself nausea in the process.
“I’m not sure,” I said, words spilling out of a part of my brain I wasn’t fully paying attention to. “Every time I’ve interacted with him, he’s been pretty calm and chill. But he gives me the impression of a fighter, and someone who’s deliberate about what they do. So my guess is that he probably exercises or trains or something to stay fit. Not sure when, though. He’s nocturnal, so probably at night. But maybe not? I’m a light sleeper, so if he has been training at night, he’s at least not been loud enough to wake me up. I can at least say he’s not the type to throw parties.”
I sucked in a quiet, long breath. It was time to chill out and get the conversation back to where I wanted.
“Noted.” Drake said, leaning in to hover uncomfortably close over the interface. “I can work with that. What are your hours like? I mean, when do you leave and come back to your house?”
Sounds like a great question if you’re a burglar, I thought, unhelpfully remembering the intruders. “Oh, um. I leave the house at about 7:30—sometimes 7, if I want to get an earlier start to the day. And then I get back at around 5 or 5:30. But it can vary, depending on case-loads and such. You know how this job doesn’t always have the most regular hours.”
“True.”
“Which reminds me,” I said, jumping in before he could ask his next question. “I noticed something else weird, on a different day.”
“Yeah?” He said carefully. I didn’t like that carefulness. What was he being careful about?
“Well, I was checking on something related to the Gates—I’m trying to figure out some portal patterns for a case—but when I looked up the log, I found out that they were apparently shut down for maintenance or something? Which, I suppose it’s not that weird, I just thought it was, though, because don’t we usually we get memos about stuff like that?”
“Huh.” He was frowning slightly at the display.
“I just thought it was weird,” I repeated, faltering, unsure of how to get at the points I wanted to make. “Say, you help out with maintaining the Gates, right? Was there some kind of problem with them?”
“Oh, that,” he waved his hand dismissively, and pulled it back down quickly—I didn’t have time to really pay attention, but I got the impression that his hand was shaking, slightly. “Just routine stuff. You know. Making sure everything is up to code and all. I guess they just forgot to send out an email.”
“But who is they, exactly?” I replied, adding in a quick laugh to offset my sudden vehemence. “I mean, that is, I’ve always wondered who organizes that kind of thing, and there weren’t really any indications on the log. Not that I was looking that hard,” I added, hoping I didn’t sound like I was lying, “It’s just something I’ve noticed comes up now and again in this work, y’know? It’s always some nebulous ‘they’ who does or decides things, it seems. I just thought it was kind of interesting.”
I really can’t keep using the same phrase over and over, I thought. If he’s paying attention, then he knows I have something to hide, too.
“Oh. Um, you know.” He looked over his shoulder, not quite at me, then jerked a hand towards the building above us. “The people in Corporate. They’re the ones making sure things keep up with the other districts and all. I don’t think there’s any one person that oversees that kind of thing.”
“Ah, that makes sense,” I said. I rummaged around in my brain, trying to find some way to continue this line of questioning without sounding suspicious, overly eager. “I think I was just paying more attention than normal because I could have sworn I saw someone going down to the Gates while I was looking for the kittens.” I shrugged deliberately, poking again at the wire. “But that doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Not if it was off-limits,” he said, leaning forward, making a show of examining the Deprehender-whatsit. “You wouldn’t even have been able to get down there without clearance from someone on the Board.”
“Right, right, right,” I replied, as if I’d just been reminded of something obvious. “So I guess I was wrong then. Must have been a different door. Not the one to the Gates.” Despite said door bearing all the labels and signage for the Gates.
“We should really finish up,” he said. “I have other projects to get to.”
Again, that roiling feeling in my gut. This was more brusque than anything I’d ever heard from him. But I had to be just projecting my own insecurities.
“Oh, true. What else are you working on?”
After all, it’s not like I knew him that well. And he was busy. He didn’t need to answer every single one of my prying questions. I was just blowing this out of proportion.
“Portal stabilization,” he said. “For the Gates.”
I waited for more. When he didn’t elaborate, I said: “oh, haha, topical. What angle are you working? More Mithae? More tech?”
“It’s a bit convoluted to get into right now,” he replied, quiet.
I stared, still waiting.
But that was it. No excitement, no wordy overview of something I could barely keep up with. Just nine, dismissive words.
He looked over at me for the first time since I’d started on this topic, and I dropped my face back into a neutral mask. “You look a bit out of it. You alright?”
I managed a tight smile. “Fine, just tired. It’s been a long week.”
“When hasn’t it been,” he said with a chuckle—a tired, ironic sound. Like I’d placed some enormous weight on him.
For a moment, I wanted to pat his shoulder in sympathy, because I knew how much it sucked to need to keep secrets, and I could understand the unwelcome weight of it all. Which was an insane impulse. If he was keeping secrets, who for, and why?
But we were in an organization that traded on secrets. Surely this was normal?
And yet, he didn’t seem simply… reticent. He wasn’t acting like he had classified information he couldn’t tell me—if that were the chase, he would have just told me so, and I would have stopped asking questions.
“So I’m guessing that the portal stabilization is for whatever’s up with the Gates?” I asked.
He just shrugged. “More or less. It’s a commission of sorts. Now, when you’re at home, do you tend to be active?”
“Sometimes,” I said, sliding into blank, automatic responses. “And I don’t sleep well all the time, so sometimes I’ll be up and doing things at weird hours. I ended up stress cleaning the other night,” I offered, a more human tidbit that I hoped would help put him back at ease. It wouldn’t be right to alienate a potential friend due to nothing more than wild suspicions. And if he wasn’t a friend, I didn’t want him paying too much attention to me.
“Alright,” was all he said. “Exercise?”
“Workouts either in the morning or the evening, depending on what I’m feeling like,” I replied. I had fallen out of that habit recently, but maybe this could get me back into it. After all, I needed to be fit and ready for anything, considering the weird directions everything had taken lately. And I knew I had a punching bag that I’d been meaning to dig out for months.
“Do you keep weapons?”
“Nothing big,” I said. “Just the Rimloc and a few other odds and ends, like knives. Bigger stuff, and most gun-type weapons, I pretty much only use here.” Speaking of which, I really needed to check in on the armory and gun ranges. That was, after all, part of my actual job. “I don’t shoot them around the house, though, so if that happens than your device can definitely mark that at as abnormal.”
That was true, but as soon as it left my mouth I regretted it. What if there was another intruder?
Ah well. One crisis at a time.
“Any other hobbies I should know about?” he asked, then, with a faint smile: “If you have a tendency to light grease fires in the kitchen, we should also know that.”
My shoulders relaxed, slightly. A joke. He was either trying to go back to business as usual, or offering a tentative olive branch. Maybe both. “I don’t think there’s anything too active or disruptive. No jumping on the beds, and I’ll have you know that I haven’t accidentally started a fire in ages.”
“I don’t dare ask what fires you’ve started intentionally. Loud music?”
I thought wistfully of having a piano. “No.” If I did ever get one, it would likely be ages after this whole thing had either blown over or up.
He tapped away for a while longer. “Okay, then, I think that should be the bulk of what I needed to know. I’ll finish calibrating the rest of it all this afternoon. You can come get it after work.” He paused, considering the wall with blank eyes before he shook his head. “Scratch that. I’ll bring it up to the office for you.”
“Great, thanks,” I said, swallowing the knee-jerk thought that he was keeping me out of the Basement. “If that’s it, then, should I make my way out?”
“Yeah, sure.” He turned, and offered a chuckle that seemed more reminiscent of his normal self. “If you can manage your way through all this, that is.”
“I think I can see the door,” I replied lightly, thinking better of adding a wink at the end. Didn’t want to force the camaraderie.
He nodded, and turned back to the Deprehender.
It was probably a good sign that he wasn’t insisting on supervising my every move, right? Or was he just trying that hard to not talk to me?
I turned away and shoved my hands in my pockets, fingers curling around the phone awkwardly wedged in my too-small pocket.
And then, I had a terrible idea. Clenching my fingers tighter around the phone, I gave Drake one last smile and nod (despite his turned back) and headed out. Before I could think any further about what I was really doing, I slipped it out of my pocket, on the side opposite Drake, and thumbed open the camera.
It was easy to settle on a perfectly normal pace—not too hurried, not too casual. After all, it was a skill I’d honed since childhood. And, thankfully, my phone was nowhere near as laggy as my old one had been. A few moments later, I had all the pictures I wanted. Several taken of different sides of the room, and an attempted close-up of the cork board (despite suspecting it would be illegible). Gnawing on my lip and keeping my breathing under control, I kept my other hand in my free pocket so that I wouldn’t try and wipe the sweat off my palms. As I passed the table holding all the papers and files, I slowed to a halt, leaning close enough to snap several rapid-fire pictures before sneaking my phone back into my pocket.
I was so, so, so getting fired if anyone ever found out.
“Everything alright?” Drake asked, as I guessed he would.
I made a subtle show of looking up from the table, despite the light-headed dizziness making the world around me float. “Hmm? Oh, yeah, I caught a glimpse of these earlier and just thought they were interesting. Like, you guys work in such a different sphere, it’s kind of, well, magical. I could never understand it but it’s still fascinating. Words like ‘tel-lel-esche’, like, what does that even mean?”
I forced myself not to move, not to gesticulate wildly, even as my blood thrummed frantically through every vein.
“Oh, that’s kind of related to the stabilization thing,” he said, waving his hand in an over-the-top gesture, similar to the ones I had just avoided. “Long-distance meeting-place thingamabob. The Mithae equivalent of a video call, you could say. But it’s still a really new idea. Speaking of which, I am kind of busy, so if you wouldn’t mind—”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” I said, disengaging from the table. “Sorry, just got distracted.”
“Ha, ha, no worries,” he replied—making me feel like there were, in fact, a lot of worries. “Have fun in the sunlit world up above.”
“If I ever find a window, I’ll let you know,” I quipped back, hoping to leave on a friendly note, and stepped through the door.
The only reason I didn’t collapse against the door-frame, giving in to the nervous tension trembling through my legs, was that I knew the hallways had cameras. Most labs didn’t, due to something about Mithae and tech and all that, but I had no such luxury here.
So, again, relying on old habits, I turned and walked in a marvelously regular stride towards the exits, and out into the more familiar world of CENCA’s overground base.
Of course, as I write this now, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed a little bit longer, poked around a bit more. Would anything have changed, if I had known what lay only a few rooms down the hall? But that’s a fruitless thought. Better to think about what’s already in front of me.
I came up out of the Basement somewhere along the edge of the Research sector, and wavered between diving further in, towards the library, or heading back to my desk to regroup. Which would look more normal? If someone was watching, what would they expect?
Before I could properly decide, my phone dinged. I looked down to see an alarm I’d set myself: “Text your sister your new phone number.“
Shoot.
I’d completely forgotten about that.
Part of me wanted to jam my phone into my pocket and forget I’d ever had a sister, both for my own sanity and for the sake of the mission, but I knew what Cal would say. I snoozed the alarm, sighed, and turned towards the Field Work sector and the privacy of my cubicle. Seems my mind was made up for me.
When I got back to my desk, I sank down in my chair, and the alarm I’d snoozed immediately went off.
Gritting my teeth, reminding myself that this was for the long-term good of both of us, and that she was the only family I had left, I opened the messaging app, typed in her phone number, and wrote out a text before I could squirm my way out of it.
[Hey, this is Jeanne. Sorry if you’ve sent me something over the past few days and I haven’t replied. My phone broke and I had to get a new number—which is the one I’m texting you from now. Let me know if you’re still interested in calling or meeting up or whatever sounds good]
I hesitated over the send button, tempted to obsessively read the text over and over to make sure it sounded… something. Natural, maybe? Friendly? “Correct”?
I really don’t have time for this right now, I thought, mind flitting back to Drake’s lab. But then again, when will I? After all, I’d already been putting this off attempt at re-connection for several years.
I took a deep breath, pressed “send,” closed the phone, and flopped my head down on my desk. As far as I had been able to find out, I was safe from cameras in my cubicle, but even if I wasn’t, dealing with potentially emotional family situations would give me enough plausible deniability for acting tired. And, really, having to text my sister now was just the distracting cherry on top of a whole cake of stress.
For several minutes, I didn’t move, curling my arms around my head and breathing slowly, deliberately, deeply, seeking to relax the tension-taut muscles all over my body.
Naturally, my thoughts circled around the events of this morning.
I wasn’t sure how to process Drake’s odd behaviour. True, it wasn’t anything terribly drastic, and I was certainly being paranoid, but I couldn’t help but think how weird it had been to have somehow flipped a switch, and to have watched him freeze over in a single moment. That hadn’t just been my imagination. Right? But how suspicious was this all, really?
Then, of course, there were the photos.
I buried my face further into my arms, hiding a sudden flare of embarrassment. What had I been thinking? It was such a breach of policy and confidentiality that I could hardly believe I’d actually done it. And yet… it had been such a perfect opportunity. If everything was above-board in there, well and good, no harm done as long as no one found out about it later. But if there was something strange going on, it was unlikely I could manufacture any better circumstance for snooping. High risk, high reward.
All it took was inching my neck a little further onto the chopping block.
On one hand, it wasn’t like my regular day-to-day activities (such as eating breakfast with a fugitive) would get me a round of applause from the Board; on the other, all the proof of that I kept at home, out of their sight. I tried to avoid making a habit out of sauntering around with damning evidence in my pocket.
So, ultimately, it wasn’t helpful to spin myself in circles about why I’d done what I’d done. I knew why, even if it scared me. What I needed was action, now. Find a way to keep the evidence while removing it from any form of detection.
I didn’t want to look at any of it on my work computer for fear of being somehow monitored, and I didn’t have any flashdrives with me anyway. After debating for a while, I figured the best I could do at the moment was to send the pictures to my personal email, delete the sent email (and the pictures off my phone), and then once I’d downloaded them on my own laptop back at home, I could put them on a pendrive or something of the kind there. I doubted my plan would be touted in history books as the perfect cover, but it would at least remove immediate danger of casual discovery. And if someone was actively digging for dirt on me—well, that would mean I was stuck with other, bigger problems.
In a few minutes the plan had been fully carried out, which left me alone with my thoughts to sift through a stack of looming responsibilities and decide what to do next.
I might be insane. It wasn’t like someone else at CENCA keeping secrets was a matter of national security. I mean, it was, but usually that was due to the contents of the secrets and not the fact that there were secrets.
A notification popped up, telling me I’d got a new email.
For a moment I panicked, thinking I’d sent the photos to the wrong email, but I caught the address and breathed a quiet sigh of relief. It was a reply to my request for information from the Appalachian district. Uncommonly fast response time of them, really. Either some new intern had been really enthusiastic about my questions, or it was a really slow day over there. Or maybe both. Who knew, really.
Rolling my shoulders to loosen some of the tension, I sat up straight, flipped to a new page on my notepad, and opened the email.
After a lot of filled out forms and notes of who was saying this and why and polite greetings, etc., etc., I found the part that I’d been looking for:
“After searching several times through our records and consulting various experts on the extra-normals of the area, we have not been able to find a match to either the name “silverie” (except as an adjective for various other extra-normals, in ways that did not seem relevant—e.g., the “silvery” luster of a wolf-wild’s coat), or the description as you put it forward. We used several local databases as well as national ones, and consulted our library of written sources, as well as checking in with a few repositories of oral traditions. There has been nothing conclusive, and while several people suggested looking into some rock-based extra-normals, none of our resources found even close matches to Talsic Feldspar’s portrait.”
I let my shoulders slump as I heaved a long sigh. Well, then, an unfortunate dead end, and my guess had been wrong: Talsic wasn’t from the Appalachians. I almost clicked away, but as I scrolled down, I found a postscript at the bottom, almost as an after-thought.
“One expert theorized a small possibility of a connection between this silverie and ancient legends from the Appalachia area, concerning ‘the moon-eyed people.’ There is no evidence that such a people truly existed in our dimension, and the original sources that have been recorded are not considered credible, so it was thought to be largely irrelevant to your request. The hypothesis mostly arose from the way this extra-normal’s eyes were described, so, for the sake of completeness, we included this addendum and attached information on what little is known of the moon-eyed myths.”
Huh.
My pen hovered over my notepad, mirroring my uncertainty of whether this was helpful information or not. Did that mean that silveries were from a different dimension, and that possibly older interactions between dimensions had given rise to current myths? Or was I just making up connections?
Still, for the sake of completeness, I jotted the new info down. Additionally, I wrote “moon-eyed people/unconfirmed myths from Appalachia” on a sticky note, and stuck in on the open part of my cubicle wall, and then added another one beside it that said “silveries unknown in this dimension’s Appalachian mountains.”
The email’s attached file briefly described the appearance of the moon-eyed-people, which was similar to Talsic mostly in that they featured large, moon-like eyes, and short frames. But there was no mention of horns. They were rumored to have been in competition with the local Cherokee population, who apparently drove them away and underground. There was also some debate about their real origins coming from Welsh travelers from long ago.
And that was… pretty much it.
I pushed myself back from the desk, leaning back in my chair with a creak of wood. How well could this be classified as a lead? Was it worth gathering more information on?
Well, I did need to head to the Research sector anyway, so I might as well add it to the list.
Or should I go ahead and talk to Stanton?
No, I decided. Better to have my thoughts more formulated and my notes better organized.
So, Research first. But before then, there was one more preliminary check I could run from my computer.
Opening up the main database, I typed in the name I’d acquired from the break-in: Theodore Bradyr.
And found nothing.
Frowning, I double-checked the spelling from the picture on my phone. No, I’d gotten it right. And this was a database that we shared with the police and the government, so it should be able to access information on pretty much anyone. Of course, I’d need a warrant to look up anything beyond the basics, but someone’s name should be public enough information to be listed here.
Maybe the intruder had gotten the spelling wrong?
Typing in Bradyr with an i (Bradir) didn’t reveal any results, either, and neither did Bradar, Braydr, or any other variation I tried. Same with Theadore, Theodor, Theedor, and anything else I could think of without just changing it into a different name. Then, I double-checked every other database I had access to, but still no results. I even tried several different online search engines, but the most I got were social media pages belonging to people with very different names.
As far as I could find, no one by the name of Theodore Bradyr had ever existed. Not even in obituaries.
So either this man had had his name horribly mangled during transmission, did not actually exist, or had had his existence forcibly scrubbed from the world.
I groaned, rubbing my temples despairingly. None of the above were helpful options. At best, this was a simple dead end. At worst, this was a whole other ugly rabbit hole to dig into.
The otheroption was that it was someone from the multiverse, but if so, where would I even start? Communication between dimensions was difficult, hence why every dimension tended to stay in their own lane. Even CENCA, despite their common connections, had every dimension almost completely independent from every other dimension. After all, if one dimension decided to do something different from the others, what was realistically going to happen? Was a Board member from three dimensions over going to drop by and give them a stern talking-to?
True, “daughter” organizations still responded to and cooperated with their “parent,” but even that was only until the other dimension had enough resources to stand on their own. Most people thought the sooner the separation happened, the better, since it was an enormous drain on the parent corporation—as I knew from the Canadian branch of CENCA’s current sponsorship of an infant CENCA in D.198.
So, if I wanted to go pour some of CENCA’s precious assets down the sink, I’d need a really, really good reason—not to mention a renewed License for Interdimensional Travel, which was a whole minefield of an issue just by itself. Batting my eyelashes and telling the Board: “well, you see, my extra-normal guest mentioned this name, and I definitely didn’t find it in any other suspicious way, so if you don’t mind, can I go bother every other dimension in the area for a while?” wasn’t going to cut it.
If anyone wanted any kind of interdimensional operation to run long-term, it needed backing from a gargantuanly powerful source—someone like the Dragon Emperor that Cal was running from.
Which was a fantastic reminder of who we’d ultimately have to outwit.
Between annoyance and resignation, I scribbled the name of Theodore Bradyr on a sticky note, underlining it and surrounding it with question marks, and stuck it to my wall next to the scribbles about the moon-eyed legends. Sometimes even dead ends got a second life, so might as well keep the memories around.
But now with that new impasse reached, it was time for the Research Sector. Then, collect the Deprehender from Drake, and then head home.
An ending to the day that felt impossibly far away.
Twirling my pen, I got ready for another list, and wondered if anyone would mind if I took a nap at my desk, instead. With a shake of my shoulders, I took a deep breath, collected an extra notepad, and headed back to Research.
At least there it should be peaceful, quiet, and free from suspicious activity. A girl could dream, anyway.
To be continued…