Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was 11:33pm on a Tuesday night, and Dr. Emily Pope stared down a pile of HRA production reports on her desk, forehead braced against her palm.

Or at least, the clock in her office said it was 11:33pm. But in the Oldest House, time was a relative concept.

Emily finished scrawling her signature on another amplifier request form. Dropping her favourite pen into its holder, she started corralling a bunch of similar papers into what vaguely resembled a stack. Her eye caught on an internal memo sitting on top of her in-tray.

Weird. She didn’t remember that being there. Someone must have dropped it off while she was in one of her paper reading deep dives.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF CONTROL

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

DATE: Tuesday, █████

TIME: 8:03 PM EST

FROM: T. Vasquez, Custodial Services Coordinator

TO: Acting Resource Administrator, Research Division

CC: Dr. E. Pope (Head of Research), Dr. N. Chang (Acting Head, Ritual Safety), G. Voller (Security Ops Liaison)

RE: Sanitation Infrastructure Within Research Sector Safe-Zones During Tier 2 Decontamination Protocols

It has come to our attention that certain junior staff in the Research Sector have raised concerns about the number of available sanitary facilities within designated “safe zones” during ongoing Tier 2 decontamination efforts.

Custodial Services would like to clarify that three (3) lavatory units remain fully operational and accessible within the cleared areas of Research.

While we understand that field conditions are less than ideal, we remind personnel that the Bureau continues to operate under reduced resource allocation, and that historical precedent supports the adequacy of three restrooms for the current staff density.

Staff are encouraged to plan ahead and utilize approved break periods responsibly.

Any additional requests for emergency sanitation infrastructure must be routed through Ritual Safety and will require Form 26-S (“Temporary Spatial Augmentation”) to be approved by Security in advance.

Custodial Services is confident that, given the esteemed research pedigree of the personnel involved, a solution can be arrived at that does not involve additional plumbing.

— T. Vasquez

Custodial Services Coordinator

>> Typed and distributed via Pneumatic Network Node #314. Do not remove this memo from Bureau premises. <<

Emily squinted at the memo.

Barely a sector away, the bodies of some of her former colleagues were still levitating by the ceiling, murmuring their uncanny incantations. The Bureau was not even halfway through the Hiss infestation, and people were arguing about bathroom breaks.

It was close to midnight. Emily eyed the couch on the far end of the office with a certain despondency.

A knock sounded on the wide double doors.

Emily dropped the bathroom memo onto the lower tier of her inbox. “Come in,” she said, trying to push the papers around on her desk so that at least some of the scratched wooden surface was visible.

One of the doors opened with a slight creak and Jesse Faden stepped inside, looking every bit as weary as Emily felt.

Despite her hair being pulled up neatly and the Bureau’s pin glinting dimly on her Director’s coat, shadows hung under Jesse’s eyes. She stopped in front of Emily’s desk.

“Director Faden,” Emily said, a tiny smile making its way onto her mouth. “What brings you here?”

Jesse scrunched up her face and dropped into a chair opposite her. “Ugh. You know I hate being called that, Dr. Pope. I feel like I’m cosplaying a civics teacher.”

Emily arched an eyebrow. “Well, I think the suit looks good on you. Very regal.”

Jesse let out a half-laugh. “Regal’s not the word I’d use.” She sighed. “Had to do a formal debrief update for some Maintenance sector reps. Apparently it doesn’t count if I’m not wearing the outfit.”

“That’s the Bureau for you.” Emily picked up the coffee mug she had abandoned in the corner of her desk earlier. It was half empty, and cold. “Ritualistic to a fault.”

“Have you been here the whole day? I haven’t seen you in Executive,” Jesse asked, looking at the pile of documents sitting on the in-tray. Emily was a little conscious about it and had spent the better part of the day waging battle against the growing heap.

But the memos just kept coming.

Emily set the cup back on the table and leaned back in her seat. “Unfortunately, yeah. Those HRAs aren’t producing themselves, and there’s a lot going down among those of us left in Research.”

“Oh.” Jesse winced. “I should have brought another coffee or something.”

“It’s alright,” Emily said. “I don’t know how many I’ve already had today. This really should be my last cup. So, what’s up?”

Jesse pursed her lips, then sat forward. “I need your help with something. I ran into Arish earlier, and he says a few of his guys down in Sublevel 3B have been acting off.”

“Here in Research?” Emily almost reached for the leftover coffee but stopped herself. “And by off, you mean—”

“I mean, weirder than normal, whatever normal means around here.”

“Hmm.” Emily frowned, lacing her fingers together on her desk. Sublevel 3B wasn’t a designated safe-zone as of yet, so only Rangers and high-level personnel were allowed down there.

Jesse nudged a chair leg with her boot, eyes caught at a point between them. It was a look she always wore when deep in thought. “He says they’re losing track of time. Messing up their schedules. One of them apparently referred to a teammate who doesn’t exist.”

Emily sat up straighter. “That is weird.”

“Yeah. So I went down there.” Jesse fidgeted with her edge of her sleeve. “Sublevel’s half-dark since they’re still sweeping for the Hiss. But I found this room sealed up with Black Rock.”

“Black Rock?” Emily narrowed her eyes, swivelling in her chair slightly towards the side drawers where most of the sector files were kept. But there wasn’t anything in there she had already read once, at least. “There shouldn’t be any active containment protocols down there.”

“Exactly. And yet, there it was, a big slab of Black Rock in my way. Somebody didn’t want anyone poking around in there.” Jesse dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out a single Bureau-issue sheet. She unfolded it and laid it on the desk. “I went to the archives and this was all I found.”

Emily picked it up and scanned it. It had the Bureau’s official seal on the heading, and was mired with redactions.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF CONTROL

ARCHIVAL DOCUMENT #082-342-RE

OBJECT/ANOMALY TYPE: Threshold-Like Activity

LOCATION: Research Sector – Level 3█ Sub-Access (As of ██/██/20██)

CONTAINMENT STATUS: Sealed

CONTAINMENT PROCEDURE:

Affected zone has been enclosed using Black Rock panelling. Containment dimensions correspond to the structural footprint of the ████ ███████ Storage Room. Standard Bureau ████ markers applied to all ████ points. Reinforcement integrity verified and recorded.

DESCRIPTION/ALTERED EFFECT:

Threshold-adjacent spatial anomaly identified within Sublevel 3█, ███████ ████ ███. Affected area demonstrates low-level █████ interference and minor █████ disruption in exposed personnel.

Following installation of Black Rock containment, the internal ████ configuration of the sealed zone no longer conforms to external ███████ █████. This ██████ inconsistency is considered stable and within acceptable Bureau tolerances under current conditions.

Anomaly field appears self-contained in height (█.0m vertical limit) but exhibits lateral expansion when uncontained, with growth rate measured at approximately █████ per 24-hour period. Current seal confirmed airtight; no fluctuation in baseline readings recorded outside containment boundaries since installation. Field monitoring deemed non-essential due to current containment procedures.

NOTES:

— Excursions into the field suspended per Assessment Memo #RE-███-C.

— Site is to remain sealed under all operational conditions.

— Access strictly prohibited without Director-level override.

— Breach of ████ may compromise current ████ ██████.

— No further inquiry required unless ██████ ██ ██████. DO NOT OPEN.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS:

See Evidence Item Ref: R-17.███ – Stored under “RESEARCH / █████████ STORAGE / UNVERIFIED”

“This is… very strange.” Emily turned the page over but it was, of course, blank on the other side. “It says here that containment should be secure, but clearly it isn’t anymore, based on Arish’s reports. Looks like some related evidence is stored here in Research, though.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. I was wondering if you could take a look around here and see if anything turns up.” Jesse ran her fingers over her hair, like she was trying to brush away a curl that wasn’t there. “I feel bad though, you’re probably swamped.”

Jesse’s gaze drifted across the room. Old notes were still haphazardly pinned to every wall, and stacks upon stacks of spiral-bound notebooks and hard-backed journals cluttered every surface.

Most of it had been Darling’s. Emily hadn’t had the time to organize much of it, let alone bring any of her own things in.

Emily folded up the document again and tucked it into the inner pocket of the notebook beside her. “I’m sure it’s no better for you. Besides, I knew what I was signing up for with the promotion. I could’ve just said no.”

It was Jesse’s turn to raise her eyebrow. “Are you sure about that? I remember basically strong-arming you into it.”

Emily let out a short laugh. “This is the role that every junior researcher dreams about.” Her eyes landed on Darling’s old projector perched in the middle of the office, its dusty capped lens still pointing at the blank screen. “I just… didn’t expect to get it like this. With Darling disappearing the way he did.”

“Yeah.” Jesse pulled herself to her feet. “I just hope that he’s okay. Wherever he is.”

Emily stood with her, and walked her to the door. “Me too. He wasn’t the easiest person to work under. But he was one of the most brilliant researchers I’ve ever known.”

Jesse exhaled, turning back with her hand on the door handle. “Update me if you find anything?”

“Sure. Of course.”

Jesse gave her a tired smile before pushing the door open. “I’ll bring snacks next time.”

Then she left, footsteps echoing in the huge, half-ruined expanse of Central Research.

It was sometimes hard for Emily to imagine that the hesitant hands fiddling with the new Director-appropriate updo were the same ones capable of ripping rebar from the walls and launching chunks of concrete across the room.

She watched the dark line of Jesse’s coat disappear into the corridors beyond.

Emily’s eyes opened to a blurry view of the wall clock.

3:54am.

She sat up from the corner office couch, suddenly unable to sleep anymore. The ceiling lights winked momentarily as yet another power fluctuation rippled through the sector, and in the distance the hum of the HRA lab served to replace absolute silence.

Emily retrieved her notebook from where it lay on the couch beside her, and pulled out the redacted archival file again.

Secondary evidence storage in Research was just down the hall. Granted, not an officially designated safe-zone, but Arish’s teams have already finished sweeping the entire floor days ago.

And she basically lived with an HRA strapped to her at all times anyway.

Emily grabbed the emergency flashlight she kept on the coffee table and hugged the notebook close. Then she ducked out of her office and into the side hallway leading away from Protective Studies.

The labs in this wing were still closed. Through the long glass windows, Emily could see the equipment sitting in the dark as she moved quietly down the hall. At the end were a set of double doors, and once past those, she rounded the corner to a nondescript door marked ‘Evidence’.

The exact reference number in the document had been expunged, but what most would consider a dead end, Emily thought of simply as a challenge.

The door to Evidence swung shut with a creak behind her. Somehow, it felt colder in here than out in the hallway, even though there was no draft. Rows of steel filing cabinets lined the room, forming narrow aisles in between them.

Overhead, less than half of the fluorescent lights buzzed faintly. They cast uneven bands of light across the floor. Emily tried to shake off the feeling of being watched as she moved towards the first row of cabinets.

The sound of her own footsteps were muffled by the thin layer of dust on the ground.

She kept the flashlight low, sweeping the beam past a row of shelves crammed with binders and file boxes. Worn labels in block letters marked each shelf and drawer, some scratched out and relabelled, some torn off entirely.

After taking more than a few wrong turns, Emily found Aisle 17.

She had spent a nontrivial amount of time early in her career riffling through archival dumping grounds just like this one. She set her notebook down and reached for the oldest-looking folder on the first shelf, slowly lifting the flap and half-expecting it to crumble apart in her hands.

Inside the index folder, the battered inventory manifest card was stuffed into the pocket alongside maintenance reports and acquisition forms. Emily scoured the log line by line until she found it.

R-17.882 - “Research Notes, Dr. R. Callow”

- Supplemental (Inconclusive, Retained for Protocol)

Her flashlight picked out that particular filing location, a small cardboard box on the lowest shelf. She crouched down and pulled the cover off the box.

A small cloud of dust rose into her face, and she let out an involuntary sneeze that echoed loudly off the filing cabinets. She covered her nose with her forearm and lifted out a fabric-bound journal. There was nothing else in the box.

On the first page, handwritten in black ink, was:

West Storage Anomaly Field - Notes and Observations / Dr. Robin Callow

If you don’t recognize this page, it means you’ve already forgotten.

THIS IS THE ONLY ACCURATE RECORD

Emily frowned at the underlined message. Underneath that was list of about a dozen names, with no other context.

The writing had the desperation of someone no longer doing objective research, and suddenly the unverified and inconclusive tags made perfect sense.

But the next few pages were filled with logs and notes all referencing a room enclosed in Black Rock on Sublevel 3B of Research, and Emily snapped the journal shut, holding it closer.

Looks like her night wasn’t over yet.

Chapter Text

INTERNAL CORRESPONDENCE

TO: Dr. E. Pope

FROM: Dr. R. Underhill

Dr. Pope,

My mold samples were submitted to the Luck and Probability lab for extended analysis on the 12th. As of this morning, I have yet to receive any of the results, or any status updates.

Please advise whether this delay is due to an operational oversight, or if research priorities have shifted again without formal notice.

— R. Underhill

>> Distributed via Pneumatic Network Node #306. Do not remove this memo from Bureau premises. <<

Emily sighed at the note as another pneumatic tube landed with a clank in the intake receptacle.

It was barely eight in the morning. Underhill probably hadn’t even had coffee yet.

Deciding that a charitable interpretation of the note’s tone was the best course of action at this hour, Emily slipped the paper into her pocket and made a mental note to reply to it later.

She looked down at the strange journal in her other hand, the one she dredged up from Evidence earlier. On the outside, it looked like any other logbook. But from the pages she’d manage to study in the few hours since, some details seemed to contradict basic facts. And the notes in the margins seemed to chronicle the slow descent of a researcher going off the deep end.

But somehow, it made just enough sense that Emily felt compelled to take it seriously.

Tucking the book under one arm, Emily turned from the pneumatic dispatch terminal and headed to Executive.

Central Executive was the busiest Emily had seen it in days. Co-workers in HRAs criss-crossed the floor, and Emily was grateful to see a few people she recognized among those who had survived the Hiss.

Jesse hadn’t been in her office, so Emily decided that she would have to look for her. Callow’s journal wasn’t exactly internal-memo material.

“…why do you think they’re making us clear out the cafeteria?” a guy wearing a tie and a mail room tag was saying as Emily scanned the area.

“Don’t know. Seems like they’re actually calling it a safe-zone now.” The woman next to him was carrying a slightly dented ration box. “Maybe we’ll even get to eat there again.”

Emily spotted Jesse standing by the corner near the large freestanding HRA unit. She was back in her usual black jacket and ponytail. The Ranger that Jesse was talking to stepped away as Emily approached, and he nodded at her before heading off to the elevators.

“Hey, Jesse.” Emily pointed at the journal she was holding. “Got a moment?”

“Hey,” Jesse said, the lines around her eyes softening. Her gaze flickered to the dusty green cover of the book. “Did you find something?”

“Found it in Evidence, like the file said.” Emily sidestepped as a pair of Rangers jogged past them, casting a side eye at the smattering of people heading in and out of the area. “A little questionable in terms of content, though.”

Jesse tipped her head towards the doors behind her. “Board room?”

Emily glanced in the direction of the heavy doors. “Is it still empty? I thought they’d find some use of the space once I left.”

Jesse motioned at the half-unpacked crates of field gear around the entrance. “We’re setting it up as a command center for the Rangers but no one really likes being watched so closely by all the Directors.” She pushed open one of the doors just enough to slide in, and Emily followed suit.

Emily paused at the doorway, the familiar array of portraits staring back at her from their lofty perches on the high panelled walls.

“Well. No one besides you, maybe.” Jesse broke into a small smile. “Just something about a bunch of old guys staring down at us.”

“It probably is weird,” Emily said, looking up at the low, square slab light. It threw harsh shadows over the room. “But it feels like I’m pushing back a little, just by sitting here.”

Jesse picked a chair, spinning it around once before sitting down. “I guess we are.”

Emily went over to the table, setting the journal down on the edge of the massive concrete surface. She took in all of the equipment laid out in front of them. Mostly recording instruments and field maps, but standard-issue Ranger weapons and armor were racked along the far wall.

Jesse nudged aside a stack of tapes and reached for the book. “So this is the unverified evidence.”

Emily sat down next to her. “You’ll see why once you read it. Someone clearly wanted this hidden without destroying it outright. Bury it in some back room somewhere, make it too inconvenient to find? And no one will.”

Jesse flipped the cover open and examined the spiky, uneven handwriting. “It’s describing that room I found. It says here, cognitive interference…?”

“That’s Bureau-speak for memory loss, usually.”

Jesse looked up. “Isn’t that what’s happening to the Rangers down there right now?”

“That’s true, but there are some concerning inconsistencies in there.” Emily pointed to the first page. Her words came out quicker. “For one thing, there’s no order to the entries. Then there’s this list of names on the first page. There’s twelve - no, thirteen - people listed there, and they’re referenced in the next pages as Rangers who went on excursions into the room.”

She took a breath before continuing. “I took the liberty of cross-referencing that list with Bureau records. And get this. None of these people are on our files.”

Jesse frowned and turned a few more pages. More scrawlings in black ink. Diagrams, logs.

Emily caught herself watching her, and she forced her attention towards straightening a stack of folders on the table.

She wanted nothing more than to comb through the entire journal with annotated sticky notes for every page. But she was Head of Research now, and she also had to keep the labs running and fend off departmental fallout on the side.

“You think they’ve been scrubbed?” Jesse asked. “The Bureau loves doing that, right?”

“It’s possible,” Emily said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic over something that was decidedly not reassuring. But she had always found herself drawn to questions that didn’t want to be answered. “I haven’t found anything with my clearance level, but you might be able to get access to something I can’t.”

“Hmm. I’ll get on that.” Jesse had the book flipped all the way to the end and landed on the inner back cover. “What’s this?”

“Yeah. That.” Emily scooted her chair a little closer. Drawn directly on the scuffed linen inside the back cover, in the same dark ink as the rest of the pages, was a detailed circular sigil. “I’m not really sure. It’s not anything I recognize off the bat.”

They both leaned in towards the page, and Jesse traced the slight indentation of the spindly lines on the cover. “It looks a bit like an occult symbol.”

“It definitely means something.” Emily contemplated the lines radiating from the center of the sigil, the almost fractal-like manner in which they twisted and curled. “I’ll dig through the Bureau’s codex again. Maybe it’s an obscure, archaic system.”

Jesse's eyes flicked towards Emily, but she didn't say anything.

The door to the Board Room opened with a raspy, hollow sound. Emily only realised how close their shoulders were to touching when she and Jesse straightened slightly, almost in unison.

“Uh, sorry. Dr. Pope?” A junior research tech poked her head in. “Murphy said to let you know the latest batch of HRAs were delayed because of a short in the attenuation relay.”

Emily was already calculating the relay failure rate in her head. “I’ll go take a look. In the meantime, ask him to check with Kwan if the form 99-Bs are ready?”

“Sure. Thanks, Dr. Pope.” The tech nodded at Jesse. “Director Faden.” She ducked out and pulled the heavy door shut behind her.

Emily turned back to Jesse. “Duty calls.” She pulled out a sticky note from the back cover of the journal.

“Wow, you’re really prepared,” Jesse said as Emily passed her the note. It already had the thirteen names on the first page copied over in the blue ink of Emily’s favourite pen.

Emily tapped the edge of the journal. “We can compare notes tonight?”

“Yeah, definitely.” Jesse held up the sticky note in her palm up to the light. “I’ll be around. I mean- obviously I’m around, we’re in a lockdown…”

Something about the way Jesse said it pulled at the corner of Emily’s mouth. She picked the journal up and rose from her seat. “I know you are. See you later, okay?”

Jesse stuck the note into her pocket. “I guess I’ll… send you a memo?”

“Sure.” Emily chuckled slightly as they moved to the door. “You do know how to use the pneumatic system, right?”

“God, no,” Jesse muttered, following Emily back outside.

INTERNAL CORRESPONDENCE

TO: Dr. R. Underhill

FROM: Dr. E. Pope

Dr. Underhill,

Thanks for your earlier note, I’ve followed up regarding the sample strains you flagged. It appears the Luck and Probability lab was unable to proceed due to inconsistent labeling across the containers received. It’s unclear at what point during transit the mix-up occurred, though I trust it was unintentional.

If you could kindly clarify which samples correspond to the blue-capped containers, I will ensure the analysis is expedited accordingly.

— Emily Pope

>> Distributed via Pneumatic Network Node #301. Do not remove this memo from Bureau premises. <<

Emily tucked the note into one of the empty pneumatic capsules by the dispatch terminal and stuck the cap on. She suddenly picked out the fuzzy warble of guitars from behind her, amplified by the concrete expanse of the central courtyard.

She turned, and spotted the head janitor of the Oldest House. “Hi, Ahti. Working late tonight?”

Ahti was dragging a mop behind him and didn’t seem to hear her at first. Music continued to leak out of his Walkman’s headphones. As he brought the sweeper closer, he sang under his breath in a language Emily didn’t recognize, and almost seemed to be dancing.

She watched him for a minute. There was something very strange about the man, but at the same time, almost comforting.

Ahti stopped mopping a few feet away from Emily.

“It’s not too late. Not yet.” Ahti swirled the mop in his bucket, but the water remained pristine. “The messages always find their way, even if they miss their first stop.”

Emily held onto the pneumatic capsule. “Oh— okay. Thanks…?”

She was about to press him further on what he meant, but Ahti stuck on his headphones again and resumed cleaning.

Blinking, Emily dropped the capsule into the receptacle, and the air pressure from the tubes pulled the message away from her with an unceremonious whoosh.

She stood in front of the terminal for a few seconds longer, gazing up at the tubes snaking their way to the ceiling.

Adjusting the shoulder strap on her HRA, Emily thought about the sigil in Callow’s old journal again. Something about the pattern of the lines, felt like they were a reminder of something. But what?

In any case, Emily found a few books on pictographs and glyphs buried among Darling’s old books in her office. Some of them dipped into the arcane, but after Jesse’s remark in the Board Room, she thought it might be relevant.

Somewhere far off, a door slammed.

Emily rolled her shoulders back and started heading to her office. Ahti had drifted into the center of the square, sweeping in slow circles beneath the shadows cast by the tall trees under the faux sunlight panels.

As she rounded her corner, Emily almost ran into someone coming from the opposite direction.

“Dr. Pope!” Kwan, from Executive, stopped short. His tie was askew and some of his hair was sticking out in an odd direction. “I was just about to drop these Black Rock forms in your office.”

“It’s okay. I can take them.” Emily took the stack of papers from him.

“Sorry about the delay. Something weird is going on with the copy machine.” Kwan tried adjusting his tie. “Also, I was just going past the Director’s office and she wanted me to pass this note to you.” He gestured at the small piece of paper folded in half on top of the forms.

“Alright, thanks Kwan. I’ll probably have to bother you for more of these forms soon.”

Kwan nodded tiredly. “Sure, no problem. I just hope they can get the machine fixed.” He set off towards Executive again, giving Ahti’s wet floors a wide berth.

Emily balanced the papers on her hip and unfolded the note.

Found something. And also didn’t (You know what I mean). I’m in the old break room near Executive Affairs. Come find me when you’re done with work.

PS- I gave up on the pneumatics. Hope you’re not too disappointed!

Emily smiled to herself and folded the note back up. Back in her office, she swapped the forms for Darling’s old books on nonstandard semiotic theory. The evidence journal didn’t look out of place at all among the dusty hardcovers.

The upper level above Executive Affairs had a lot less foot traffic, seeing as it was only recently swept for the Hiss. Not exactly a safe-zone yet, but Emily had ventured into far weirder wings for much less.

She pushed open the door to the break room.

Jesse was sitting on one of the couches with her boots propped up on the coffee table. Opened document folders were splayed out on the surface, alongside a bag of pretzels, a half-eaten protein bar, and two lidded paper cups.

Jesse let her feet drop when she heard the door open.

“Hey.” Emily raised her eyebrow at an opened bag of trail mix sitting on the floor next to a folder with a red DIRECTORIAL ACCESS ONLY seal. “That’s quite the spread.”

Jesse brushed a few crumbs off her jeans and shot Emily a faintly guilty look. “I wasn’t sure if you’d already eaten, so I brought enough to make it awkward if you say no.”

Emily let out a small laugh. “I’ll never say no to pretzels.” She dropped the stack of books onto the table next to the protein bar and took a seat on the couch.

Picking up one of the cups and handing it to Emily, Jesse waved the stapled document in her other hand. “Coffee first, or you wanna hear what I found first?”

Emily took a sip of the drink. It was still warm, and had the specific chalky tang that came from the vending machines in Executive. She wasn’t sure how she could tell but somehow, she always could. “Okay. Hit me.”

Jesse flipped open the sheaf of papers. “I took a look at the records for the list of names you gave me, and I couldn’t find anything either. What happened to that note…” She fumbled around in her pockets until she found the sticky note crumpled up behind a cushion. Smoothening it out on the table, she scrutinized it again. The ink was slightly smudged.

“But.” Jesse held out a finger. “I decided to look up Dr. Robin Callow, and I found a bunch of old files.” She gestured at the coffee table and at the papers she held. “There’s a lot. Still trying to get through them all.”

Emily nodded in approval. “Nice work.”

“Yep. Just call me Detective Faden.” Jesse grinned slightly and popped a piece of granola into her mouth.

Shaking her head lightly at the joke, Emily reached for a pretzel. “As for the sigil,” she said, picking up the first book from her stack, “after looking through the common systems logged with the Bureau, I think we’re looking at a more regional iconographic syntax. I just can’t figure out if it’s a variant of a known sequence or intentionally coded for obfuscation.”

“Sounds complicated,” Jesse replied from her end of the couch.

Emily squinted at the text. “I’m sure I’ll find it eventually. If not, then we might have to consider that Dr. Callow was slipping into truly speculative territory.”

For a while, they sat in a comfortable silence, punctuated by the rustling of a turning page, the buzz of the emergency light by the door, or a crackle of a snack bag.

Jesse broke the quiet after a while by dropping the file she was holding onto the arm of the couch and draining the last of her coffee. “Holy crap, how do you do this all day?”

“Sheer will and determination, I guess,” Emily deadpanned without looking up. “And snacks.” She paused on her spot in the page, turning to the sigil on the journal again. “Wait. I might have found something.”

“Really?” Jesse moved a little closer to take a look.

As Emily shifted to show her the page, their fingers brushed briefly. It was a light touch, but it felt like a flicker of static passing through.

Neither of them reacted, though Emily’s pulse ticked up as Jesse’s eyes lingered on the diagram on the book for a second too long.

“I guess the lines look similar.” Jesse paused. “…okay, I’m a little lost.”

Emily cleared her throat. “So, it’s not really about the shape of the lines. It’s what the lines are representing.” She pointed at the textbook diagram, at the recursively looping whorls. “The pattern in the arms are encoding a sequence of numbers. And these sequences are meant to evoke certain concepts.”

Jesse sat back. “But it looks like it could be anything.”

“Exactly, which is why it was so hard to figure out.” Emily flipped back a few pages in the book. “I just realised base conversion might be the key here. Callow seemed to be working in base-8.”

She tapped the end of her pen against the hastily written string of numbers she decoded from Callow’s sigil. “And this exact sequence, in decimal? It represents protection.”

Jesse knitted her brows, picking up her file again and shuffling it absent-mindedly. “Protection. From what?”

Emily stared at the central glyph. That was the very first thing she deciphered. “Memory, apparently.”

“Okay, well that can’t be a coincidence, right?” Jesse leaned forward, elbows on her knees.

“It’s almost like the Bureau is trying to cover something up,” Emily said. “The redacted documents, the scrubbed personnel files. But why keep Callow’s journal? Why not just get rid of it?”

“Look at this.” Jesse turned the piece of paper she was holding over. It was a personnel log, and she had one name underlined. “Dale Griggs. Check the journal again? He was on one of Callow’s teams that went into the room, right? And he’s still around. His file says he’s on one of the Ranger sweep teams.”

Emily grabbed the notebook and scanned the page. “We need to talk to him.”

“I’ll ask Arish about it tomorrow,” Jesse said, then let out a sigh. “Maybe I should just go in there. See for myself what the hell is in that room.”

“We don’t know how it works exactly. It could be really dangerous.”

“Yeah.” Jesse looked down at her hands. “But I’m the Director, and that’s gotta count for something, right?”

Emily chewed on the inside of her lip. “I know. But if Callow’s theory is right, we’re dealing with some kind of memory-affecting Threshold. You can’t shoot a cognitohazard.”

Jesse brought her gaze up again to meet Emily’s, and there was something unreadable in her eyes. A sense of responsibility, maybe.

Or regret.

Emily realised she was gripping the journal in her hands. She loosened her hold on it, and her voice softened. “Just let me talk to this guy first, okay?”

There was a moment of silence as they both turned their attention to the mess of papers strewn around them.

“Okay,” Jesse said finally. She hesitated, then leaned back in her seat and reached for the last piece of granola.

Emily set the journal down on the coffee table. The sigil stared back at her, and it almost looked like it was glowing under the break room’s lights.

Chapter Text

West Storage Anomaly Field - Notes and Observations / Dr. Robin Callow

Log #5 - First Casualty

Expedition ID: 01-C

Personnel: Myles Byrne, Eleanor Greaves, Luis Ocampo, Dale Griggs

Time of Ingress: 1034 hrs

Time of Egress: 1051 hrs

Rangers Byrne, Greaves, and Griggs returned without Ranger Ocampo.

Upon debrief, all three displayed incomplete or inconsistent recollections. Byrne and Griggs reported Ocampo being “attacked,” but were unable to describe the attacker or sequence of events.

Greaves reported encountering an unfamiliar individual inside the third corridor. The figure was described as wearing a Bureau-issued Ranger uniform consistent with a late-1990s deployment cycle. Greaves was unable to recall any details of the individual’s face, voice, or behavior.

When asked if this individual was responsible for Ocampo’s disappearance, Greaves and Griggs gave affirmatives, but could not give concrete details. Byrne was unable to provide a definitive response.

Additional Observations:

All three Rangers presented mild disorientation and signs of cognitive lag post-exit.

Rifle diagnostics confirmed that all three had discharged their weapons during the expedition.

When prompted, Byrne stated, “Something went down. We tried to cover Ocampo, but it got out of hand. We had to get out before we lost someone else.”

Recommended Action:

Further expeditions to include post-exit cognitive assessments. Continue monitoring for emergent behavioral patterns.

The door to Emily’s office opened suddenly, and she dropped her pen onto her desk.

“Afternoon, Dr. Pope,” Shields, the one remaining lab tech from Luck and Probability, walked in. She paused by the 3-D hypercube models near the door. “Sorry, I thought I heard you answer.”

Emily tried to file away the journal log into the back of her mind and flipped the book shut. “No, it’s fine. Just got a bit too carried away with reading.”

Shields had a piece of paper clutched in her hand. She was young, one of the newer hires. Now she was effectively the lead researcher for the LPL, solely because her superiors were all floating by the ceilings. “They told me to inform you that Ranger Griggs is set up in Executive and is ready for the interview whenever you are. Oh, and there’s a new circular going out about the new bathroom break schedule.”

She placed the document on Emily’s desk. “But I guess it mainly applies to us junior techs.”

“Thanks.” Emily picked up the memo and gave it a once-over. “Wow. This is actually terrible. Why are they even scheduling bathroom breaks?”

“Yeah, I know,” Shields shrugged. “We tried to tell them, but you know how that went down.”

Dropping that onto the tray alongside the previous bathroom memo, Emily unlocked the desk’s side drawer and placed Callow’s journal inside. “Alright, I’m heading to Executive. By the way, did Dr. Underhill get back yet about the mold sample labels?”

Shields straightened her name tag so that it sat more neatly against the HRA straps. “Uh no. Not yet. I’m holding the samples in the humidity chamber for now, but we really should start running the tests before they degrade any further.”

“Okay, keep me posted.” Emily picked up her notes and made her way to the upper floor of Executive, where brass nameplates met the muted, corporate-red carpet.

Conference Room 2, said the sign outside the entrance.

“Ranger Griggs.” Emily closed the door behind her, and took in the small but plushly-furnished conference room someone else had apparently decided was the best spot for the conversation. The space didn’t exactly scream, ‘relaxed’. “Thanks for making time to talk on such short notice.”

Griggs adjusted the collar on his Ranger coat, looking slightly uncomfortable being seated among the leather-lined chairs at the polished mahogany table. “No problem, Dr. Pope. Not every day I get summoned to Executive. Wasn’t sure if it was about that runaway rubber duck Item from last week.”

“Oh, it’s not about that, don’t worry about it,” Emily answered, sliding into a seat at the table facing the Ranger.

Griggs fiddled with a drink coaster. “We got it back, by the way. Just not as efficiently as we’d hoped.”

Emily placed her work notebook on the table but pushed it to the side. “Actually, I was hoping you could tell me more about this old case you worked on. You were part of an expedition team working a Threshold field, under Dr. Robin Callow?”

“Ah, right.” Griggs settled down a bit more in his chair. “Yeah I guess I have been working for the Bureau for a while now. I think that was like ten years ago? Back when I first started with the Rangers. Basically just a rookie at the time.”

Emily nodded. “I just wanted to ask about one of your earlier expeditions. Specifically the one where Luis Ocampo went missing.”

There was a pause as Griggs knitted his brows. “Uh. I don’t mean to sound dense, but I don’t think I ever worked with anyone named Ocampo.”

Emily blinked, and the clock behind her seemed to tick a little louder. “But I have a log here that says on the expedition headed by Myles Byrne, there were four of you who went in: Byrne, Greaves, Ocampo, and you. And Ocampo didn’t make it out.”

Griggs let out a nervous, halting laugh. “I remember that trip with Myles and Eleanor. But there were only three of us on that expedition, Dr. Pope.”

Emily sat back in her chair.

That did not make much sense. Or did it? She forced out a breath. Should she trust Callow’s notes? Or the fact that the Bureau had no records of Ocampo, and his supposed squadmate has never heard of him?

“You sure there hasn’t been some mix-up in the files or something?” Griggs asked, scratching the side of his jaw. “There were a few teams assigned to that case, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never had an Ocampo with us.”

Emily was about to respond when the door to the conference room creaked open.

Jesse shuffled in, hastily pulling out a chair diagonally from both Emily and Griggs. “Sorry I’m late.” There was a smudge of something like oil on her cheek and hands.

Griggs sat a little straighter. “Director Faden,” he stuttered, staring at Jesse, then at Emily. “Feels like this meeting might be above my pay grade.”

Jesse flicked her wrist. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just sitting in. Pretend I’m not here.”

Emily caught her gaze. Jesse had mentioned possibly not being able to make it for the interview because of some kind of blockage down in Maintenance.

But she was here, and she gave Emily a slight shrug of her shoulder and a small, apologetic smile.

“Director Faden is here for observational purposes,” Emily tried. It came out sounding less convincing than it did in her head.

Griggs shifted in his seat. “Uh, okay.”

“Anyway.” Emily opened her notebook. “I was about to say that Luis Ocampo was listed in Dr. Callow’s research notes. As your squad mate.”

“This might not fully explain it,” Griggs rubbed the back of his neck, “but Dr. Callow wasn’t exactly doing great by time they decided to seal up that room.”

“What do you mean by ‘not doing great’?” Jesse said, then stopped. She held out her hands. “Sorry.”

“Dr. Callow has always been a bit… eccentric. I mean, no disrespect, they were the only reason why we managed to seal off that Threshold properly at all. But kind of the classic parapsychology type, you know?”

Emily tilted her head.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Griggs quickly added.

Emily let the moment pass without commenting further.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is,” Griggs continued, “that case messed us all up quite a bit. Especially Callow, since they were in charge of it. Something really weird was going on in that room. All that business with the messed up corridors and the anchor time limit? Probably best that the Bureau put a stop to it.”

“Anchor time limit?” Emily asked, turning the page. She saw the term being scribbled a few times in Callow’s journal, but always in the margins so far. It sounded important, the way Griggs’ eyebrow twitched as he said it.

“Twenty minutes and thirteen seconds,” he said. “Still remember it to this day.”

“What happens after?”

Griggs shrugged. “We were just told to get out before then. No matter what. I keep feeling like something horrible happens if you stay too long, can’t explain why. Not that it’s ever happened to any of us.”

He paused, tapping his fingers once on the table.

“At least, not that I remember.”

“What do you think?” Emily asked, as she and Jesse took the steps back down to Central Executive.

Jesse scrubbed at her knuckle with her other hand, but it didn’t seem to do much for the oil stain. “About Griggs? I feel like he’s telling the truth.”

“Me too,” Emily mused. She nodded at Kwan as he hurried past with an armful of electrical tape. “But then, what gives? Did Callow just hallucinate those names?”

Jesse slowed to a stop at the hallway leading to her office. “You know, I could go find out.” She looked down at her stained fingers, then back at Emily. “I go in, take a quick look, and get out. Ten minutes, max.”

Emily crossed her arms, letting her gaze settle on the giant, leafless plants that flanked the Director’s office. The bulbous trunks burst from the confines of the planters, spiralling into spindly limbs that ended in small white blooms.

The inconsistencies were piling up. Callow’s notes didn’t quite line up with the Bureau’s version of events, making them borderline unreliable. But right now, they were all she had. Uncertainty was an unfortunate constant in applied research, but this was pushing it.

Then again, if anyone had a shot at handling this, it would be Jesse.

“Actually—” Emily turned back to Jesse. “I’d like to take a look at it.”

Jesse hesitated, wiping her hands down the side of her jeans. “At the room?”

“Just the outside,” Emily added quickly. “Don’t worry, I’m not charging in there blind. I just want to know what we’re up against.”

You could still learn a lot about a construct from the shape of its boundaries, she thought.

Jesse’s brows were slightly furrowed, but eventually she nodded. “Okay, I’ll go with you.”

They walked back through Research, past the towering trees and the concrete columns pockmarked by bullets.

A bathroom door stood just off the main hall. Emily glanced at the crooked OUT OF ORDER sign taped across the door, then kept walking.

The elevator arrived almost as soon as Jesse pressed the call button. Once inside, Emily spotted a few bent and twisted paper clips lying on the floor.

The doors closed with a resonant ping.

She hit the button for 3B. “So, how are things going on the other floors?”

Jesse leaned into the corner railing, letting out a breath. “It’s going, I guess,” she said, her lips curling slightly, though her words were quieter than usual. “The place is still standing, which is probably more than I expected.”

Emily gave a soft snort. “You shouldn’t sell yourself short, you know.” She watched the floor numbers tick down on the counter. “But seriously. I hope you’re holding up okay.”

Jesse’s gaze flickered over to her, but before she could answer, the elevator doors rolled open to a darkened corridor.

Sublevel 3B seemed to be illuminated solely by emergency lights and a vending machine at the far end of the hallway. The hulking machine hummed, its dim white light something of a beacon in the gloom.

“Stick close,” Jesse said instead, stepping out of the elevator.

Emily followed her into the dark. The air felt heavier down here, and broken glass crunched underfoot.

“It’s strange how there aren’t any bodies,” Emily observed. The fact that there were no traces left of her infected coworkers after they’d been neutralized, hinted at yet another mechanism of the Hiss that she hadn’t been able to decipher.

Jesse looked back over her shoulder as she picked her way around the overturned office furniture littering the hallway. “Yeah. Kinda gets to me, sometimes.”

Emily stopped to pick up a dropped name tag.

Federal Bureau of Control, Parapsychology Division. The tag owner’s name was smeared, illegible.

She placed it back where she found it, on a toppled mail cart. Documents and envelopes spilled across the carpet alongside spent casings.

Jesse stopped in front of a nondescript door. The sign simply read, STORAGE ROOM.

“Is this it?” Emily asked. It looked like any other door in the lower wings of Research. Maybe a little too unexceptional.

“Yep.” Jesse twisted the doorknob and pulled the door open, revealing a solid slab of Black Rock. “These walls go around the entire room. But as far as I can tell, this is the only door.”

Emily peered at the dark, semi-matte surface. She pulled out her pen and lightly dragged it across the surface, noting where the nib hitched over a slight variance in the surface. “There’s a seam here.”

“Do you think the wall is cracked or something?” Jesse asked.

Emily made a noncommittal noise as she scrutinized the surface. An odd feeling washed over her. She was sure she had walked this hallway before, dozens of times. It was Research after all, and while she usually kept this to herself, she spent more nights here than she’d ever admit.

She frowned, rolling the pen in her between her hands, trying to place the uncertain memory she had of this particular hallway.

Had there always been two water coolers standing side by side a few feet away?

Was that brownish stain in the corner of the carpet always there?

How many times had she walked by this very door not knowing this was here? How was it even possible that she hadn’t stumbled upon this on her own?

And what was that sound?

“…Emily? Hey, are you okay?”

A hand on her arm.

Emily turned around, blinking. She pulled herself back.

Sublevel 3B. A gloomy side hallway. And Jesse, framed in the weak light filtering from that vending machine, a concerned expression on her face.

Her hand was still on Emily’s arm.

Emily tried quashing the strange sense of deja vu that just took over and filed it away for later. “I was just thinking,” she managed, “about how they managed to hide this in plain sight for so long.”

“You were kind of out of it for a while,” Jesse said, peering at her. She pulled her hand back slightly, letting it drop to her side. “I called your name a few times.”

Emily exhaled and stuck her pen back into her pocket. “Sorry. I got turned around for a second.”

“Maybe we should head back up.” Jesse cast a glance at the wall again and reached for the doorknob.

“Yeah. We probably should.” Emily’s gaze lingered on the seam in the Black Rock until Jesse closed the door with a soft click.

They said nothing as they turned and headed back to the elevator. Near the water coolers, Emily caught sight of a half-spilled bag of what looked like salt on the ground.

Once inside the elevator, Jesse stabbed the button for the doors to close. As they lurched up, one of the ceiling bulbs blinked. Jesse prodded one of the paper clips on the ground with the toe of her boot.

“Okay,” Emily said, “Let’s do it.”

Jesse looked up, eyebrows raised.

“Ten minutes. Then you’re out of there.” Emily held up her hand. “And I’m putting together a Protocol for you to follow.”

Jesse tipped her head as she leaned against the elevator rails again.

“Ready when you are.”

That night, Emily sat hunched over Callow’s notebook, her own notes spread in a vague fan around her on the office couch.

Jesse had to be in Maintenance again. “I’ll have to miss out on the research tonight, unfortunately,” she had said. “Ahti said things are acting up down there.”

Emily waved her off casually. “I’ll be fine. You’ve got your duties. Janitor’s Assistant, right?”

Jesse smiled, and Emily found herself smiling back before she could stop it.

Hours later, Emily sat among her balled up notes, the air coming from the ceiling vents stale and dry.

She heaved a sigh.

Most of Callow’s journal was written without much thought for chronological order or even thematic sense. It was almost as if Callow flipped the book open to a random page every time and wrote in whatever manner they pleased.

Across the page, down the page, sentences cut off, thoughts interrupted by drawings of what looked like floor plans. Rooms with dimensions that intersected wrong, axes that cut into each other at odd angles.

Interspersed were more lucid, structured logs but it was painstaking work, sifting through the paragraphs of scattered personal tangents for them.

Eventually, after deciphering an especially lengthy paragraph Callow wrote on the origins of the ZZ plant (Zamioculcas zamiifolia), Emily flipped to the next page, scanned it, and marked it with a sticky note.

Log #13 - Anchor Time Limit

Expedition ID: 02-D

We began timing the excursions from Expedition 2A onward, initially to determine whether the passage of time within the field matched that outside it. We confirmed that there is no significant time dilation; however this process revealed a more concerning property of the field.

During Expedition 2D, Rangers Kendra Foss and Dominic Mercer failed to return. According to the remaining team members (Derek Ansari and Casey Graham), the team had been delayed in one of the interior hallways when a door “disappeared”. When the team returned to the main room for egress, Foss claimed that the exit was no longer accessible, which the rest of the team disputed. While the team was debating this, Mercer also eventually claimed that the door was gone.

At this point, Ansari and Graham made the decision to withdraw for backup. When the next team was deployed two hours later, Foss and Mercer were no longer present in the main room and could not be located.

My working theory is that the disappearance of the exit is tied directly to the length of time an individual remains within the field. Expedition members entered consecutively: Foss entered first (team lead), followed by Mercer, Ansari, and Graham. The sequence of their reports supports this assumption.

Ansari’s recorded time during Expedition 2D was twenty minutes and thirteen seconds. For now, I find it prudent to treat this as the maximum “safe” duration to remain within the field, and it is unjustifiable to risk additional personnel by exceeding it.

I am designating this duration the Anchor Time Limit. Future excursions must remain within this window to mitigate the recurrence of these exit-disappearance events.

Emily sat back and squeezed her eyes shut. Whether this Anchor Time Limit applied uniformly to every person or not, Jesse’s window was narrower still.

Opening the Black Rock containment was already a risk in itself, potentially allowing Callow’s field to spread.

But there was another problem now: Jesse was their Polaris conduit. If they closed that Black Rock panel on her, their connection to the Resonance would be cut off. And every HRA would blink out instantly.

An unacceptable consequence.

Emily pushed her hair out of her face, pulled her calculator towards herself, and punched some numbers in. When she’d said yes to being Jesse’s Head of Research, she took on a responsibility towards the Director, towards the Bureau.

One way or another, she would have this figured out.

Chapter Text

Bright white light leaked out of the open Black Rock panel.

Jesse stepped into the square of light projected onto the dusty office carpet. Salt crunched under her heel.

Compared to the darkness of Sublevel 3B, the interior of the room was blinding. She squinted against it. The air buzzed intangibly.

Jesse turned around.

Emily stood across the hallway behind monitor-sized pieces of equipment, hauled down from the upper levels of Research, now balanced on a couple of old side tables.

There was a stopwatch in her hand. “Ready?” she called out.

Jesse exhaled. “Yeah.”

Emily signalled to the armed Ranger nearby. He flipped switches on the machine next to him and it whirred to life.

“Okay, Jesse.” Emily turned to her. “You can start the Protocol now.”

Jesse checked her watch. Then patted her pockets. They were all empty, save for a sprig of rosemary in her left jacket pocket.

She checked her watch again.

“Steel. Descent. Fever,” Jesse recited. “Aid. Elapse. Route. Administration. Reflection.”

Emily was watching her. She was mostly in shadow, but Jesse saw her nod.

“Alright. We’re good to go.” Emily sounded professional, capable as always. But there was an edge to her voice Jesse couldn’t quite place. “Director Faden, you may proceed. Ingress recorded at 9.53pm.”

Jesse turned to the opening again and stepped in, hands empty. The panel groaned almost all the way shut behind her, leaving behind the tiniest crack.

Emily said they had to leave the smallest gap manageable so that Jesse’s Resonance could still seep through. So that she could still power the HRAs on the outside. Emily tried explaining wavelengths, amplitudes, diffraction.

Most of it went over Jesse’s head, but she trusted her.

Now, Jesse took in the space: a large almost perfectly square room, with rows of desks arranged in a grid facing her. Each had a black typewriter sitting atop.

She counted the desks. Eight rows, eight columns.

On the far end of the room, a row of doors, all closed. The left corner of the room was in disarray, in sharp contrast to the symmetrical grid of desks.

Two of the desks had been dragged from their neat rows and pushed up against the leftmost door. A barricade.

Against what?

Jesse stared at that side of the room for a moment, then forced her shoulders to drop.

It’s fine, she told herself. This is what the document said. Totally expected. Totally not weird at all.

She made her way over to the nearest desk. A black mug with the words “World’s Greatest Niece” sat on the edge of the table. The handle was broken off. Upon closer examination, Jesse realised the typewriter had the letter F missing.

Papers were scattered all over the surface, with some sheets on the cracked green upholstery of the desk chair and on the ground.

Jesse tentatively reached out and tried flipping the switch on the desk lamp. It didn’t work. Undeterred, she picked up one of the pages lying on the seat of the chair. It was yellowing and curled at the corners and almost completely blank.

There was only one line on the page, in faded typewriter print on the upper left corner.

Mr. David Clark,

And that was it. The rest of the paper had a muddy, mottled quality to it. Jesse let it drop back onto the chair.

She moved on to the next desk.

The chair was entirely missing from this one, and the lamp still didn’t work. As she leaned in over the desk, her palm caught on something rough on the edge of the table. A shallow groove was gouged down the right side.

Jesse paused, did a double take.

This typewriter also had a missing F key.

Shards of black ceramic lay under the table. Crouching down, she picked up the largest piece and turned it over.

World’s Greatest Niece.

Jesse frowned and set the mug fragment on the table with a clank. She checked the desk on the row behind her.

No F key. Non-functioning desk lamp. Same mug, with the same cheesy pink font, except this one was intact, handle and everything.

Stacks of old documents cluttered this desk too. The pages were either all completely blank or had only one or two names legible.

Director Trench.

Mr. David Clark.

Annie Driscoll, Archival Officer.

Jesse backed away from the desk and moved slowly through the rows. Every desk had the same typewriter, same mug, same gouge on the wooden edge of the table.

She stopped at the fifth row, almost dead center in the grid of desks. Splintered cracks down the side of one desk. A telltale sign that someone had fired into it. Dried blood was smeared on the drawer handles of the desk next to it.

Jesse almost drew the Service Weapon but decided against it, the thought of its weight brushing against her fingers.

That faint buzzing was still there. It wasn’t like Polaris, who was a fluttering, a pulse, threaded through her every nerve and fiber. This sound hovered in the background, straddling the line between real and imagined.

Emily said to look out for anything out of the ordinary. “Doors that lead nowhere. Blood stains, maybe. Be careful, okay? Don’t go in too far for now.”

Jesse regarded the sixty four desks in the room, the missing F keys, the overhead lighting that felt too bright for the ceiling’s old tube fixtures.

They were the same recessed florescent bulbs that normally flickered to half-life in other Bureau hallways, but here they bore down on her like a spotlight.

What did ordinary even mean, anyway?

Jesse decided that she would have to check the doors. She approached the far wall and realised that each door had the same “Storage Room” plate affixed to it.

Taking a small breath, Jesse started with the door on the right.

The doorknob turned with a slight squeak, and the door swung open to reveal a long hallway. Only one other door stood at the other end of the corridor, the walls left and right plain and featureless.

Remembering how Emily warned that doors could potentially disappear in here, Jesse cast a wary glance at the threshold before stepping through.

She left the door open and walked down the length of the hallway, trying to keep her footsteps light against the moss-coloured carpet.

Was it just her, or did it feel like she needed to take more steps than made sense to reach the other end?

The door ahead was also labelled “Storage Room”. Was it the same door, though? Jesse pushed down the unease bubbling up from the pit of her stomach as she tried the knob.

It turned easily.

She was in a regular-sized filing room full of shelves lined with binders and folders. Some boxes had toppled over, spilling papers across the aisle.

Right by the door sat a Ranger’s helmet with its visor cracked and the earpiece ripped out.

Jesse bent down, tracing the trail of broken helmet pieces across to the shelves.

Beneath the lowest shelf, half-buried by a tipped-over box, lay the missing earpiece.

The room thrummed with an indistinct whisper as Jesse crouched by the boxes. Reaching in under the shelf, her hand grasped the small device.

A soft thud sounded.

Jesse yanked her arm back and looked up. But the room was as it was: inanimate, desolate. She looked down at the curved item in her hand.

I probably just imagined that.

She slotted the earpiece in and pressed play. The device flared to life. A man’s voice, hoarse and faint:

I… I need to remember. Where the door was. It’s gone. It was there, now it’s gone. I told her to leave without me.

Anita. Yes. That’s her name.

But she wanted to help me. And they got to her. They fucking got her. She was a friend. She was a—

My name. I’m Thomas Harper. Ranger Second Class. Ranger Harper.

Ranger Jones…

Thomas Jones.

James Jones.

…don’t forget me.

The recording dragged on, just dead air, the sound of something thumping again and again in the background. Then, click.

“Hello.”

Jesse spun around, still crouched. The earpiece slipped from her fingers.

A blank-eyed woman stood in the doorway. She stared at Jesse, swaying slightly. One of her shoes was missing.

Bruises the colour of dirt marked her face, and a patch of dark red stained the side of her once white button-down shirt.

The woman stepped into the filing room and the humming grew a little louder.

Jesse’s heartbeat picked up. The humming, it wasn’t in the room.

It was in her head.

This new sound was a tremor on the surface of Polaris. Muddying the waters, clouding her Resonance.

“Do I know you?” the woman asked, warbled. Her voice a pitch too high.

Jesse’s eyes flicked to the fallen earpiece. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you—” the woman faltered. “Do you know me?”

Jesse tried to steady her breaths. In, out.

There were two exits. The woman was blocking the way Jesse had come from, and the other one led deeper in.

Has it been ten minutes already? Jesse didn’t want to risk looking at her watch. Maybe it was time to leave.

“Why don’t you remember me?” the woman asked, louder now. She took another step, shuffling on her one bare foot. The stain on her shirt was old blood from a bullet wound.

The earpiece was just out of reach. It evidence of something, though Jesse wasn’t sure of what. She needed to take it with her.

“I’m sorry,” Jesse said, “I don’t know you.” She lunged forward, scooping the earpiece into her hand, and made for the door.

Jesse tried to skirt around the woman and the shelf, but the distance was narrower than she expected.

The woman snatched Jesse’s wrist as she tried ducking around her.

Her fingers locked tight against Jesse’s skin, like cold iron. Much too strong for a person with a hole in her side.

“Stay,” she droned, as Jesse twisted in her grasp. “Stay.”

It was almost instinct now. Jesse drew her free hand back. But as she aimed her palm in front of her, something hitched. As if her Resonance shuddered, winked, thinned for a second.

Still, a second later the air bucked and Launch threw the woman back like a puppet.

She slammed into the back wall. No screaming, just crumpled straight to the ground. Jesse thought for a moment that she had gone still. But the woman jerked upright, her arms dragging herself on the shelves.

Jesse turned and ran. Back through the empty hallway, the space stretching oddly now before her. A muffled pounding of her boots on the carpet. Behind her, the sound of pursuing footsteps. They were just as fast, just as frantic.

Jesse burst through the other door, back among the grid of desks. The exit was still there.

Lifting one of the chairs, Jesse braced herself. The woman barrelled in, heading straight for Jesse.

“Who are you?” Jesse shouted.

The woman crashed past the desks, giving no answer.

Jesse hesitated, hand hovering, chair at the ready. It was one thing to be pitching office furniture at warped, corrupted entities who were also shooting back. Somehow, this person felt too… human.

But she showed no signs of stopping, pushing past the tables. There was a delirious desperation in her eyes.

When she got too close, Jesse hurled the chair at her.

It clipped the woman in the shoulder and she staggered back. “Stay… please,” she rasped, hunching over.

Jesse retreated among the workstations. The exit was behind her now.

As she grasped the handle of the door, the woman threw herself forward, screaming. It was a brittle, misshapen sound.

Jesse wrested the door open and stumbled back. The last thing she saw before she shoved the door shut was the woman’s face, contorted with anguish, and rage. Her bruised face streaked with wordless tears.

Jesse met the ground outside the storage room, the impact biting her knees. “Close it,” she gasped, fingers still clenched tight around the earpiece.

“She’s out!” Emily yelled. “Seal it up!”

The Black Rock panel slowly ground shut over the West Document Storage Room.

“Jesse.” Emily was next to her now, her fair hair almost coronal in the dim light. “What happened?”

Jesse sucked in lungfuls of the stale basement air. She let the earpiece drop.

“I’m… I’m not sure,” she eventually managed.

“You’re okay.” Emily’s hand came down on Jesse’s shoulder. “You’re back.”

All Jesse could do was to focus on that gentle pressure on her arm, trying to push the haunted look in that woman’s face out of her head. She nodded slightly, eyes still on the dusty, salt-strewn carpet.

The stutter she had felt inside the room was nothing she had ever experienced before. She was out of there, but the sensation lingered on her palms. Tenuous, almost undetectable.

Ever since the Hedron incident, Polaris had burned bright and constant in Jesse. Like a second heart, beating alongside her own. A guiding star.

But now it flickered, ever so slightly. Even on the other side of the Black Rock, even as Emily helped her up, even as Jesse flexed her fingers and tried to reassure Emily that she was fine.

The waver in the Resonance was still there. Like a flame caught in a sigh from something she couldn’t name.

Chapter Text

Emily rushed through the courtyard of Central Research, footsteps ricocheting off the concrete. It was only 9.30am, and another small misfortune had befallen the HRA production team.

Apparently Murphy and Kwan had taken it upon themselves to fix whatever was going on with the copy machine, causing it to print pre-filled 99-Bs non-stop. The Quarry team just dropped off a ridiculously large shipment of Black Rock at the HRA lab and they barely had enough space to fit all of it.

It was decided that the best course of action was to temporarily decommission that particular copy machine.

Now, the HRA lab looked like a miniature version of the Quarry itself, with just enough space to walk to and from the HRA machine.

With that near-catastrophe averted, Emily took a few deep breaths, smoothed a crease from her lab coat, and thought about how great a coffee would be at the moment. Then she pushed through the doors of Luck and Probability.

She was greeted by the sight of Shields standing at the roulette table, or the Central Luck Calibration Table, as it was officially termed. Shields had goggles pulled over her eyes and a flask of blue liquid in her hand.

Instead of roulette, there were several playing cards laid out on the table, with the Queen of Spades turned up.

“Hey, Leslie,” Emily said. “Sorry I’m late! I got held up at the HRA lab.”

Shields swirled around, almost dropping the flask. “Dr. Pope!” The junior researcher quickly set the liquid down on the table and pulled up her goggles. “I might be onto something with these mold samples!”

Emily leaned down, arms by her side, careful not to touch anything on the table. She peered at the flask. The liquid inside had a cloudy tinge to it. “Really? Dr. Underhill would be quite excited to read the report, I think!”

“Well…” Shields looked down at her gloved hands. “This test isn’t part of the test battery Dr. Underhill requested. But it’s the only one showing promising results.”

Emily paused. “Oh. Interesting. So the controlled decay probability and coin flip tests came back null?”

Shields moved over to one of the side tables and produced a slim folder from the stacks of documents covering the desk. “Along with the magnetic deflection test. No effects so far.” She passed the folder to Emily.

Emily tucked it under her arm and went back over to the roulette table. A 1-dot mahjong tile sat among the cards. “What about this?”

Shields hurried back over. “Ah, that! The mold seems to be messing with the mahjong tiles too. The thing is, the tests Dr. Underhill requested all produce binary results: up/down, heads/tails, yes/no. But cards and mahjong have softer outcome distributions.”

Emily nodded slowly. “So… stochastic resonance?”

“My thoughts exactly. Seems like the mold is producing a natural vibration, some kind of low-level noise. And it’s influencing the outcome distribution of the card deck and mahjong tile draw.”

“That’s very curious.” Emily tapped a finger against the folder. “Could you send a copy of these results over to my office when you’re done? I’ll be sure to mention it to Dr. Underhill later.”

“You’re going down there?” Shields looked surprised. Maybe even a little sympathetic.

Emily sighed and shrugged. “Sometimes a face-to-face conversation is more effective than passing messages through the tubes.”

“Right,” Shields said, tugging at her gloves. “I didn’t receive any response about the blank labels, so I went ahead and ran the tests on the mold samples anyway. Took photographs of the containers and assigned arbitrary labels to each of them.”

Emily flipped the file open, scanning through the neat rows of numbers and the accompanying photographs. Even through the haziness of the photo film, the mold’s colours shone vividly, like sea coral. “That should work for now. Hopefully, Dr. Underhill’s lab knows which samples are which. Thanks, Leslie. Great work.”

Shields blinked, and a small smile popped up on her face. “Oh— thanks.” She picked up a pair of die from the table and rolled them around in her palm. “I’ll keep you updated on these tests.”

As Emily left the lab, her gaze drifted to her office door right across the courtyard. A coffee might have helped but what she really needed was some actual shut-eye. She’d barely slept since Jesse tumbled back out of the Storage Room looking stunned, a broken Ranger’s earpiece in her hand.

During the debrief, Jesse kept saying she was alright. Emily didn’t want to push it, so she focused on keeping her notes thorough. All while clocking the quiet turmoil in Jesse’s eyes that hadn’t been there before.

Between the debriefs, insisting and signing off on Jesse’s standard medical check, logging the earpiece as evidence (after Protective Studies cleared it for dangerous properties), and grinding out the initial incident report, Emily’s night had disappeared. She barely had time to skim through the actual recorded message on the earpiece when a knock at her door dragged her to the HRA lab’s Black Rock situation.

Her mind leapt to a dozen connections when she first heard the recording, but she wanted to pick it apart word by word, before letting her theories solidify.

For now, Emily had one more thing on her morning’s to-do list.

A lab assistant was working the topside monitoring station near the elevator that led down to Underhill’s domain.

Several analogue panels displaying various metrics sat on the workstation, wires snaking down parallel to the elevator shaft. The lab tech squinted at the displays and wrote something into a logbook.

He looked up as Emily approached. “Morning, Dr. Pope. Headed down? Or just dropping something off?”

“I’m going to Dr. Underhill’s lab.” Emily watched the panel needles on the workstation jump and waver. “Is she around?”

“She’s in her office. Whether she’s receiving visitors is… well.” The lab tech gave a knowing tilt of his head.

Emily offered him a dry smile.

The lab tech reached into a box and pulled out a respirator mask. “Spore counts are a bit high today. Going to have to ask you to keep this on the whole time down there.”

“Sure thing.” Emily pulled the mask on and stepped onto the elevator platform.

The open-sided freight lift shuddered before beginning its descent. The walls of the elevator shaft crawled upwards as the lights of Central Research receded. In almost no time at all, the shaft was plunged into a murky darkness, illuminated only by the lights on the elevator’s guard rails.

Emily stood by the elevator control panel, silently observing how as the platform moved, the concrete walls grew slick with mold. Starting out in patches, the growths got larger and more abundant, glowing green, brown, blue.

By the time the elevator reached its destination with another resounding jolt, it was as if Emily had been dropped into another dimension entirely. One where Oldest House had been almost completely subsumed by rot and decay.

Greyish specks twirled through air. Even through the mask, the wet scent of ancient earth was uncompromising.

It was a far cry from the sterile surfaces of the organic labs up above, or even the dust-ridden research archives. Up there, the humidity levels were at least humane.

Emily tried not to sweat through her shirt or breathe in too deeply as she navigated the path up to Underhill’s lab. A pair of Rangers stood guard outside on the raised platform. They both nodded as Emily approached.

“Is Dr. Underhill inside?” she asked, her own words muffled to her ears.

One of the Rangers stepped forward. “Yeah, she’s in there.” She tapped a gloved knuckle on the door three times.

“Who is it?” a mildly annoyed voice asked from inside.

“It’s Dr. Pope,” the Ranger said, and a moment later the door creaked open.

Raya Underhill stood on the other side of the threshold, a pair of forceps in her hand. Brownish residue clung to the tips. “Well don’t just stand there, Dr. Pope, you’re letting in the spores. My ventilation filters are already strained enough as they are.”

Emily stepped through and closed the door behind her. Oddly enough, Underhill herself didn’t have a mask on.

The Threshold specialist walked to the workbench in the middle of the room and went back to probing a particularly large fungal sample. “So, what brings you down here? I hope it’s not just to tell me that Logistics has mucked up my request for the amber glass sampling jars again.”

“No complaints from Logistics today, miraculously.” Emily placed the folder Shields gave her onto Underhill’s desk. “I’m here with the results from the Luck and Probability tests you requested last week.”

Underhill paused, a large mold stalk still pinched between the forcep jaws. “Oh. A little overdue, I’d say. But if there’s anything in that report, it might just bring me closer to the next breakthrough.”

“I’m not sure if the results show what you’re looking for, but the test battery you requested mostly came back negative,” Emily replied carefully.

“I see.” Underhill eyed the folder like it was an adequate but ultimately uninteresting specimen. “That’s unexpected.”

“Shields is trying out a different test battery on the samples. The card and tile tests. Results are preliminary at this point, but I thought you might want to know that she thinks she’s found something.”

The vents in Underhill’s office hummed. She put the forceps down. “Dr. Shields was not instructed to run parlour games with my samples.”

Emily shrugged. “I’ll admit those are more esoteric methods, but a correlation still means something for your theory, doesn’t it?” She watched as Underhill peeled her gloves off.

“Hmm. Time will tell, I suppose,” Underhill responded, dropping the gloves into a receptacle. “I’d like to see those results the moment they’re available.”

Emily was acutely aware of Underhill’s gaze on her, as if the other scientist was visually dissecting her. But she refused to squirm. “Of course.”

Underhill placed a hand on her hip. “Was that all?”

“There is something else.” Emily found herself hesitating, but decided she had to say it. “We recently discovered an active containment site on Sublevel 3B. There are some signs the current containment protocols are… inadequate. I just wanted to warn you that part of it is vertical alignment with the Mold Threshold.”

“I find it a bit hard to believe that as Head of Research, you let something like this slip past you.” Underhill went around to the other end of the workbench and began riffling through a box of sample labels. “Still getting a handle on your new responsibilities, I see.”

“I’d rather inform you early than wait until it becomes a cross-contamination report,” Emily said evenly. “The Storage Room Threshold is stable across levels, but the Mold isn’t.”

“You should know that I have as much control over the spread of the Mold as I do over the weather. If this turns into a containment breach, Dr. Pope, the fault will be yours. I’ll make sure that’s reflected in the report.”

Of course she would.

Emily felt a twitch in her eyebrow but ignored it. She exhaled slowly, counting to five in her head. “Then I guess we’ll both be watching the containment logs closely.”

Underhill said nothing, and instead made a low, unimpressed sound.

Emily turned to go. As she grabbed the door handle, Underhill called out behind her, “Don’t forget to decontaminate when you get back to Central, Dr. Pope. Wouldn’t want the Mold to settle into your office.”

Emily gave her a curt smile before closing the office door.

On the elevator ride back up, she thought about Mold-1, the gigantic fungal entity that previously resided deep within the Threshold. Underhill was so sure it had been the source of the growths. It was dead now, Jesse had made sure of that, but somehow the Mold persisted.

Emily leaned against the rail and allowed herself a heavier-than-usual sigh into her mask.

It was the same with the Hiss, clinging onto the Oldest House like a persistent flu. Emily kept this from everyone, even Jesse, but she was worried that without understanding what really sustained the hostile resonance, all the Rangers were doing was playing some twisted game of whack-a-mole. Clearing one area while losing another to the infection.

And now this mysterious Storage Room had come out of dormancy. It felt like the House was one mishap away from dimensional collapse.

Had it always been this way? Had Darling, and Ash Jr. before him, just kept up the illusion of control when the Bureau was being held together with figurative duct tape?

Or was she in over her head?

The glistening growths on the walls gave way to plain grey concrete again. Emily got off the elevator.

“Thanks. It’s a bit muggy down there today,” she said to the lab tech as he held open the door to decontamination for her.

He nodded grimly.

Once inside the chamber, and hearing the door seal shut behind her, Emily pulled the mask off and placed it into a chute.

The speaker in the corner of the ceiling crackled. “Decontamination procedure initiating,” a pre-recorded voice announced. “Kindly ensure your eyes remain fully closed and avoid voluntary inhalation for the next 15 seconds. Maintain your arms in a neutral position throughout the duration of the process. If you experience any unexpected symptoms such as rupturing of the tympanic membrane or internal hemorrhaging, please remain calm and notify your assigned Decontamination Compliance Officer immediately.”

Emily shut her eyes as a tone sounded. The misters hissed as they flooded the room with a cocktail of chemicals, causing the exposed areas of her skin to tingle. A light pulsed through the room so brightly that she saw it through the skin of her eyelids. Above her, the speaker started playing the Cleansing Incantation on loop.

Undulate. Rhetoric. Pill. Heal. Captivate.

Undulate. Rhetoric. Pill. Heal. Captivate…

She held her breath against the sting in the air. This was far from Emily’s first time in the decontamination chamber, and she knew exactly how the process worked. But maybe because she was so familiar with the principles behind it that she knew it wasn’t foolproof. There was always the possibility that a germ survives it.

Or a spore, stuck on the bottom of a shoe.

Or something worse, like a corruption. Hidden away somewhere deep, where the chemicals and formulas can’t touch.

The tone blared again. The misters stopped and the chanting cut off. Emily opened her eyes to see the door opposite rolling open.

“Eardrums okay?” the lab tech asked as she walked out.

Emily touched her earlobes, her fingers coming away dry. She nodded. He handed her a form to sign and a mint for the coppery taste on her tongue.

She made her way back to her office, ready to crash onto the couch. But when Emily opened her office door, she saw that the spot had already been taken.

“Jesse? I thought you had a meeting with the Board.”

Jesse pushed herself upright on Emily’s couch, blinking a couple of times. “Crap. I might have passed out for a moment.” She grimaced and raked her fingers through the reddish strands that had escaped the twist on the back of her head. “Hope you don’t mind that I sort of commandeered your couch.”

Emily dropped the unopened mint on her desk. “Oh! I don’t mind. But I thought you said the Board wanted to talk. It sounded serious.”

“Nah.” Jesse kicked up one of her legs and started redoing the lace on her boot. “I cut the call short. Didn’t feel like they were trying to say anything useful.”

Emily went over to the coffee table and started clearing out the papers and books she left strewn over the surface from the night before. “Sorry about the mess. I didn’t realise it was already morning.” She felt her cheeks heat up a bit as she spotted all the pencil shavings and pretzel crumbs on the table.

“Don’t be, I’m the one who barged in here.” Jesse rooted around in the cushions and came up with a stapler. She offered it somewhat sheepishly towards Emily. “I like your office a lot more than mine.”

“Really?” Emily took the stapler from her and pursed her lips. She looked at the dusty shelves crammed full of books behind Jesse. “A lot of people would say the exact opposite.”

Jesse rested her chin on her hands as Emily brushed the crumbs from the tabletop. “My place looks like a showroom. And that photo of me right outside in the hall gives me the creeps. How did it even get there?”

Surface sufficiently cleared of disorder, Emily dropped into a seat on the couch. “You’re not going to like this, but you’ll probably need to take that photo eventually.”

“Ugh, why? It’s already there, and it’s not even my best angle,” Jesse protested, even though a small grin played on her face. “I’m joking. I don’t even know what that means.”

Emily found herself laughing a little, glad to see a flash of Jesse’s usual self after what happened on Sublevel 3B. “The Oldest House must have gotten the photo from somewhere, right? So you’ll need to close the loop,” she reasoned.

Jesse’s eyebrow lifted. “Are you saying that it got it from the future?”

“Just a theory I have. Time-travel shenanigans.” Emily managed a coy smile.

Jesse let out a chuckle. Her laugh was wry, tinged with self-consciousness, but there was a warmth to it that caught Emily off-guard. She had to remind herself yet again that Jesse was the Director.

But sometimes, it didn’t feel like it.

Sometimes, it felt like the veil of the Bureau was thinning, slipping. Like now, as they sat on her office couch, knees almost touching.

“So…” Jesse started, a note of seriousness returning to her voice, “Did you manage to check out that recording from the room yet?”

Emily blinked and shifted in her seat. “I’ve gone over it a little.” She pulled out a portable playback unit from under the coffee table. The earpiece was still plugged into the machine. “I have some theories, though.”

Jesse peered at the squarish audio deck with mild curiosity. “What’s that?”

“It’s a playback deck,” Emily explained, adjusting the volume knob. “We use it to extract recordings from the earpieces and make copies for the archives.”

“Oh. Cool.” Jesse reached out and prodded the earpiece sitting in the holder. “Didn’t really expect to find anything on it, actually.”

Emily flipped open a spiral-bound notepad and frowned at the transcript of the earpiece recording she had been working on late last night. The words on the page were faded and feathery, as if the writing implement she used had been running out of ink.

But she remembered using her trusty ball-point and under most circumstances Emily would not have tolerated a dry pen.

She tried going over a word on the page again to darken it. The ink flowed normally, so it wasn’t an issue with her pen. Emily registered this strange detail.

“The Ranger who made this recording,” Jesse said, scooting forward on the couch. “James Harper or something? That name sounds familiar. He’s on Callow’s list of thirteen names, right?”

Emily opened Callow’s notebook and nudged it towards Jesse. “Thomas Harper, yeah. And so is this Anita he mentions. She was on his squad, Ranger Anita Jones.”

“So they do work for the Bureau. But all their records are gone.” Jesse chewed on a nail. “And I can’t remember exactly, but did you notice how Harper seemed to be getting his own name wrong at the end there?”

“Hmmm. He did sound disoriented.”

Jesse paused, hand hovering over the play button. “Wanna go over it together?”

Emily nodded. “Let’s hear it.”

Jesse pressed play.

The audio deck clicked on, and the moment the static-laden recording burst from the speakers, Emily exchanged a look with Jesse.

The recording kept hitching, and was a lot fuzzier than Emily remembered it to be from the night before.

…remember… the door—

Leave without me…

“Is something wrong with the machine?” Jesse eyed the turning spools warily.

Emily tapped the machine’s casing lightly with her hand. “I don’t think so.”

Over the recording, Thomas Harper continued on about the missing door, Anita, and them, voice garbled. Emily tried to ignore the faint prickle running up her arms and concentrated on writing.

Eventually, the recording ended and plunged the room into silence.

Jesse breathed out a sigh and wrung her hands. “That was odd.”

“This was all I could get.” Emily shook her head. She turned to show Jesse the transcript.

Jesse motioned for the pen. “I might still remember some of it from the first time I listened to it. I could’ve sworn the recording was way clearer inside the room.”

Emily passed her the pen and notebook. Jesse bent a little closer to the page, scribbling in sharp strokes, lips moving faintly as she tested the words.

“Okay, this is the best I can get it.” Jesse handed the notepad back. “It’s so weird, it feels like it’s already slipping my mind.”

“That room messes with memory,” Emily murmured, going over Jesse’s additions. “We’re probably seeing the effects of it on you.”

Jesse had a pained look on her features, before she stifled a yawn. She rubbed at her eye. “I need some coffee.”

Emily sighed and tilted her head, stretching her neck against the tension in her shoulders. “Me too.”

“Break room?”

“Sounds great.”

Chapter Text

Emily sat alone at one of the tables in Executive’s cafeteria, clipboard in hand, pen in her other.

Near the large tree in the center of the space, Murphy from the HRA team was setting up a second freestanding HRA unit, aided by a smattering of junior researchers and technicians.

As the intrepid team slowly transported the fragile antennas across the cafeteria floor, Emily ran her thumb over her pen’s cap, woefully aware that it wasn’t her favoured one. She had about twenty ball-point pens in her drawer, but only that one wrote the way she liked.

Obviously there were more pressing issues happening in the Oldest House, but her missing pen had established itself as a low-grade annoyance in her day.

“Dr. Pope, does this look aligned to you?” Murphy called over from under the tree. He and three other technicians were lifting the parabolic dish onto the stand.

Emily gestured with her hand. “A little more to the left. A little more… okay, you’ve got it.”

Murphy gave her a thumbs up and turned back to the dish.

Emily was here to oversee the HRA setup, but she found herself still thinking about Harper’s recording.

Did Harper ever mention Anita’s full name? Was he a Ranger First Class or Second?

These might have been small details, but Emily didn’t like how nothing from the recording landed clearly in her head. She made a few scribblings on her clipboard, trying to pull the phrases from memory. But it felt like yanking at a fraying thread.

She needed to read the transcript again. But it was somewhere in her office.

Emily struck through yet another attempt on the page and capped the pen. “Murphy, I’m popping back to my office for something. Don’t let it fall over while I’m gone!”

“Sure, no problem,” Murphy responded, holding up a hex key. “Actually, if you’re heading that way, could you grab the other set of hex keys from the HRA lab? We could use a spare.”

Emily nodded and grabbed her name tag off the chair. “Hex keys. Got it. Be right back.”

As she walked past the tree, one of the younger techs dropped a box of screws on the ground. The metal bits plinked off the cafeteria floor and rolled under every piece of furniture within a certain radius.

“Wilson!” another tech cried out in despair, as Wilson stood there beet-red and Murphy looked on in disbelief.

Emily shot Murphy an empathetic look on her way out of the cafeteria.

Once at the elevator lobby, Emily shifted her clipboard from one arm to the other, eyes on the floor numbers. The doors slid open to reveal Langston shuffling oddly inside, like he had gum stuck to his shoe.

“Langston,” Emily said, holding the down button to keep the doors open.

The man managed to dislodge a paper clip that had seemingly wedged itself to his shoe sole, and straightened his tie when he saw her. “No time to talk, Dr. Pope. Have you seen Arish? I needed more guards reassigned to the Panopticon since yesterday. I’ve got a hot mess brewing down there!”

Without waiting for an answer, Langston hurried past her towards Central Executive.

Emily watched him yelp at someone pushing a mail cart who almost backed into him. Then she stepped into the empty elevator, watching the doors seal her in for the descent to Research.

Back in the solitude of her office, Emily pulled open every drawer, flipped through heaps of folders, and even looked behind the couch cushions and inside the trashcan.

The transcript wasn’t anywhere she could find.

She stood in the center of her office, hands on her hips, brow tightening.

How was this possible? Granted, she worked in a constantly shifting building that didn’t quite obey the conventional laws of physics, but still. Emily checked her document tray for the fourth time, pushing aside a stack of memos, sending a couple of pencils rolling across her desk.

A thought bloomed, unbidden. When was the last time she’d seen the transcript?

Emily found that the memory escaped her.

She ran a hand over the back of her neck. Things didn’t just vanish. Not from her.

Emily turned her attention over to the playback unit. Crossing the room to the coffee table, she stood over it.

Her finger pressed the audio deck’s play button.

The sound that emitted from the speakers was the greyish slush of crackling feedback, an auditory wall of nothingness. Emily listened to the noise and for a moment she thought she heard a word being muttered, but it was lost in the sea of static.

After a minute, Emily turned it off. She pried the earpiece from the holder and held it up to the light.

Grabbing a pen, Emily scribbled a to-do list on a little square of paper.

[Storage Room Recording To-Do:]

☐ Extract recording tape from earpiece (Check if Mag Lab still accessible)
☐ Look for possible alternatives to playback deck in audio lab
☐ Keep looking for transcript!!

Emily stuck the list onto the side of the new Bureau terminal on her desk, an upgrade Darling always waved off as something he’d get around to but never actually did.

She took the earpiece, reached for her lab coat hanging off the hook next to the door, and headed back out to Central Research.

The air vents clicked and whirred as Emily pulled gloves on over her hands. She reached into her lab coat pocket and picked the earpiece up, placing the device in front of her on the work bench.

Reaching for the tweezers, she carefully cracked open the outer casing, pieces of plastic coming apart in her hands. Emily brushed the broken plastic chips aside.

Inside the earpiece housing sat a miniature hermetically sealed cassette. She lifted the cassette with the tweezers. It was a tiny thing, a grooved black disc no larger than the point of a marker pen.

Contained within that, the payload: a magnetic filament array suspended in a neutral antistatic gel.

Keeping an even grip on the tweezers, Emily carefully transferred the cassette over to the tray of the magneto-optical scanner, a large machine taking up most of the space on the lab’s workbench.

The cassette slotted neatly into the tray’s cradle. The scanner beeped once in acknowledgement, the cradle gripping the cassette’s drive wheels before the tray slid back into the machine, taking the cassette with it.

Emily toggled a few metal switches, and the scanner hummed as its actuator started unspooling the microscopic film for her examination.

She slid the viewfinder into place, and peered through.

Through the lens, she saw an explosion of texture in black, white, and shades of grey. Emily adjusted the knob until the picture came into clearer focus.

Grainy specks the texture of sand, interspersed with patches of coiling cloud-like ripples. As she slid the tracking dial left and right, the film shifted and flowed, a kaleidoscope of sound etched on metallic film.

Something was missing.

With a recording of someone’s voice, Emily would have expected to see thin, branching lines breaking across the film, like cracks on frosted glass.

But there was nothing indicating Harper’s voice, only the hissing of background noise ingrained in the tape. And something else, a low, droning tone embodied by the large, slowly shifting waves swirling in the background.

Emily pulled away from the eyepiece, blinking a few times. For one unnerving moment, she doubted her own recall.

But no, Jesse heard it too. Harper’s desperate last message.

However, according to the cold, hard evidence presented to her by the scanner, it was as if Harper had never existed in the recording.

Emily turned to the shelf next to her and retrieved a box of slide filters. She selected one and fitted it into the scanner.

The filter cut out the static, leaving behind only the odd, low humming. By her estimation, this sound would almost be inaudible to the human ear.

Just almost.

She traced the strange geometry of this vibration, following the patterns she couldn’t identify.

At the very end of the recording, dark lines punctuated the filament. Something rhythmic, like footsteps. Or a slow, heavy thumping.

[Magnetic Filament Array Observations:]

- Missing mid-range frequencies correspond to missing portion of recording (not possible with current lab protocols for erasure)
- Anomalous patterns in low frequency bands
- Striations observed in final 11 seconds of recording

Emily flipped the switch to respool the filament. The tray slid back out, offering up the cassette. She bagged the disc and left the lab moderately unsettled, leaning with an elbow onto the door to the common area.

“Hey,” came a voice from the far side of the room.

Emily looked up to see Jesse sitting by one of the dimmed workstations, apparently having kept herself busy with Minesweeper.

“Jesse! Well, this is a surprise.” Emily smoothed a hand against her sleeve, as the door clicked shut behind her.

Jesse spun around on the chair and stood up. “I went to your office, but you weren’t there. So I figured from that note you left on your desk that you had to be in one of these labs.”

“I’m impressed you found me, Ferromagnetics is a pretty tucked away section of Research,” Emily said, taking off her lab coat and setting it neatly over the back of a chair.

Jesse shrugged and smiled. “I asked Shields to point me in the right direction.”

“Doing overtime?” The edges of Emily’s mouth lifted slightly as she nudged her chin towards the folders sitting on the table.

“Same as you, I guess.” Jesse patted the top folder. “I went digging in Executive for some stuff relating to Harper’s former teammates. Thought we could go over it tonight?”

“Wanna talk in the pantry? I could probably dredge up some coffee somewhere.” Emily took a step towards the open doorway to the right, gesturing for Jesse to follow. “I actually put in a request to Containment’s archives too but Langston hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”

“Containment? Thought all we had was that old notebook,” Jesse said as she gathered up her documents.

Emily ventured into the little alcove. “It can’t hurt to try. Besides, Langston loves an excuse to brag about his archive.”

A fridge stood humming in the corner of the pantry, an outdated shift roster still taped to its door. On the central counter sat an old Petri dish with what looked like a half-eaten cookie in it. It didn’t look like anyone had been in there since the invasion started.

Emily gingerly picked up the Petri dish and placed it next to the sink, then started opening the overhead cabinets to investigate their contents.

Behind her, Jesse dropped the stack of documents onto the counter with a substantial thump and took a seat on one of the stools.

Emily pulled out a box of expired cereal, wrinkled her nose, and put it back on the shelf. “Unfortunately, it seems like we’re completely out of coffee or regular tea.”

“Regular tea?”

Emily produced a well-worn, unlabelled tin from the cabinets. “Well. There’s Darling’s old tea stash. Are you up for some awa bancha?”

Jesse raised her eyebrows. “Sounds risky.”

“It’s a bit of an acquired taste, but who knows? You might like it.”

Jesse leaned back in her seat and flicked a cookie crumb off the table. “Alright, I’m game. I think?”

Emily found two mismatched mugs for the both of them. As the boiling water from the pantry kettle hit the dark green leaves, steam wisped into the air.

Jesse plucked the first folder from the formidable pile, and laid out its contents on the table. Field logs, handwritten interview notes, badly photocopied release forms. “I grabbed anything that looked like it was remotely connected to Harper’s former teammates. Might have created too big of a haystack here.”

Emily picked up a piece of paper that had slid over to her side of the table. And old receipt for twenty boxes of stapler bullets, dated eight years ago. “I’m sure we’ll find something if we keep at it. Besides, it’ll be faster with the both of us sifting through it.”

Setting the receipt aside, Emily glanced up just in time to see Jesse fumble with an ancient-looking report.

Jesse flinched as one of the pages tore loose from the binding. “Oops.”

Emily pressed her lips together, turning her attention to the tea, and saw that the leaves had unfurled fully. Placing one of the cups in front of Jesse, Emily made a slight flourish with her hand. “Tea’s ready!”

Jesse gave Emily a slightly dubious look as she bravely picked up her cup and took a sip.

“Oh wow.” Jesse’s mouth twisted, and she made a face at Emily. “It tastes like hot pickle juice. I mean, no offense to pickles.”

Emily broke into an amused smile. “The leaves are fermented, which is why it’s a little sour. Kind of grew on me, strangely enough.”

“…interesting.” Jesse took another sip and suppressed a cough. She didn’t look too convinced.

Emily pulled a sheaf of documents towards herself. “Alright, let’s do this.”

They made two piles. One for the unsorted documents, and another for the ones they had looked over. But things were slow-going, and for the N-th time in Emily’s career at the Bureau, she silently bemoaned the lack of a digital archive.

An hour or so into the session, Jesse got up muttering and went outside into the common area. She returned with a bag of animal crackers that she found in someone’s desk drawer. Emily made more tea.

“Is there a reason why every single copy of this form is lopsided?” Jesse grumbled, absent-mindedly dunking a cracker into the awa bancha. She took a bite and looked like she thoroughly regretted it.

“It’s probably just that particular machine,” Emily murmured. “We’ve tried fixing it, believe me.”

Jesse held out a report. “Check this out. Project Ratatoskr. Apparently the Bureau tried creating a task force with mice.”

“No way. That’s real?!” Emily took the paper from Jesse and scanned it. “I heard about it when I first started working here, but everyone was saying it was probably just a codename and not a literal project with rodents.”

Jesse lifted her brows, half-grinning. “They called it off after a year. Guess it didn’t work out.” She grabbed another animal cracker. “Hmm, I wonder why.”

“Fascinating. The miniaturized recording tech they created for the mice harnesses… this might have been the precursor to the filament arrays we have today.” Emily let out wistful sigh. “I used to have a hamster as a kid. I’d build him little obstacle courses out of cardboard to solve. With treats at every checkpoint, of course.”

Jesse let out a laugh. “How very you.”

“Guess what I named him.”

“Mmmm. Drea. For mitochondria.”

Emily placed a hand over her heart, feigning offence. “Come on, I wouldn’t do Schrodinger dirty like that.”

“Oh my god.” Jesse snorted, nearly choking on a cracker. “You were such a weird kid!” She leaned over and lightly smacked Emily in the arm with the archival photo she was holding.

A self-deprecating smile flashed over Jesse’s face, and Emily couldn’t help but burst out laughing too. Warmth prickled her cheeks despite herself.

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” Emily sat back in her seat, as their laughter turned into giggling, then faded slowly into quiet. Jesse was still smiling at her, eyes bright, though the edges of her mouth curved softer. The heat in Emily’s face lingered.

For a second too long, neither of them moved.

Emily pulled her gaze away first, down towards the photograph in Jesse’s hand. “Wait, let me see that photo.”

“What? Oh—” Jesse blinked, then passed the print over.

Suddenly acutely aware of the distance between their fingers as the photograph changed hands, Emily tilted the photo towards the light. A team of Rangers stood in full uniform against an unremarkable office backdrop. Pasted onto the off-white border was a typewritten caption label:

  Rangers P. Simmons,           , M. Shah, D. Price,        . 3B Expeditionary Subteam Gamma, August 2009.

Three Rangers could be seen clearly, though the print was splotched with light leaks and film burn. Between Simmons and Shah, and again on Price’s left, were dark voids precisely the shape of human silhouettes.

A smoke-like wisp of an arm. The ink-black suggestion of a head. The figures looked scorched into the emulsion itself, darker than the rest of the burn.

“Look at this.” Emily slid the photo back halfway across the table, so that it sat between them. “The caption lists three Rangers, but it looks like there were five people in this photo originally.”

Jesse peered over at it. “Creepy. That’s pretty badly redacted.”

“The thing is,” Emily lowered her voice, “—the Bureau doesn’t censor photos this way. And you pulled this with Directorial Access, right? There’s no reason for redactions at this level.”

For a moment, Jesse was silent as she twirled a pencil about its tip, leaving behind a carbon mark on the table. “So if the Bureau didn’t do this…”

Emily ran a fingertip along the photo caption. The blank spaces among the typewritten letters were the right width for a name. But the paper was smooth, untouched, as if nothing had ever been there at all. “It’s just like with the recording.”

Jesse started riffling through the folder, pulling out page after page, spreading them across the table. “From the same unlabelled folder. I think we’ve found it. They all have the same blank censoring all over.”

“I don’t think these are redactions.” Emily carefully arranged the papers in front of her so that they lined up. “Not in the usual sense. The blanks make it obvious something was supposed to be there. But the erasure is so clean. Too clean.”

“This might be a little crazy,” Jesse said, pushing her cup of tea out of the way. “But do you think the Storage Room is somehow doing this? It’s not just the records, though. Remember how Griggs doesn’t remember Ocampo?”

“It’s affecting records and memories.” Emily leaned back in her seat, thinking. She reached into her pocket and placed the bagged-up filament cassette next to the photo. Emily’s gaze met Jesse’s for a moment, before she looked back down at the evidence on the table.

“I think we’re dealing with a reality-altering anomaly.”

Chapter Text

“Another memo for you, Dr. Pope.”

Emily looked up suddenly from the notes on her desk, apparently having missed the knock on her door again. One of the HRA lab techs stood halfway through the doorway, a pneumatic tube in one hand and a foil pack of cheese crackers in the other.

“Oh, right. Thanks,” Emily said, clearing her throat. He passed her the entire canister and closed the door behind him, food wrapper crinkling.

Her forehead felt a little sore, and as Emily lightly rubbed at it with her palm, she picked up her desk nameplate and used its reflective side to check her face.

A reddish imprint sat on her skin, the exact width of her forearm.

“Ugh,” Emily grumbled to herself. She had hoped for Plan A, which was to finish her briefing notes on the cafeteria’s new HRA. But it looked like Plan B happened instead, which was to fall asleep on her desk.

She twisted the pneumatic canister open and fished out the piece of paper contained within.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF CONTROL

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

DATE: Monday, █████

TIME: 8:17 AM EST

FROM: J. Harlberg, Office of the Director

TO: Dr. E. Pope (Head of Research), S. Arish (Head of Security; Acting Head, Operations); H. Mathers (Head of Communications); M. Knox (Acting Head, Investigations); F. Langston (Panopticon Supervisor)

CC: Director J. Faden; K. Kwan (Executive Administrative Coordinator)

RE: Safe Zone Expansion Strategic Coordination Meeting

Per directive from Director Faden, a cross-departmental coordination session has been scheduled at 1130 hours today, █████. Please note: the meeting has been deferred from the previously scheduled time of 1100 hours. Attendance is required from all department heads.

Agenda items will include:

• Introductions: Harold Mathers (Head of Communications), Marjorie Knox (Acting Head, Investigations)
• Consolidated field reports on Hiss manifestations in Maintenance sectors
• Research Division update on newly-installed HRA in the Executive Cafeteria safe zone (coverage radius, calibration, best-practice reminders)
• Panopticon Operations briefing from Mr. Langston on an active containment matter (details pending)

Please arrive prepared with relevant materials and departmental summaries.

— J. Harlberg

Office of the Director

>> Typed and distributed via Pneumatic Network Node #102. Do not remove this memo from Bureau premises. <<

Emily looked back down at her half-finished bullet points. She didn’t really see the point in drafting an entire speech to remind people, again, that the personal HRAs should still be a priority even with the cafeteria unit online. It wasn’t that complicated.

But if the Supply Closet Incident in the Executive sector last week taught Emily anything, it was that not everyone understood the importance of keeping a safety vest on. Not even with the threat of getting infected by a paranatural resonance hanging over their heads.

Emily eyed the locked side drawer of her desk and sighed, pushing her notes aside. She could probably wing the meeting later. Retrieving Callow’s book from the drawer, she noticed a folded up square of paper had been wedged between the pages as a makeshift bookmark.

She unfolded the note. It was blank. Splotchy patches dotted the otherwise empty sheet.

A supposedly empty square of paper folded up into fours, stuck into the old journal. She didn’t like it. When Emily turned her attention to the open notebook, her pulse jolted.

It was a full transcript of the earpiece recording.

I need to remember.

It was there, now it’s gone.

Don’t forget me.

The words were penned in a very familiar shade of blue ink. Callow only ever used a black pen.

Emily stared at the over-curled J’s, the slightly lopsided O’s. She knew them well.

It was her own handwriting.

Emily’s hand instinctively closed around the nearest item on her desk, a pencil, as she searched for any memory of writing this copy of the transcript.

Okay, no need to panic. It had been a long night, after all.

Maybe she somehow slogged through it on autopilot in her sleep-deprived state?

Her fingers tightened around the pencil. It felt like something she would have done, but the mental dredging turned up nothing. Instead, a memory of a memory surfaced: a test she had set. One ordinary copy, the second a safeguard.

Emily slammed the journal cover shut and kept one hand on top of it, as if by holding it there, she could physically stop the words inside from escaping.

So the sigil wasn’t just a paranoid, desperate attempt at thaumaturgy.

In the laboratory pantry yesterday, she and Jesse came to the conclusion that some paranatural force was behind the systemic elimination of information about certain people connected to the Storage Room. Handwritten notes, audio recordings, photographic evidence. Even memories.

As if reality itself was rejecting, or was being forced to reject, their existence.

Emily’s hands shook slightly as she reached for her cup of vending machine coffee. The liquid hit her throat, tepid and bitter.

Reality-altering anomalies were as rare as they were insidious. And for the first time in her career, Emily’s own mind hadn’t been spared the effects of it. She wasn’t just reading about it in a post-incident report in a sealed-off archive somewhere. Here she was, up close and personal with it.

Something other was reaching in behind her eyes, a tendril cold and foreign trawling through her thoughts, hollowing out what it saw fit.

Emily chucked the now-empty paper cup into the trashcan. For a minute she sat very still, listening to the hush of the Oldest House. Slowly, she cracked the book open again, staring at her personal addition to the journal.

On the opposite page was half of a crudely drawn map. It was badly done, the black-inked walls ending abruptly at the end of the page. Arrows doubled back on themselves into a hallway with too many corners than made sense. Underneath that, Callow wrote:

Roth, Mercer, and Soto encountered here repeatedly. Tendency for Residuals to converge on certain areas?

Emily head swam and she pushed away from her desk.

Journal in hand, she considered heading to the Director’s office, but remembered that Jesse’s morning had been blocked off.

“I’ve got a chat with the Board,” Jesse had said, dryly. “Apparently they need a very thorough explanation for what’s happening with the Hiss around here.”

“Will the call take long?” Joe Harlberg, the new guy stuck writing Jesse’s memos, asked as he poured over the appointment ledger. “Should I send out another memo to the department heads?”

Jesse just sighed, glancing at Emily with a quick save-me look before stalking off back to her office.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Emily said to a nervous-looking Harlberg. “Just don’t answer the Hotline.”

That was last night. Now, Emily dropped back into her desk chair and grudgingly placed Callow’s book back into her drawer. She forced herself back into the rhythm of work: tackling her inbox, going over minor lab reports, a fresh cup of substandard coffee.

She even finished her briefing notes, though her thoughts kept circling that gap in her memory, the way a tongue kept brushing up against a pulled tooth.

Emily glanced up at the clock. 10:53am.

She jumped out of her chair, scooping up her files.

If I sprint, maybe I’ll only be five minutes late instead of ten.

Her office door banged shut behind her. Emily winced, realising that she still needed to swing by the HRA lab for the calibration logs for the meeting. She turned sharply down the hall.

As she neared the entrance to the lab, she slowed to a stop. Ahti was balanced on a step ladder in front of the door, humming as he worked oil into the door hinges. A bucket full of water stood nearby, mop sticking out of it at an angle.

“Ahti,” Emily said, trying to sound like she hadn’t just scrambled at full tilt for a binder full of numbers, “I need to grab something from inside. Is the door working? Can I slip past?”

Ahti hummed as he tinkered with the hinge a moment longer. “Toimii kuin junan vessa. But no. You should wait to go in.”

“Oh.” Emily’s hand hovered near the knob. She let it drop. “Okay. I am… running a little late though.”

“The gloves are on the hook, are they not?” Ahti eyed her from the ladder, swapping his screwdriver for a buffing cloth.

Emily shifted from one foot to the other. Before she could think of an answer, Ahti hummed another line and said, “You are looking quite troubled.”

“I just— I was looking at this old notebook, and I found something I wrote in it, except I don’t remember writing it at all.” She stopped, surprised at herself.

Ahti glanced at her for a moment, then went back to polishing the hinge.

Normally, Emily kept things like this under close wraps. But there was something about the head janitor of the Oldest House that made her feel like her secrets were probably safe with him.

“Have you ever just… forgotten something completely?” Emily asked tentatively. “Something you really shouldn’t have?” Even to herself, her voice suddenly sounded smaller and more confused in space of the corridor.

Ahti stepped down from the ladder and dropped the cloth into his cart. “You look for advice about storage rooms, Emilia?” His eyes glinted from the grey shadows. “Jokaisella ovella on kaksi puolta.”

“You know about the Storage Room?” Emily shook her head. “Wait. Of course you do.”

The water in the bucket sloshed as Ahti dragged the mop through it. “No niin. This is what I shall say. The mind is a fine pilot, yes. But the heart— ah, that one always knows the path. It pulls whether you want it to or not.”

Emily squinted against the fluorescent lights. “I’m not quite sure I follow.”

The mop landed with a dull thud, droplets arcing through the air. Ahti leaned on the handle. “Why does the heart keep searching, hmm? It is hungry. It is confused. The trick is to know how to listen to it.”

“Are… we still talking about the Storage Room?”

Ahti shrugged, mop trailing water over the floor. “Will it be a wolf or a big hare? It is up to you.”

Emily watched him, clutching her files, as Ahti continued working.

He turned slowly and nudged the mop handle towards the door. “You can go inside now.”

“Oh. I am so late.” Emily stepped over the wet section of floor and pushed open the door to the HRA lab. She grabbed the hefty green folder on the desk by the entrance, and turned to go. “Thanks, Ahti. I’ll see you around.”

“Älä tärise matkalaukku, juna meni jo,” Ahti muttered as Emily darted past him out of Central Research.

The elevator dinged open at Executive, and Emily stepped out just as Langston emerged from the one next to hers.

“Everything okay in the Panopticon?” Emily asked him as they sped-walk past the inverted pyramid that hung over the central pit. “I read the memo.”

“Obviously not,” Langston huffed, tugging at his tie. “The new guards Arish sent over don’t know the first thing about how the Panopticon roster works. I’m basically building it from scratch!” His stack of papers slid sideways as they hurried up the stairs, and he caught them just in time. “So, what’s your excuse for being late?”

“No excuse for me,” Emily sighed, trying to smooth out her hair. They stopped in front of the heavy doors of the Board room. “Just lost track of time.”

Langston pushed the door open. “You might want to get your clocks checked, there’s always a chance that—”

“Frederick! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Marjorie?” Langston paused at the door, blocking Emily’s way in. “I thought no one made it out of that Maintenance safe room.”

Emily peeked out from behind Langston to see three people already at the meeting table. No Jesse. Simon Arish sat nearest the door, looking slightly out of place at the harsh rectangular slab of a table. He spotted her and gave a small, awkward smile.

At the end of the table stood the source of Langston’s bewilderment. Marjorie Knox was a middle-aged woman with broad-shoulders and wild curls barely held back with a headscarf. An easy grin sat on her face.

Knox let out a laugh before claiming the seat opposite Arish. “Yeah, it was tough. Those Hiss agents really chewed through a bunch of us. Anyway, I’m here covering for Investigations while they figure out which way’s up.”

Langston reluctantly stepped further in.

Emily went around him to right side of the table and set her files down, exhaling. “I was worried I’d be the last one in.”

From the seat beside her, Arish popped his knuckles. “Well, you’re in luck. Kwan said the Director’s running late.” He flipped open his own file, looking over at the stack Emily had just laid down. A snort of amusement escaped him. “Looks about as fun as mine. Guess we’re both drowning in paperwork these days.”

“Drowning feels about right.” Emily lowered herself into the chair, adjusting her folder so that it aligned perfectly with the edge of the table. Her hands tremored slightly from the caffeine. “How are things down in Maintenance?”

There was another man sitting directly opposite Emily, whom she hadn’t noticed much of until now. Harold Mathers didn’t look particularly Bureau-eqsue, with his greying, shoulder-length hair pulled into a tidy ponytail, and giraffes dancing across his brightly-coloured tie. Yet, he blended in with their sombre surroundings in an odd way.

Mathers pushed his glasses up and offered Emily a perfunctory nod.

“What can I say?” Arish shifted around in his chair. “Still a bit ugly down there, and all that chanting doesn’t really help. We’re running through our ammo faster than we can restock. Oh right. Did Jesse talk to you about Sublevel 3B yet?”

“We’re working on it—” Emily started, when the doors to the Board Room swung open.

Jesse strode in, and all heads turned almost instinctively. Kwan followed carrying a portable recorder. He closed the door behind them.

Jesse hesitated near the head of the table, then stepped up to the seat. “Sorry I’m late,” she said again. Her gaze flickered over to Emily before she sat.

Emily shifted her eyes down to the grey surface of the slab, as her hand reached for the standard-issue Bureau pen next to her memo pad. She wasn’t sure if she had just imagined that flit in her stomach. Or maybe it was because she hadn’t eaten anything since last night.

“Oh no worries,” Knox said from her end of the table. “We were just catching up.”

Langston mumbled something from his seat.

“Okay, well…” Jesse glanced down at the blank memo pad, pen, and glass of water laid out in front of her. “I guess we’ll just start with the introductions? We’ve got two new department leads to fill in the gaps in the chain of command. I think you all probably already know each other.”

“Can’t hurt to run through the introductions anyway,” Emily said, “even if it’s just for the agenda’s sake.”

Kwan looked up from the recorder on the side desk and smiled politely in acknowledgement.

Across the table, Mathers idly took a sip of water and set his glass down wordlessly.

“I’ll start,” Knox offered, rolling up a shirt sleeve. “Marjorie Knox. Investigations, about seven years now. Five in Containment before that. Some of you might know me from the Eppwat Reservoir Incident.” She gave a weary smile. “I’m not much for these type of sit-downs, but I know the work and I know the people.”

Jesse nodded, as the sound of Kwan typing took over the room. “Alright, thanks. What is this… incident you mentioned? If you don’t mind.”

“Oh, it was a long time ago. A team of us had been tracking down a suspected Altered Item near Eppwat. Reports of students from the nearby university falling in. One of our agents, Rubio, damn near got himself killed in the same way. I managed to pull the guy back before he went over.”

Emily clicked her pen open and shut. Knox always told it like all she did was haul a colleague up by the collar. The official report, on the other hand, was longer than her arm and described the Reservoir itself as the Altered Item. Since then, it hadn’t been a threat.

“I see,” Jesse said. While her gaze remained on Knox, she was distractedly drawing squiggles on her memo pad. “Glad you were there to help him out.”

Knox smiled mildly and lifted her shoulder in a shrug.

Emily’s eyes caught on the blue-capped pen Jesse was using. The barrel was scratched, and the clip was slightly bent with use. Emily felt a small rush of relief, when she realised she’d found her missing pen.

Kwan finished typing and silence washed over the room for a few seconds. Everyone turned to Mathers, who was in the midst of cleaning his glasses. He put them back on and steepled his hands, blinking.

“What about you, Mathers? Or… do you prefer Harold?” Jesse tried.

Mathers cleared his throat. “Mathers is fine. Or Hal. I’ve been working in Communications for a long time, so. Here I am, I guess.”

The typing sounds from the recorder started up again from the side table. Then stopped.

Mathers picked up the glass of water again and took another sip, offering nothing else.

“…right.” Jesse capped the pen and tapped it once on the table before sticking it back into her jacket. “Okay, great.”

Arish straightened a little and said, “Maybe I can start with my Hiss manifestation report next?”

“Yes.” Jesse sighed. “Please.”

As Arish started with his rundown on the Hiss suppression maneuvers the Rangers have been attempting in Maintenance, Emily found her thoughts wandering back to the notebook.

Those thirteen names. Those two dark figures in that photo, expunged from the group of five. Griggs went into the Storage Room too, but he seemed fine. Why some, but not others?

Emily forced her attention back to what she had been scrawling down, and found that she had only written the line:

What don’t you remember?

Five times over, and had been in the middle of the sixth iteration.

Emily sucked in a breath, and flipped the memo pad over.

Next to her, Jesse leaned forward to pick up her water glass, and the sleeve of her jacket shifted just enough to reveal a fresh scrape on the side of her wrist. Emily hadn’t that seen yesterday.

“…so we’re dividing the remaining members of Subteam Epsilon between the two other teams maintaining their positions at Central Maintenance and the pump station,” Arish was saying.

“Is that why you’re only able to spare five Rangers for the Panopticon this week?” Langston cut in.

Arish raised an eyebrow. “Yes, is that—”

The shrill jangling of a ringing phone pierced the air.

Everyone at the table went quiet. Emily’s first instinct was to look for the source of the sound, before she realised it seemed it was coming from everywhere at once.

Jesse gritted her teeth, hand still around her glass. “It’s for me.”

Langston shuffled his papers. “I haven’t gotten to my briefing of the situation at the Panopticon yet. It’s far too pressing to overlook.”

“I’d actually like to stay.” Jesse’s voice was tight as she placed her glass down on top of her memo pad instead of the coaster. “But I have to take it.”

The Hotline continued droning in the background, the sound of it plinging against Emily’s ears. “We can keep moving with the meeting’s agenda, and send you the minutes once they’re typed up,” she suggested to Jesse, then turned to Langston. “That way, any concerns you raise will be recorded and the Director can review them.”

Langston sat back in his seat, giving a reluctant nod.

Jesse’s chair scraped back against the carpet. She paused, hand lingering on the edge of table. “Thanks, Emily.”

Emily tipped her head slightly, the pen an anchor in her fingers. Jesse stood and left, her footsteps receding, the doors shutting behind her with a muted bang.

The Board wouldn't summon the Director without reason. If they were doing it this often… The thought coiled in Emily’s head. She shelved it and tried to focus on the rest of Arish’s report, her own notes ready in front of her.

The rest of the meeting went by as expected, with Knox asking Emily very specific questions about the new HRA’s frequency boundaries and Arish listening on, arms crossed, as Langston delivered his detailed account on the recent appearances and disappearances of Maneki-neko figurines inside the containment cells. Mathers cleaned his spectacles and drank more water.

At the end of it, Emily stopped by Kwan’s spot as everyone else started to leave. “Kwan, I spoke to Facilities about the copy machine. They said they’ll send someone over with a replacement unit this week, so hopefully that other one will be out of your hair soon.”

The relief on Kwan’s face was palpable. “Oh, that’s great. We’ve had the out-of-order sign on that thing for a while already but it keeps putting out random documents. Some of the stuff it prints is a little… unsettling.”

“Come to think of it, I remember someone from your office who used to complain about the same issue. Audrey, I think.”

“Really…?” Kwan looked slightly distressed, his hands hovering over the keyboard. “I ended up with Audrey’s old desk, after she quit.”

“Hmm. Let’s hope this solves it,” Emily replied, before leaving the Board room.

As she crossed the Control Point right outside, she suddenly became aware of the black pyramid hovering above, like a gigantic spike boring down on top of her head.

“Hey, Pope. Wait up.”

Emily paused mid-step, her foot hovering over the copper strip on the ground. “Arish! Everything okay?”

He jogged down the steps and caught up to her. “Some meeting back there.”

“I don’t think Langston likes the idea of Knox heading Investigations very much.” Emily tried to joke, but her eyes suddenly felt dry, and a dull ache was starting up at the back of her skull.

“Guess we’re all struggling in our own way, huh.” Arish absently tapped the folder in his hand against his leg. “Listen. I don’t wanna sound paranoid, but the Board’s been calling a lot more these days, hasn’t it?”

A Mail Room tech passed by the Control point. Emily and Arish stayed silent until they were out of earshot.

“Yeah, it does seem that way,” Emily finally said, holding her files closer.

Arish shook his head. “Anyway, I’ve been meaning to get ahold of Jesse about those suppression clearance forms I’m waiting on. But I know she’s probably buried under paperwork, so maybe you could bring it up the next time you see her? Executive’s been breathing down my neck about it.”

Emily nodded thoughtfully. “I understand. I’ll talk to Jesse about it.”

“Thanks. Appreciate it.” Arish sighed and rolled his neck from side to side. His boots were scuffed, the right shoe laced differently from the left.

“Long days?” Emily asked. “Can’t see handling two divisions being easy at all.”

Arish let out a tired laugh. “You’re looking equally as fresh yourself. I’ll take a break when you do, Pope.”

Emily laughed along, and Arish turned to go. He rounded the corner to the cafeteria and was soon out of sight. As she walked the distance back to her office, Emily let her hands unclench.

They shook harder now, and the pulsing in her head grew sharper, like a knife point pressing into her thoughts.