Blind the Eyes

Chapter 2: Strangers

Chapter 2: StrangersI DON’T HATE my job. Hate is dangerous. Hate is a wish for change. A wish is a dream that can draw down the Mara.

I’m not capable of hating my job. I merely appreciate when I no longer have to be at it. The pressure to focus, to keep from drifting off, to keep from being distracted by Cadence’s extravagantly expressed boredom . . . It’s exhausting.

Which is the point of work, after all. It’s the point of everything. Keep us just occupied and numb enough to stay out of trouble. Even bio breaks are subject to regulation, carefully scheduled to avoid interaction. But I excel at maintaining a modest perimeter, and my posture is flawless. Stooped shoulders to minimize my height, chin tucked to avoid eye contact and hide my face, elbows in, small steps. It’s not easy. I have an unfortunate tendency to trip over my own oversized feet, and I seem to be growing. Still.

“I miss colour,” Cadence says out of nowhere. Like she does. “When was the last time you saw a proper, rich blue? Or orange? Ooh, I miss oranges too. And fruit. And eating.”

My mouth goes dry. A tingle buzzes the base of my skull. “Shh.”

“Oh, come on, it’s not as if they can hear me.”

“But I can.” She has to stop doing this to me, reminding me she’s a ghost. The dead are strangely distracting. I hurry back to my console and squint at the screen.

“You oughta thank me for breaking the boredom. How you can stare at that thing all day, I’ll never know.”

Maybe if I pretend she’s not there, she’ll back off. I start scanning from the submerged lower levels, deserted except for the occasional aquatic patrol, and work my way up floor by deserted floor, past the ebb and flow of the Corrections division on Floor 6 and on to the tangle of codes that marks the higher divisions. Floor 15, Residential, is reliably busy; cleaners come and go all day long. Floor 18 looks empty, though of course it isn’t really. The system doesn’t track surveillance workers. There’d be no point in sitting here monitoring myself sitting here monitoring . . . yeah, no point at all.

The snarl of worker codes is heaviest between floors 16 and 30, tapering off on the higher levels. As far as I can tell, only a few enforcers and a handful of division leaders ever go that high. Apparently the Mayor lives up there, but if she has a code in the system, I haven’t figured it out.

“Oops. You missed one. Hey, if I help you find five more screw-ups, can we leave early? I’m so done with this scene.”

A surveillance feed on Floor 19 is patchy, the handful of codes flickering in and out too quickly to represent the actual movements of workers. I flag the anomaly to the field team for investigation.

“Don’t ignore me—say thank you. Manners. Honestly, were you raised in a barn?”

I don’t understand. Barn? But she’s teasing, playful, which is better than nagging. She did save me from an error, after all.

She was also the source of my distraction.

“Thanks,” I mutter into my mask. “Now will you let me concentrate?”

She makes a rude sound in my ear. It’s only a few minutes before she starts up again, complaining about things I don’t understand, distracting, harassing, and occasionally helping, just to change things up.

A good worker doesn’t need release from the boredom. A good drone lives for the boredom—or rather, the boredom is what lets us live. So I’m not struggling to focus, counting the minutes through the day. I don’t dream of a different life, a better one. Not anymore.

But can I help if I’m forced to listen to Cadence imagine wild and beautiful alien worlds? She doesn’t always nag and tease and pester. Sometimes she tells stories, wild fantasies of people and places from the Outside, before the ocean invaded. Colours, not just shades of grey; forms that aren’t purposelessly shapeless; food that’s something other than flavourless and slurped through a straw twice a day. More often than not, her stories trail off in confusion, usually when she tries to talk about herself instead of just making things up. Because, you know—ghost. She doesn’t remember her past. She doesn’t know any more about the world than I do.

But she keeps talking while I focus on my screen. Flag the anomalies. Repeat. Build a record of obedience. I’ve only just sat down after my second bio break of the day when I see it. I have to look twice to be sure. Surveillance is down across a full half of Floor 20.

“Is that . . . ?” Cadence sounds awed. “Full crash? How would that even happen?”

It’s a major anomaly. If there were warning signs, someone’s going to be in a lot of trouble. I flag it for field service. Whoever gets assigned to investigate is going to be busy for a while. An alert takes over my screen: “Surveillance Technician 18-Cole-: Assigned to task.”

That can’t be right.

“No way,” Cadence says, “you get to do a field investigation? Awesome.”

That definitely can’t be right. Only senior surveillance technicians are assigned to field duties. I glance at the supervisor’s office door and swallow. I should report something’s gone wrong and get the task reassigned.

Unless he did this.

The buzzing in my head settles into a deep, pulsing ache. I push back at it, rumpling my hood. He wouldn’t, would he? Purposely assign a major field investigation to me, just to see me fail? Or—

I take a closer look at the notation buried in the attached files. Two words jump out at me: “Probationary Trial.”

I can’t believe it. I’d thought after this morning’s incident, I’d be waiting months, years even.

I wring my hands. It’s here it’s here it’s here it’s . . . impossible. It’s a trap. Kistrfyv is setting me up to fail. I hardly know anything about field missions.

But there’s no way to refuse the task, not without admitting failure and giving up my shot at normality. I push back my chair, catch my knee on the side of the console, and almost collide with a passing worker.

“Really?” Cadence sounds delighted. “You’re actually going? This is so cool. What do you think Floor 20 is like?”

She keeps up a steady one-sided commentary. I try to breathe and walk at the same time. I clench restless fingers into stillness, fumbling the door to the hallway open. There’s a crowd in front of the elevator doors.

A crowd.

Refuge Force. It was all a trap. Kistrfyv set me up, and now they’ve come for me and they’ll drag me back down to Floor 6 to die—

But enforcers wear white, close-fitting uniforms. The figures up ahead are in standard grey, Noosh-bleached features shadowed under their hoods as they huddle distressingly close together.

“You just gonna stand here or what?” Cadence sounds annoyed. It’s as if she doesn’t even see them, doesn’t realize how deeply in violation of regulation it is for them to be congregating out here. Work shifts are carefully staggered to avoid this exact situation. There should never be more than one of us moving between locations at the same time.

One worker in the middle of the group stands out. He’s tall, maybe even taller than I am, his shoulders thrown back to show the clear line of his body beneath a carelessly dishevelled uniform. His ID is obscured; I can’t tell which division he’s with. I’ve certainly never noticed him before. His hood has slipped, exposing dramatic blue-black strands against golden skin. But even properly covered, he would stand out—his irises are like liquid gold. And he’s staring right at me.

“About time,” he says.