How to find someone they moved
1065 Words
“Audit week must be killing you,” I said, and slid the box of cookies across Maren’s counter.
She laughed, short and tired. “You have no idea.”
Maren Hollis had run margin housing admin for over a decade. She knew every unit number in every block, could quote occupancy rules from memory, and kept a frog-shaped stapler on her desk that she’d had since before I started volunteering here. She was not suspicious of me. I had made sure of that over three years of small kindnesses and zero requests.
“I was going to stop by Petra Vasik’s place today,” I said, pulling my bag strap up my shoulder. “But I heard they moved her recently. Is she still in block seven?”
Maren was already typing. “Block eleven. Unit four.”
“Thanks.” I picked up my delivery bag. “Hope the audit ends fast.”
She waved me off without looking up.
Forty seconds. No alarm. Nothing owed.
I walked out into the grey morning and let myself feel, just briefly, how easy that had been.
The harder part was making it mean nothing.
I spent the rest of that first day building the frame around it. I visited Edna in block two, who made me sit down and drink tea I didn’t want while she talked about her daughter’s new baby. I dropped bread and tinned fruit with the Solis family in block four, their three kids loud and underfoot the whole time. I picked up a prescription from the pharmacy for old Cresswell in block nine, who couldn’t manage the walk anymore.
Same route I’d done a dozen times. Same faces. Same reason to be moving through margin housing on a weekday afternoon.
When I got home that night I sat at my kitchen table and wrote down nothing. I kept the block eleven address in my head only, where it couldn’t be found.
Day two started at the lab.
I was early, which wasn’t unusual for me, and I had a full analysis report to finish on the new botanical compounds, which was straightforward work. The compounds were clean and consistent, well-processed, easy to write up. I was almost done before I started pulling the sourcing chain.
I did it out of habit. It took twenty minutes and by the end of it I was sitting very still, reading the same three lines again.
A distribution company. Then a holdings subsidiary. Then, behind that, agricultural supply contracts tied to the margin buffer zone. Land that pale wolf families had farmed for generations. Plants they had grown and harvested and sold because they had few other options.
Ashveil Holdings had a subsidiary that bought those plants for almost nothing, repackaged them, and sold them up the chain at a profit. My employer bought them from that chain. I was paid to analyze them. Not one document in the sourcing file mentioned where they actually came from.
I finished my report. Saved it. Said nothing to anyone.
Then I took a piece of paper and wrote down the subsidiary names by hand, folded it twice, and put it in the inside pocket of my bag. Small and quiet, like everything else I was doing.
The corridor near the administrative offices was not on my usual route through the building, but I had a resource request that needed a signature, which gave me a reason to be there. I got the signature. I was turning to leave when I saw Damon at the far end of the hall, talking to someone from facilities.
He wasn’t looking at me.
I kept moving.
I told myself it made sense. He worked here. He had business in every part of this building. A Beta’s day was a series of exactly these small administrative interactions, none of them interesting.
I told myself that and I almost let it go.
The communal garden was on my way back from block four that afternoon. I cut through it because it was faster and because I had taken this same shortcut twice before, which meant it fit the pattern I was building.
Damon was standing near the far wall with his phone out, reading something in the sun.
He didn’t look up when I passed.
I counted my steps until I was out of sight. Then I stood still for a moment between two buildings and thought about it.
The corridor. The garden. Both places slightly off my usual path. Both in the last two days.
He wasn’t following me. If he were following me, I could dismiss it as coincidence or rank anxiety. Following was something you could talk yourself out of.
This felt more like attention. Patient, unhurried, present in the background the way a sound is present before you consciously hear it.
I filed it. Kept moving.
On day two I ran the same delivery route in the same order before I went to block eleven. Tea for Edna. Bread for the Solis family. Cresswell’s prescription. Same timing. Same small conversations. Anyone watching would see exactly what they expected to see.
Block eleven was at the edge of the margin housing, set back from the main paths. The hall inside smelled like concrete and something faintly damp. The units were smaller here than in the older blocks. Less window. Quieter in a way that wasn’t peaceful.
I found unit four at the end of the hall.
I raised my hand to knock.
The door opened before I touched it.
Petra stood in the gap, white hair loose, smaller than I remembered from her old place. She looked at me without surprise, the way you look at something you’ve been expecting long enough that you stopped holding your breath about it.
“I was wondering when you’d find me,” she said.
I had a whole conversation ready. Lena Cross. The photograph. The compounds and the supplier chain and the name Ashveil Holdings on a piece of paper folded in my bag.
“Come inside.” She stepped back. “There’s something I’ve been waiting to tell someone for twenty years.”
She held the door open and looked at me with those steady, certain eyes.
“I think it might be you.“
- Writer
