CHAPTER 9 Learning the EmpireUntitled Episode
661 Words
By Friday of the first week, Ava had a clear picture of what Varek Industries actually was.
On the surface, it was exactly what it presented itself as. A conglomerate with fingers in construction, private security, shipping and logistics, real estate development, and entertainment. The numbers were large and the operations were global and the people who worked in the building went about their days with the purposeful energy of a well-run machine.
Underneath the surface, things were more interesting.
She noticed the patterns first because that was how she noticed most things, by seeing the shape of information rather than the information itself. The meetings that were not in the official calendar. The calls that Colt fielded in a particular low voice that he reserved for a specific type of conversation. The visitors who arrived without appointments and were shown directly to Valdris's office without going through her or through the system at all.
She filed this away. She was not naive about what the Varek name carried in Ashenvale. She had grown up in this city. She knew the texture of the rumors as well as anyone.
But she had also learned early that rumors were rarely the whole picture, and that the most useful thing a person could do in any new environment was pay attention before forming conclusions.
So she paid attention.
She was good at the job, which she had suspected and was now confirming. She had the reports on his desk before eight every morning. She managed his calendar with the combination of precision and pragmatism the role required. She learned which calls Colt meant when he said urgent and which he meant when he said soon and handled them accordingly. By Wednesday she had stopped needing to ask him questions about the filing system. By Thursday she had reorganized the incoming correspondence protocol in a way that saved approximately forty minutes per day and had left a one-paragraph summary of the change on Valdris's desk without being asked.
He had not mentioned it.
She had not expected him to.
She learned that he arrived between nine and nine fifteen every morning and did not take lunch at a consistent time and usually left between seven and nine in the evening depending on what the day had held. She learned that he preferred written communication to verbal for anything that was not time-sensitive and that he read everything she put on his desk, not because he told her so but because his responses were always specific to the content in a way that proved it.
She learned that Colt was his operational second in everything, that there was a layer of the company that ran through Colt rather than through formal channels, and that certain conversations happened in Colt's office rather than Valdris's for reasons she did not yet understand.
She did not yet understand a great many things. She was comfortable with that.
On Friday afternoon, twenty minutes before she was due to leave, she was finishing the weekly summary report when she became aware of the particular quality of quiet that meant Valdris had come out of his office. She kept her eyes on her screen. She heard him cross to the documents shelf to her left, heard the particular sound of a file being removed and replaced.
"The correspondence reorganization," he said.
She looked up. He was standing with his back to her, returning the file to its place. "Yes," she said.
"It works better," he said. He walked back to his office.
The door closed.
Ava looked at the closed door for a moment. Then she looked back at her screen and finished the summary report and told herself that four words from a man who did not waste words was a reasonable end to a first week. She saved the document and shut down her computer and collected her things.
She did not smile until she was in the elevator.
- Writer
