---
Malkuth checked her list.
It was a good list. She had been very careful with it. Every line was written in her neatest hand, and every line had a little box beside it, and every box she'd already ticked had a tick in it that was straight and firm and exactly the same size as the others.
Day 7.
Cake (for the team!! Employee 002's idea).
E.G.O. gear (four sets, the Manager approved it, it's allowed now).
Employee 001, Captain.
Captain's device (give to 001, explain it PROPERLY).
(+ the armband!! the cursive one)
Be on time.
She read it once, from the top to the bottom. Then she read it again, because the first time didn't count if she'd been excited while she read it, and she had been. Then she read it a third time, because on the second time she'd noticed she had written Captain with a slightly wobbly C, and she wanted to see if the wobble was really there or if she'd imagined it.
It was really there.
She did not rewrite it. She thought about it very hard, and then she did not, and she was proud of herself for that.
She read the list a fourth time.
It wasn't that she didn't trust it. She trusted it more than anything. The list was the one thing on her side of the screens that never changed unless she changed it, and that never forgot, and that never looked at her the way Angela's voice sometimes sounded like it was looking at her. If something was on the list, it would happen. If it wasn't on the list, it might not. That was the whole reason for having one.
But a list was only as good as the one reading it. And she had been, on occasion, in the past, a little bit of a problem Sephirah.
So she checked.
On the first morning, she had checked her list once more than she needed to, just to be sure, and she had been one minute late. It had been a very small list, then. Welcome the Manager. Welcome Employee 001. She had written Don't be late at the bottom afterward, so she would remember.
On the second morning, there had been one more line on the list. One more line meant one more thing she could forget, so she had checked it one more time. Two minutes.
That had seemed fair.
It had kept seeming fair, every morning, all week. A new employee. A new Abnormality. A new rule about the fairies, underlined twice. Every day the list grew by a line, and every day she checked it one more time than the day before, because every day there was one more thing she couldn't bear to get wrong.
She knew. She wasn't stupid. She could count.
She read the list a fifth time.
"Four minutes," Angela had said, on Day 4. "Noted."
"Five minutes. Noted."
"Six minutes. This will be reported to the Manager."
The Manager hadn't said anything to her about it. Not yesterday, and not at the end of the day, either. He had only given his orders, and she had passed them on, and at the end of the day he'd sent her a short message about cake that had made her so happy she had to write it down twice.
She didn't know if that meant he wasn't angry, or if it meant he was saving it.
She read the list a sixth time, and on the sixth time, her eyes caught on the line at the bottom. Be on time. She'd written it last night. She'd underlined it.
And then she was reading it a seventh time, before she'd even decided to, and somewhere in the middle of the seventh time she realized the clock had already moved, and all of her screens came on at once in a bright yellow rush, and she was already talking before the picture had finished settling.
"Good morning, Control Team!"
. . .
"Seven minutes," said Angela.
Malkuth's smile stayed exactly where it was. She'd practiced that.
"Operations began seven minutes ago, Malkuth. This makes seven consecutive days. The Manager has been informed."
"I know," said Malkuth, very brightly, on every screen in the Main Room. "I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
There was a pause from the speaker. It wasn't long. It didn't need to be.
"Noted," said Angela.
Malkuth held her smile for one more second. Then she looked down at her clipboard, and found the first unticked box, and for the first time all morning, she let herself feel what was written next to it.
Cake.
She looked back up at her team, all four of them, waiting on the bench in front of her screens. Employee 002 was practically vibrating.
Her smile became a real one.
---
Outis had been awake for an hour when Polites knocked.
"Morning!" came through the wall, and then, a second later, through the door. "Day seven! That's a whole week, Outis! A whole entire week!"
"I know," said Outis.
"Do you think she remembered? About the cake? She wrote it on her list, so she must have, right? She said she'd write it on her list and she did, I heard her..."
"She remembered."
"How do you know?"
Outis looked at the white tile, and the red light in the corner of the ceiling, and the paper cup on the shelf with the little white pill still in it, exactly where it had been left.
"She writes everything down," he said.
He'd slept. Actually slept, for the first time since the morning of Day 6, all three of them. He didn't know if it was the System's space or the crying or just that his body had finally decided it had had enough. But he'd woken up with something in his chest that felt lighter than it had any right to, and his hand had gone straight to his forehead, and the crown was still there.
Thin and rough and dry. Almost weightless. He hadn't dreamed it.
. . .
The elevator was already occupied when it opened for them.
"Control!" said James, from the back corner. He looked exactly as rumpled as he had yesterday, pen behind his ear, sleeves rolled, freckles and all. "Good morning. Don't mind us, I pressed the wrong button."
"You pressed it on purpose," said the woman beside him.
She was about James's age, maybe a little younger. Straight pale hair tied back so tightly it looked painful, a purple suit pressed so sharp it could have cut paper, her tie dead center, her purple "Y" armband exactly level. She held a clipboard against her chest the way some people held shields. She was looking at the elevator buttons as if they had personally disappointed her.
"I pressed it with intent," James corrected. "Which is different. Everybody, this is Ilse. She started this morning. Ilse, this is Control. That's Outis, he hits things very hard, and that's Polites, he says hello first..."
"Hello!" said Polites.
"...and the tall one asleep against the wall is Elpenor, and the one looking at the exits is Eurylochus. Don't take it personally. He looks at everyone's exits."
Ilse inclined her head precisely one centimeter. "Good morning."
"Ilse got the bird," James said, with enormous satisfaction, as the doors slid shut and the elevator hummed. "The new one. Came in this morning."
"O-02-56," said Ilse.
"It's a bird."
"It is designated O-02-56. We don't know what it is yet."
"It's a small bird in a cage, and when I walked past it, it looked at me like I owed it money." James leaned toward Outis, conspiratorial. "Little thing. Fluffy. Very judgmental. And we've still got the Forsaken Murderer, so now our floor's got a guy in a straitjacket who won't look at anyone and a bird who looks at everyone. Information's very well balanced."
"Forsaken Murderer?" said Polites. "Is that the name? You got the name?"
"Came through last night. Yesod read it out this morning like a weather report." James did a passable impression of a very flat voice. "'T-01-54 is designated Forsaken Murderer. Do not approach without instruction.' I said, 'What if he looks lonely?' and got five points."
"Ten," said Ilse.
"Ten. Thank you, Ilse." He turned back to Polites. "Anyway. Word chain. We left off on eel. New girl, you're up."
Ilse looked at him as though he'd suggested they all lie down on the elevator floor.
"I don't play games during work."
"It's not work yet. It's the elevator."
"The elevator is a facility asset. It is technically work."
"Then it's a work game. It builds team cohesion. Yesod loves team cohesion."
Ilse's mouth tightened. She looked at the floor numbers. She looked at her clipboard. She looked, finally, at Polites, who was gazing at her with such open, hopeful expectation that Outis almost felt sorry for her.
"...Ledger," said Ilse, very quietly.
"Yes," said James.
"Rabbit!" said Polites.
"Tea," said Eurylochus, before anyone could look at him.
Elpenor opened one eye. "Apple."
"You can't use apple again," said James. "You used apple yesterday."
"I don't remember yesterday," said Elpenor, and closed the eye.
The elevator dinged. The doors opened on the Control floor, and the four of them stepped out, and behind them Outis heard Ilse say, very low and very precise, "Elephant," just before the doors closed.
He didn't know why it made him want to laugh. He didn't fight it very hard.
. . .
They waited seven minutes in the Main Room, and then Malkuth arrived all at once, very bright, and Angela said what she said.
Outis watched Malkuth's face while Angela said it. He'd started doing that on Day 4. The smile didn't move, not even a little, and that was how he knew.
He didn't say anything. There wasn't anything he could say through a screen that wouldn't make it worse. But he caught her eye, or whatever passed for her eye on the other side of the monitor, and nodded, the way he nodded to One Sin at the door, and after a second her smile went soft around the edges and became something real.
"Okay!" She clapped her hands, and her clipboard went flying, and she caught it. "Okay. Okay okay okay. Today is a very special day, and I have a lot to get through, so everyone please pay attention, and Employee 004, please wake up."
Elpenor, lying full length along the bench with his head in Polites's lap, raised one hand without opening his eyes.
"Thank you! Item one." She ran her finger down the page. "Employee 001."
Outis straightened.
"As of today, you have worked in the Control Team for seven consecutive days. That's the longest of any agent in the department, because you were the first one, which, um, makes sense. So." She took a breath, and for a second she looked almost shy. "So by Lobotomy Corporation standard procedure, you are now the Captain of the Control Team."
There was a short silence.
Then Polites shot up off the bench so fast that Elpenor's head hit the wood.
"Captain!" he said. "Outis! You're the Captain!"
"Ow," said Elpenor.
"Sorry! Sorry. But he's the Captain!"
Outis didn't know what his face was doing. He found that he'd stood up, without meaning to, the way you stand up when your name is called at a graduation. He'd stood up for his name at a graduation exactly once, a week ago and a world ago, and nobody had cheered.
Polites was cheering. Polites was cheering loud enough that a clerk in the hallway flinched.
"There's a little bonus," Malkuth said, reading carefully. "And more responsibility, and you'll help the Manager keep everyone, um, coordinated, and if the Manager is ever... busy... you're the one the team listens to. But mostly," and she looked up from her list, "mostly it means you've been here the longest, and you've taken care of everybody, and the Manager noticed."
He noticed.
Outis looked up at the speaker in the ceiling, where the voice that wasn't the Manager's came from, and behind it the one that never spoke at all.
"Thank you, ma'am," he said. And then, a little quieter, toward the ceiling: "Thank you."
Eurylochus, at the far end of the bench, said nothing. But when Outis glanced his way, he found Eurylochus already looking at him, with his narrow eyes and his bandaged arm folded across his chest, and Eurylochus gave him one short nod.
It was the same nod he'd given him on the floor outside Scorched Girl's door. An answer I can live with.
It felt different from this side.
. . .
"Item two!" said Malkuth. "And this is the surprise. The one I wasn't allowed to write down yet. I'm allowed now." She beamed. "The Manager has extracted E.G.O. equipment for the whole team."
"Ego what?" said Polites.
"E.G.O.! It's... um." She checked a different page. "It's equipment made from the energy and the... the essence, sort of, of the Abnormalities. Weapons and suits. So you'll be safer! And stronger. And it all works much better than the batons."
Four clerks in brown suits came in through the side door, pushing two long carts. The clerks didn't look at anyone. They never did. They parked the carts in front of the bench, lined them up neatly, and left the way they'd come, and on the carts, under plain gray cloths, were four tidy piles.
"Each set comes from one of our Abnormalities," said Malkuth. "The Manager picked them himself. So. Um. Employee 001 first, because you're the Captain."
Outis lifted the first cloth.
It was a mace.
The handle was long and black and plain, wrapped at the grip. But the head of it was a cross, a squat, heavy cross the dark blue of deep water, and in the middle of the cross, where the arms met, there was a skull. Pale. Small. Its empty sockets turned outward. And around it, binding it to the cross, rust-red and tangled and sharp, a crown of thorns.
He knew it before Malkuth said it.
"Penitence," she said. "From One Sin. The weapon and the suit."
The suit lay folded underneath. Dark navy, the same deep-water blue as the cross, with padded sleeves and padded knees, and over the chest a thick plate of dull rust-red, the color of the thorns. Plain. Heavy. It looked less like a uniform than like something a person might wear to carry a weight for a long way.
"It says in the file," Malkuth added, reading, "that it's 'no better than rags to someone without a sense of guilt.' Um. I don't know what that means. But the Manager picked it for you."
Outis thought he might know what it meant.
He picked up the mace. It was heavier than the baton, much heavier, but it sat in his hand like it had been waiting there. The thorns on its head were the same color as the thorns on his own.
"It matches," said Polites, hushed. "Outis, it matches. The crown and the... it's the same!"
"Of course it does," Eurylochus said, to no one. "Of course it's the skull."
Outis turned the mace over once, carefully. The little skull at the center of the cross caught the light, and he thought of the big one down the hall, hanging where it always hung, and of saying thank you to it on the floor yesterday.
It gave me a crown, he thought. And now the Manager's given me the rest of it.
The Manager didn't know about the crown.
...Did he?
"Employee 002!" said Malkuth.
Polites bounded to the cart and pulled off his cloth like a magician, and then stopped.
It was a gun. Sort of. It was the biggest thing Outis had ever seen anyone call a gun: a long, boxy barrel of gray plated metal, longer than Polites's arm, scuffed and riveted and heavy-looking, with a wide round muzzle ringed in red. The middle of it, between the plates, was wrapped in something rough and fibrous and gray, like old rope, or like wood split into splinters and bundled together. A stubby wooden grip jutted down from underneath. And on top, where a sight might have been, there was something black and swollen and bulb-shaped, on a short wooden stem.
Like the head of a match.
Under it, folded, was a coat. Long and black and shaggy, made of something that looked like it had once been fur and was now mostly ash. It shed a little gray dust where it sat on the cart. The tie lying across it was red.
"Fourth Match Flame," said Malkuth. "From Scorched Girl. It's a very long-range weapon, so you can stay far away from things! And there's only one of it. It's yours."
Outis's hand tightened on the handle of the mace.
He'd known, probably. Somewhere. He'd known when Malkuth said each set comes from one of our Abnormalities, and he'd known when he counted them, four Abnormalities and four employees, and he'd known who the Manager would match with her. Of course it was Polites. Polites was the one she liked. Polites was the one she'd pressed herself against her window to watch.
Polites was the one she'd marked. In another version of this week that only Outis remembered, on the afternoon of Day 6, Polites had walked into the supply room with her following him, and said stick close, and five seconds later there had been nothing left of him but the sprinklers.
And now there was a coat made of her ashes on the cart, and a cannon with her match on top of it, and Polites was reaching for them with both hands.
"It's warm," said Polites, delighted. He held the coat up against himself. Gray dust drifted down onto his shoes. "Outis, feel this! It's like she left it in the sun for me."
Outis made himself let go of the mace with one hand. He reached out and touched the sleeve.
It was warm. Not hot. Just warm, the way a seat is warm after someone's been sitting in it.
"Yeah," he said. His voice came out almost normal. "It is."
"She likes me," Polites said happily. "I told you she likes me."
"You told me."
Polites hoisted the cannon. It was so heavy that he staggered, and Eurylochus put out a hand without looking and caught the end of the barrel before it hit the floor.
"It's very long range," said Eurylochus flatly, "so you can stay very far away from things. Stay very far away from things."
"I will!"
"Stay very far away."
"I will, Eurylochus!"
Outis looked away, at the wall, at the Sephirot Tree with its ten circles, until his eyes stopped stinging.
. . .
"Employee 003 and Employee 004!" said Malkuth. "Now, the Manager did something a little bit unusual here, so I'll explain. Normally a set comes from one Abnormality, weapon and suit. But we have rising energy quotas, and the Manager looked very closely at everyone's records, and he decided to, um, mix and match. So!"
Eurylochus pulled his cloth away with two fingers, the way he did everything, as if it might bite.
The weapon was a mace, too, but nothing like Outis's. Its handle was a long, thin, dark rod, and its head was a fat, rounded bulb of glassy aquamarine, the exact color of the Fairy Queen's skin, banded around the middle with two thick stripes of yellow. Above it, folded flat, were two pairs of wings, thin and veined and translucent, and the whole head of it gave off a faint, pale green glow, like the light under the fairies' door.
"Wingbeat," said Malkuth. "From Fairy Festival. It's quite cute, but it's very heavy. And your suit..."
Eurylochus lifted the suit off the cart, and stared at it.
It was brown. Fuzzy. Not soft-fuzzy, but worn-fuzzy, the brown of an old blanket, matted flat in places and pilled in others. Over the jacket was a padded vest of dull sage green, quilted and thick, and there were matching pads at the knees, and at one shoulder seam a little pale tuft of stuffing poked out where the stitches had given way.
It smelled, faintly, like an old closet.
"Bear Paws," said Malkuth. "From Happy Teddy Bear. It's a stronger suit than the others, a higher risk level, and it needs someone sturdy, and the Manager says you're the sturdiest. Which you are! You're so sturdy."
Eurylochus looked at the suit for a long time.
"It's fuzzy," he said finally.
"It's very protective!"
"It's fuzzy."
Polites made a sound like a kettle trying very hard not to boil. Eurylochus turned his head slowly and looked at him, and Polites clapped both hands over his mouth, and the cannon slid out of his arms and Eurylochus caught it again without looking.
"Don't," said Eurylochus.
"I didn't say anything!"
"Don't say anything later."
"Employee 004!"
Elpenor had sat up, at some point. He was looking at the last cart with mild, sleepy interest. Outis lifted the cloth for him, because Elpenor didn't seem in any hurry to do it himself.
The suit was aquamarine. The same watery blue-green as Eurylochus's weapon, cut like a uniform but padded at the chest and the knees, with yellow stripes around each upper arm. And at the back of the shoulders, a pair of small wings. Thin and translucent and slightly crumpled, like they'd been folded too long in a box.
"Wingbeat!" said Malkuth. "The suit, this time. It's lighter, so it's good for someone who's still... um, growing into things. And they say if you wear it, the fairies might take better care of you."
"Huh," said Elpenor. He touched one of the wings. It didn't move. "Do they flap?"
"I... don't think they flap."
"That's okay." He seemed genuinely fine with it. "And this one?"
The weapon underneath the suit wasn't a weapon at all, at first glance. It was a paw.
A huge, brown, furry paw, the size of a man's head, shaped like a mitten. The fur was the same matted, worn-out brown as Eurylochus's suit, rubbed bald in patches. There was a gray-green cuff at the wrist where your arm would go in, and on one side the seam had split wide open, and a fat cloud of pale stuffing bulged out of it.
Outis stopped breathing.
"Bear Paws," said Malkuth. "The weapon. From Happy Teddy Bear. It's a little advanced for you right now, so be gentle with it. It tears easily."
Elpenor slid his hand into it.
Outis watched him do it. Watched the long, thin fingers vanish into the brown fur, all the way to the wrist, and the cuff close over the end of Elpenor's sleeve, and the whole paw settle around his arm. Like being held. Like being hugged and not let go.
The window. The bear's arms closing. The pencil on the white floor.
He was the only one who knew. He was the only one in the world who knew.
"Oh," said Elpenor. His arm dipped, and the paw thumped down onto the bench. "Oh, it's heavy." He tried to lift it. It came up halfway, and wobbled, and sank again. "It's really heavy. It's like..." He frowned at it, thinking. "It's like a really heavy hug."
Outis put his hand on Elpenor's shoulder before he knew he was going to do it.
Elpenor looked up at him, puzzled. "What?"
"Nothing." Outis made himself take his hand away. "Just... be careful with it. Okay? If it's too heavy, tell me. You don't have to use it if it's too heavy."
"Okay," said Elpenor easily. He looked at the paw again, then at Outis, with that sleepy, unbothered look of his. "You look like you saw a ghost."
"I'm fine."
"You always say that."
"I know," said Outis. "Get changed."
. . .
They changed in the supply room, by turns. Outis went last.
When he came out, Polites was standing in the middle of the Main Room in his long black ash-coat with the cannon propped up beside him like a second, very tall friend, and Elpenor was asleep sitting up with his little wings crumpled against the wall and the bear paw resting in his lap, and Eurylochus was standing very straight in his fuzzy brown suit with his arms folded and his face daring anyone to say a single word.
Polites was saying a single word with his whole face.
The red M bands were still on all their arms. Someone had pinned them over the new sleeves.
Outis looked down at himself. Navy and rust-red, the plate heavy and solid across his chest, the mace hanging from his hand, and above it all the light, thin pressure of the crown. Skull to thorns, everything matched.
It fit. He didn't know how it fit so well, but it did. It felt less like wearing someone else's clothes and more like carrying something he'd already been carrying for a while.
"You all look wonderful," said Malkuth, from every screen, and she meant it. "Now, item three. And it's for the Captain."
The side door opened, and a single clerk came in carrying a small gray box, set it down on the end of the bench next to Outis, and left without a word.
Inside was an earpiece, small and black and curved to fit behind the ear. And a band, flat and dark and flexible, with a narrow strip of screen set into it.
And under them, folded neatly, an armband.
It was red, like the one already on his sleeve. Same cloth, same width. But the white letter on it wasn't the plain block M that everyone on the Control floor wore. This one was written. A single M in flowing cursive, looped and slanted, like a signature at the bottom of a letter.
"Ooh," said Polites, leaning over his shoulder. "It's fancy."
"That's the Captain's armband!" said Malkuth, brightening. "Only Captains get the cursive one. So everyone knows who to listen to. Item... um, item three-and-a-half." She ticked something. "I almost forgot to put it on the list. I didn't, though. It's there."
Outis unpinned the old band from his sleeve. He held the two of them side by side for a moment, the block letter and the cursive one. Then he folded the old one carefully, and put it in his pocket, and pinned the new one on in its place.
It didn't weigh anything. It shouldn't have felt like it did.
"This is the Captain's device," said Malkuth. She was reading from her list very carefully now, one finger under each word. "The earpiece goes in your ear. The band goes on your wrist. Your left, the Manager says, so your right hand's free. It's for... um... it's for orders. If the Manager gives an order, it'll show up on the band. As text. Right away. Straight from the Manager. So you can see it even before I say it out loud, and..."
She stopped. Her finger had stopped moving on the page.
"And..." she said again.
Outis fitted the earpiece behind his ear. It was lighter than it looked. He buckled the band around his left wrist, and the screen woke, a thin line of pale light, blank.
"Allow me," said a voice.
It didn't come from the ceiling.
It came from right behind his ear, close, calm, very even. Polites had once said it sounded like a very expensive elevator. Up close, it sounded like a very expensive elevator that had been listening to you for a long time.
"Employee 001. I am Angela."
Outis kept his face still. He'd had a lot of practice, this week.
"Yes, ma'am."
"The device is a precaution." Angela's voice was the same in his ear as it was over the speakers: smooth, unhurried, precise. "It is for emergencies. It is a backup. And it is for any situation in which the Manager requires something to be done quickly, without delay."
"Without delay," Malkuth echoed, very quietly, on the screen.
"The Manager's orders will appear on your band as text. I may also relay them to you directly, by voice, when the situation demands. It is not a replacement for your department head." A pause. "Malkuth will continue to give your team its orders, as she always has. You will follow them, as you always have. The device exists in case that is not enough."
"Understood," said Outis.
"Good," said Angela.
And then she was gone. Not a click, not a sign-off. Just the absence of her, behind his ear, like a draft that had stopped.
Outis let out a breath.
He thought of a voice, on the first Day 6, saying Shall I prepare the... and then stopping, and then saying Understood. Resetting. He thought about how that same voice was now one small black piece of plastic away from the inside of his head.
She's not the one who resets it, he reminded himself. The Manager is.
She's just the one who watches.
"Um," said Malkuth.
Outis looked up. She was holding her clipboard against her chest with both arms now, and she looked smaller than usual on the big screens.
"Um, also," she said. "Also, this isn't on Angela's list, but it's on mine. I can talk to you through it too. The earpiece. If I need to tell you something just for you. And..." She glanced down at the page and back up. "And you can relay orders. To the team. If I can't. If something happens and they can't hear me, or they're too far away, or... or anything. You can tell them what the Manager said. Because you're the Captain."
"So it's not instead of me," she added, very fast. "It's as well as me. That's all. That's what it's for."
Outis looked at her for a moment.
He thought of the list. Every line a box, every box a tick, straight and firm and all the same size. A woman who wrote down 'Team laughed' so it would last forever.
"Ma'am," he said. "We'll still be listening to you."
Malkuth blinked.
"It's a good backup," Outis said. "But you're the one who knows all our names." He paused. "Well. Our numbers. But you know which one's which."
Polites, beside him, nodded so hard his coat shed. "You're the best at that."
"Oh," said Malkuth. And then, smaller: "Oh."
She bent her head and wrote something on her clipboard. Outis couldn't see what. But when she looked up again, her smile was the real one.
. . .
"Okay!" She flipped back to the first page. "One last thing before we start, and it's an important one, so think carefully."
Polites went very still.
"The cake is ready," said Malkuth. "It's here. In the facility. Right now."
Polites made a noise Outis had never heard a human throat make before.
"So!" said Malkuth. "Do you want it now, before work? Or after the day is over?"
"Now," said Polites instantly.
"Now," said Elpenor, without opening his eyes.
Eurylochus unfolded his arms, and folded them again the other way, and said, "After."
Polites spun on him. "After? Why would you want it after?"
"Because if you eat cake now," said Eurylochus, "you'll spend the whole day thinking about how you ate cake. If you wait, you'll spend the whole day thinking about how there's cake." He shrugged. "One of those is better."
Polites opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it again. "That's actually a really good point and I hate it."
"Now," said Elpenor, still not opening his eyes.
That was two and one. Outis thought that was the end of it, and then he realized everyone was looking at him.
All three of them. And Malkuth, on every screen, her pen raised over her clipboard. Waiting.
Because you're the Captain.
Outis thought about it.
He thought about Day 6. All three of it. He thought about how, in the first one, there hadn't been an after at all, not for Polites. He thought about how, in the second, there hadn't been one for Elpenor. He thought about what it would mean to spend a whole day knowing there was something at the end of it worth getting back to.
Odysseus had had Ithaca.
He had a cake.
"After," he said.
Polites groaned and flopped backward onto the bench, his coat puffing up gray ash around him.
"After," Outis said again, more gently. "So we've got something to come back to. All of us." He looked at each of them in turn. "Everyone comes back to the cake. That's the rule. Okay?"
There was a short silence.
"Okay," said Elpenor, and opened his eyes for it.
"...Okay," said Polites from the bench, muffled. Then, sitting up: "Okay. Okay. That's actually really nice, Outis. That's a really nice rule."
Eurylochus said nothing. But he didn't argue, either.
"Everyone comes back to the cake," said Malkuth, writing. "There. That's on the list too. Forever."
. . .
The day went like days went.
It went better than days usually went, actually. Outis noticed it by the second work. The mace in his hand made One Sin's room feel quieter than ever, and when he came out his head was clearer than it had been all week. The fairies loved Eurylochus even more in his new weapon than they had before, and clung to him in a delighted green swarm that he endured with his eyes closed and his jaw clenched and his fuzzy brown shoulders up around his ears. Scorched Girl's light, when Polites went in wearing her coat, turned the color of a candle and stayed that way for the whole work.
And the band on Outis's wrist stayed quiet.
He kept looking at it anyway. Every order that came over the speakers, he glanced down, and every time, the thin line of light on the band was blank. Malkuth was fast this morning. Faster than she'd been all week. Every order came out of the ceiling clean and clear, a beat after the Manager must have given it, and the band never had anything to add.
Outis found himself smiling about that, a little.
Elpenor fell asleep in the supply cupboard after his Fairy Festival work. Outis sat outside it for twenty minutes, and then Polites came and sat outside it with him, and then Eurylochus, wordlessly, sat a little way down the wall from both of them, where he could see the doors.
"Is this a team thing now?" Polites whispered. "Sitting by the cupboard?"
"It's a good wall," said Outis.
. . .
The band lit up at 1:52 P.M.
Outis felt it before he saw it, a faint warmth against the inside of his wrist, and he looked down, and there was a single line of plain white text scrolling across the strip of screen.
CONTROL: ALL AGENTS TO MAIN ROOM.
The lights dimmed half a second later.
"The Qliphoth Meltdown level has reached two," said Angela, from the ceiling, for everyone. "An Ordeal has begun."
And then, before she could finish, Malkuth: "Everybody come back to the Main Room! Right now, please, everybody back to the..."
Outis was already moving.
He'd read the band. He was halfway down the hall before Malkuth's voice had finished the sentence, and when he got to the supply cupboard he hauled the door open and Elpenor blinked up at him from the floor, bear paw in his lap.
"Ordeal," said Outis. "Main Room. Now."
"Mm," said Elpenor, and let himself be pulled up.
"Amber Dawn," said Angela.
Outis had never heard of it. He didn't have time to ask the System. Because somewhere behind him, under the floor, something had started to scratch.
. . .
It came up through the tile ten meters behind them.
The floor buckled. Cracked. Bulged upward like something was pushing at it from below, and then split, and the thing that came out of it was a worm. A brown, glistening worm as thick as Outis's thigh and as long as he was tall, and the end of it opened like a flower, and inside the flower were teeth. Rows of them. Small and white and very, very many.
It reared up out of the floor and turned the open end toward them, and Outis understood, with perfect clarity, that it was looking at them the way Polites had looked at the cake.
"Run," said Outis.
Elpenor ran. Outis ran beside him, half-dragging him, the bear paw thumping against Elpenor's hip with every step, and behind them there was a wet sound, and a crash, and the scrape of the worm coming after them across the tile.
They made it into the Main Room. Polites was already there, with the cannon braced against his shoulder and pointed at the door, eyes huge. Eurylochus was in front of him with the fairy mace up, its head glowing green.
"There are five of them on our floor," Malkuth was saying, fast and high. "They go under the floor and come up again in other places, so watch the floor, everyone, watch the floor! The Manager says stay together! Stay together and..."
The band on Outis's wrist warmed.
001: HALLWAY. LEAD THEM OUT. 002 COVER FROM DOOR.
"Polites," said Outis. "Stay in the doorway. Shoot anything that comes down the hall. Don't come out. Eurylochus, Elpenor, with me."
Malkuth, from the ceiling, half a second behind him: "The Manager says Employee 002 cover from the door, and the rest of you go out with Employee 001!"
She stopped.
"...Oh," she said. "He already said that." And then, faster, braver: "Go with your Captain!"
They went.
. . .
It wasn't like the clown.
The clown had been one thing, in one place, and Outis had known exactly where it would be. The worms were five things, and they were everywhere. They went down into the floor with a sound like someone sucking on a straw, and then there was nothing, just cracked tile and quiet, for one second, five, twenty. And then they came up somewhere else.
The first one came up right in front of Eurylochus.
He didn't flinch. He'd been waiting for it, the way he waited for everything, and the fairy mace came down in a short, hard arc that caught the worm right behind its open mouth. There was a sound like a melon hitting the floor. The worm thrashed, sprayed something brown all down the front of his fuzzy suit, and went still.
"Gross," said Eurylochus, with feeling.
The second came up behind Elpenor.
Elpenor swung. It was a good swing, for someone who'd been asleep five minutes earlier: he twisted around and brought the bear paw up and across with his whole body behind it. But the paw was too heavy. It dragged his arm down halfway through the arc, and instead of hitting the worm in the face, it hit it in the side, a soft, muffled whump like a pillow fight. The worm reeled, and turned, and its mouth opened wide...
"Down!" said Outis.
Elpenor went down. Outis stepped over him and brought Penitence around with both hands, and the cross-head took the worm square across the teeth, and there was a crunch, and a smell like old blood, and the little skull at the center of the mace looked the worm in the face as it died.
Outis stood there for a second, breathing hard. Something cool moved through his chest, the way it did after a work with One Sin. His head felt very clear.
Elpenor was sitting on the floor, looking at the bear paw. A second seam had split open on it, along the thumb. Stuffing was coming out.
"Sorry," he said. "I told you. It's heavy."
"It's okay." Outis reached down and pulled him to his feet. "You hit it. That's what matters. You hit it and you didn't get bit."
The paw slipped off Elpenor's hand as he stood, and fell, and Outis caught it before it hit the floor.
It was light.
He frowned. It was light. It sat in his hand like a mitten. Like a glove he'd been wearing all his life. Elpenor had been struggling to lift it, his whole arm shaking, and in Outis's hand it weighed nothing at all. He turned it over, and the stuffing bulged out of the split seam, soft and pale, and for a strange half-second he thought, very clearly, I could use this.
I could use both.
In the corner of his vision, the System's window blinked open. Pale blue. Empty.
Three dots appeared in it.
Then they went away, and the window closed, and it didn't say anything at all.
"Outis?" said Elpenor.
Outis blinked. "Here." He held the paw out, and Elpenor slid his hand back into it, and it dragged Elpenor's arm down the way it always had. "Use it like a shield. Hold it up in front of you. Don't swing it, just hold it. If one comes at you, let it hit the paw, and then I'll hit it."
"Like a shield," Elpenor agreed. "Okay."
Outis turned around.
And the voice came from behind his ear.
"Employee 001. Floor. Step left."
He stepped left.
The tile where he'd been standing exploded upward in a spray of broken ceramic, and the third worm came up out of it, mouth open, teeth gleaming, snapping at the empty air where his legs had been half a second before.
Outis didn't think. He just swung.
Penitence came down on the back of its head. Once. The worm folded sideways and lay still, and the cool thing moved through his chest again, and the hallway was quiet.
He stood very still, with the mace in his hands and his heart hammering, and waited for the voice behind his ear to say something else.
It didn't.
She was watching, he thought. She was watching me close enough to see the floor move before I did.
"Thank you," he said quietly, to no one. To the earpiece.
Nothing answered.
. . .
The fourth worm came up in the hallway outside the Main Room, between the doorway and the elevator, and Polites shot it.
Outis didn't see it happen. He heard it. A sound like an enormous match being struck, a hollow FWOOMP that rattled every containment door on the floor, and then a flash of orange light that lit up the whole hallway from end to end. When he got back to the Main Room, the worm was a black, smoking curl on the tiles, and Polites was sitting on the floor of the doorway where the recoil had put him, his ash-coat smoking gently, the cannon across his lap and his eyes enormous.
"I got it," said Polites. "Outis. I got it. I stayed in the door the whole time and I got it."
"You got it," said Outis.
"It took forever to fire. I thought it was broken! I was pulling the thing and it was going hmmmmmm and I thought it was broken and then it went boom and I fell over."
"It's very long range," said Eurylochus, coming up behind Outis with worm still drying on his fuzzy sleeves. "So you can stay far away from things."
"I stayed far away from things!"
"You did," said Eurylochus. And then, after a moment, a little grudgingly: "Good shot."
Polites looked like he might float off the floor.
The fifth worm, in the end, never came up at all. It surfaced on the Information floor instead.
"It's on Information!" Malkuth said. "The last one! It's... oh. Oh, they got it! James and the new one! Yesod says," and she paused to listen, "Yesod says 'Adequate.'"
Somewhere far below them, Outis imagined James on a cracked tile floor, grinning, and Ilse beside him with her clipboard held up like a shield and not a single hair out of place.
A minute later, Angela announced the Ordeal cleared.
Malkuth, on every screen, let out a breath that was almost a sob.
"Everyone's okay," she said. "Everyone is okay. Oh, I'm so glad."
The band on Outis's wrist warmed, and a single word scrolled across it in plain white letters.
CAPTAIN.
"The Manager says you did very well," Malkuth went on, a beat behind. "He says," and she checked, "he says, 'Captain.' Just that. I think he means good job."
That was all. No well done. No good job. Just the word, sitting there on the strip of screen like a nod across a room.
Outis stared at it.
He tried to picture the man on the other end. He'd been trying all week, and he still couldn't do it. Someone who never spoke, not once, not even to say well done. Someone who'd watched Elpenor die, and reset the whole day so that he didn't have to, and then sat behind his screens and typed 002 COVER FROM DOOR in capital letters like a telegram. Someone who'd given Eurylochus a fuzzy bear suit, and had to have known exactly what Eurylochus's face would do when he saw it.
Was he completely serious? Was it all just orders and quotas and numbers, all the way down, and the one word on the band was only a word?
Or was there someone back there, behind all those monitors, who'd typed CAPTAIN with a perfectly straight face, and then, maybe, very slightly, smiled?
Outis couldn't tell. He had a feeling he wasn't supposed to be able to.
He doesn't leave anyone behind, he reminded himself. That's the part that matters.
But he caught himself, for just a second, hoping it was the second one.
. . .
He had barely set the mace down when the alarm went off again.
Not the low, heavy tone of the Ordeal. Something shorter. Sharper. Two quick notes, over and over, coming from somewhere below.
"Containment breach," said Angela, calm as ever, from the ceiling. "Information Team. O-02-56 has escaped its containment unit."
"The bird," said Polites. "That's the bird. James said it was a little bird!"
"It's... it's on the Information floor," said Malkuth, scrambling through her pages. "It's not on my list, it only came this morning, I don't have anything on it, I..."
The band on Outis's wrist warmed.
001: INFORMATION. ASSIST.
He looked at it for a second longer than he needed to.
He was curious. That was the honest truth of it. He'd been curious since the elevator, since James had said fluffy, very judgmental with that look on his face. And the Manager wanted him down there. Not the team. Just him.
He turned around. Polites in the doorway with the cannon. Elpenor on the bench, cradling the torn paw. Eurylochus with the fairy mace across his knees, glowing faintly green.
"Eurylochus," said Outis. "You've got them."
Eurylochus looked up at him. For a moment, Outis thought he was going to ask why, or how long, or what Outis expected him to do if something came up through the floor again.
He didn't. He just nodded, once, and shifted his grip on the mace, and turned his eyes to the door.
That was all Outis needed.
. . .
The Information floor smelled like dead worm and something else, something faintly dusty, like old feathers.
The mauve lights were flashing. Purple-suited clerks had pressed themselves into doorways all the way down the hall. And in the middle of the corridor, flitting in quick, jerky little arcs from one end to the other, there was a bird.
It was small. Smaller than Outis's hand. Round and white and fluffy, with stubby little wings that beat too fast to see, and a single bright red mark on its chest like a drop of paint. Its eyes were black and beady and furious.
It was pecking James on the head.
"Ow," James was saying, crouched against the wall with his arms over his head, and laughing helplessly. "Ow. Okay. Ow. I get it. I'm sorry. I don't know what I did, but I'm sorry. Ow."
Peck.
"That one didn't even hurt. Ow. Why am I saying ow."
Peck.
And beside him, white-faced, her clipboard abandoned on the floor, Ilse had her baton in both hands. She was holding it so tight her knuckles had gone bloodless. Her hair had come loose at one side. Her breathing was too fast. She was watching the bird circle above James's head with the fixed, glassy stare of someone who had been very afraid for a very long day and had just found something small enough to hit.
She raised the baton.
The System's window flashed open in the corner of Outis's vision, so bright and so sudden it almost hurt.
[ Outis, don't let her hit it. ]
He was already moving. He didn't know what the bird would do if she hit it. He didn't need to. He knew that look on Ilse's face, and he knew the feeling under his ribs, the one that had made him tell Eurylochus to run before anyone else knew there was anything to run from.
He caught her wrist halfway through the swing.
"Don't," he said.
Ilse whipped around to stare at him, eyes wide. "It's attacking him!"
"It's pecking him."
"That's attacking!"
"Ow," said James, from the floor. "To be fair, it's pretty much attacking."
"Don't hit it," Outis said again, quieter, still holding her wrist. "Please. I don't know what it does if you hit it. I just know you shouldn't."
[ It gets much bigger. And much angrier. And it doesn't stop until it's finished with whoever hit it. ]
Great, Outis thought. Thank you. Good to know.
The bird stopped pecking James.
It hung in the air between them for a moment, its tiny wings blurring, its black eyes moving from Outis to Ilse and back again. Then it darted forward, so fast Outis barely saw it, and pecked Ilse once, squarely, right in the middle of her forehead.
Bonk.
Ilse blinked.
Something in her face changed. Outis watched it happen. The glassy look went out of her eyes all at once, like someone had opened a window in a stuffy room. Her shoulders came down from around her ears. Her breathing slowed. Her fingers loosened around the baton, and Outis let go of her wrist, and the baton dipped toward the floor.
"Oh," said Ilse, in a small, surprised voice.
The bird pecked her again, gently, on the top of her head. Then it turned in the air, and pecked Outis on the cheek, bonk, hardly harder than a flicked fingertip. Something cool and clear went through his head, like cold water on the back of his neck. A long day, three days long, got a little lighter.
Then it flew back down the corridor, in its quick, jerky little arcs, straight in through the open door of its containment unit, and landed on its black perch, and fluffed itself up, and looked out at all of them with an expression of deep moral superiority.
The door slid shut.
The alarm stopped.
For a moment, the only sound in the hallway was James laughing on the floor.
"I told you," he wheezed. "Judgmental. Very judgmental."
Ilse looked down at the baton in her hand as if she didn't remember picking it up. She looked at Outis. She touched her forehead, where the bird had pecked her.
"...I feel better," she said, sounding almost offended by it.
"Yeah," said Outis. He rubbed his cheek. "Me too."
"Why do I feel better?"
"I think that's what it does." Outis glanced at the closed door. The bird, behind its little window, was preening. "I think it gets out, and it bonks people, and they feel better. As long as nobody hits it."
"How did you know not to hit it?"
Outis opened his mouth, and then closed it again.
"Gut feeling," he said.
Ilse looked at him for a long moment, with her hair half down and her pressed purple suit rumpled at the collar. Then she bent, and picked up her clipboard, and smoothed the top sheet very carefully with one hand, and wrote something on it.
"Thank you," she said, without looking up. Stiffly. Precisely. But she meant it.
"Employee 001," said a voice from the ceiling. Flat. Cold. Precise. "You are not assigned to this floor."
Outis looked up. "The Manager sent me, sir."
A pause.
"...So he did," said Yesod. "Adequate. Return to your department."
James, still on the floor, grinned up at Outis and mouthed, He likes you.
. . .
When Outis got back to the Main Room, Eurylochus was sitting exactly where he'd left him, mace across his knees, eyes on the door. Polites was in the doorway. Elpenor was asleep. Nothing had come up through the floor.
"Well?" said Polites. "Was it the bird? What was it like? Was it scary?"
Outis thought about it.
"It was very small," he said. "And very judgmental. And if it ever gets out up here," he added, looking at each of them in turn, "nobody hits it. Okay? It might peck you. Let it."
Polites looked delighted. Eurylochus looked deeply suspicious.
"I'm writing that down," said Malkuth. "'Don't hit the bird.' Underlined."
. . .
The cake came at the end of the day.
Two clerks wheeled it in on a cart, after Angela had told the Manager the energy quota was met, and after Malkuth had said "Well done, everyone, very well done" three times and checked off something on her list each time. It was a plain sheet cake, white, rectangular, and not very large. Someone had piped DAY 7 across the top of it in yellow icing, in a hand that was very careful and very slightly wobbly on the 7.
Malkuth hadn't said who.
Outis looked at the 7 for a long time.
Polites cut it. He insisted. He cut it into exactly six pieces, very seriously, with his tongue between his teeth, and counted them twice. He handed the first one to Outis with no explanation except "Captain first," as if it were a rule everyone already knew. Then he picked up the fifth piece, looked toward the door, and walked out into the hallway and held it out to the first brown-suited clerk who walked by.
The clerk stared at him.
"It's cake," said Polites. "It's our one-week cake. You can have some. You've been here a whole week too, probably. Probably longer."
The clerk looked at the cake. Looked at Polites. Looked, very briefly, at the cart, and the four agents around it, and the screens.
Then, very slowly, the clerk took the cake, and nodded, once, and walked away down the hall with it held carefully in both hands.
Polites came back glowing like his coat had caught.
"Two nods," he said. "Two. This week is the best."
Then he picked up the sixth slice, on its own paper plate, and carried it over to the biggest screen in the Main Room, and set it down very carefully on the ledge underneath, right in the middle, where Malkuth's face was.
"Oh," said Malkuth. She looked down at it. "Employee 002, what's... is that..."
"It's yours, ma'am," said Polites. "It's the team's cake. You're on the team."
"But I can't..." She stopped. "I'm not... I'm not down there. I can't eat it."
"I know," said Polites. "It's still yours."
Malkuth didn't say anything for a moment. Her pen had stopped moving. She looked at the slice of cake sitting on the ledge under her screen, small and white and slightly lopsided, with half of a yellow 7 on top of it, and her face did something Outis had never seen it do. Not the bright smile. Not the practiced one. Something smaller than both, and much more real.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
Polites beamed, and went back to the bench.
They ate on the bench, the four of them, shoulder to shoulder, with Elpenor's head on Polites's shoulder and Eurylochus at the end with his fuzzy brown elbows on his knees. The cake was dry, and the icing was too sweet, and it was the best thing Outis had ever eaten.
He didn't need to eat. The System had told him that, back in the white space, before any of this. Eating was optional. For enjoyment, or not at all.
He ate the whole slice anyway, slowly, and tried to remember the last time anyone had cut a piece of something and handed it to him first, without being asked.
He couldn't.
"I have to say," said Malkuth, watching them from every screen with her chin in her hands, "this is my favorite thing I've ever had on my list."
She kept glancing down at the ledge under her biggest screen. Every time she did, she smiled again, as if she'd forgotten it was there and found it all over again.
She wrote something on her clipboard. Outis would have bet anything it said 'Team ate cake.' And underneath it, maybe, in smaller letters: 'Me too.'
He looked down at his wrist. At the band, quiet and blank, waiting. He looked at the mace leaning against the end of the bench, with its little skull and its crown of thorns, and at the rust-red plate across his own chest. He looked at his team: a boy in a coat made of fire, a man in a suit made of a bear, a kid with a fairy's wings and a paw that was too heavy for him, all of them alive, all of them sticky with frosting.
Everyone comes back to the cake.
They had. Every one of them.
He finished his last bite, and set the paper plate down on the bench beside him, and let himself just sit there for a while, in the hum of the lights, with his crew.
---
[ Captain Outis. :) ]
He was lying on his back on the glowing floor of the white space, with his hands folded on his stomach, full of cake that he didn't technically need.
"Don't," he said.
[ Captain Outis Kanenas, of the Control Team. ]
"You're going to make this a thing."
[ It's already a thing! I've Logged it. :D ]
Outis laughed, short and surprised, at the ceiling that wasn't there.
They talked for a while. About the worms. About Polites falling over. About the clerk and the cake. The System was very interested in the cake, and wanted to know exactly how dry it had been, and seemed quietly pleased when he said very.
Then he said, "Today. In the hallway. When I picked up Elpenor's paw."
The window dimmed. Just a little.
"You opened up. And then you didn't say anything."
[ ... ]
[ I was thinking. ]
"About what?"
The three dots came. They stayed for a long time.
[ About how much you're growing. ]
[ That's all. ]
[ I'll tell you more when it's time. I promise. ]
Outis looked at the window for a while. It didn't brighten. It didn't dim any further, either. It just waited, the way it always did, patient and pale and there.
He thought about the paw, light as a glove in his hand. I could use this. I could use both.
"Okay," he said.
He let it go. For now.
He'd gotten good at that, this week. Letting something be. Waiting for someone to be ready.
[ Outis? ]
"Mm."
[ Everyone came back to the cake. ]
Outis closed his eyes.
"Yeah," he said. "They did."
- - -
A/N: Sorry to suddenly break the immersion, don't worry, this'll be gone once I upload the next chapter. I'm leaving this here to ask whether those reading have enjoyed it so far. These first 10 chapters are my gift and apologies for how long I've been gone.
Depending on how well these chapters do, it'll set the pace of when future chapters come out. I already have an outline for this whole volume, and yes, that does mean I have played all of lob corp several times.
Anyway, this is MASH, or XE, and I'll cya next time :)