Chapter 1 Intake, 0800 #2
The rest of the form went the way forms go.
Emergency contacts. Suppressant status — none current, disclosed and dated.
Contraceptive implant, sited, in date, expiry logged and countersigned by the clinic, which was the one field on the whole sheet the panel would not schedule an intake without, because the panel did not put four people in a licensed unit and then have to re-score it in nine months.
There was no field anywhere on the form for bonding, and there never had been; whatever the old books said about bites, nothing in three years of Cairn Ridge records had ever come across her desk as one, and the schema had no box to put it in if it had.
Dietary, medical, the clause about the panel’s decision being the panel’s.
Robyn read every field before she confirmed it, because that was what three years of records work did to a person, and Okonjo let her take the time without drumming her nails, which Robyn understood was the kindness the job had room for, and took it as it was meant.
Then the field that was wrong.
“Estimated next heat,” Okonjo read off the screen, “thirteen March. That’s auto-filled from your registration history.”
“It’s wrong.” Robyn had the clinic letter in the folder on her knees and had known, from the moment the recitation started, that it would come to this, because she had filed her own registration history and knew what it averaged.
She took the letter out and unfolded it on the desk and smoothed it with the side of her hand.
“The clinic re-estimated in February. Fourteenth of March. It’s on the letterhead. ”
Okonjo read the letter the way people read things they are deciding whether to believe, and then she did the thing nobody in the room had done all morning, which was hesitate over a drop-down. “This field populates from registration,” she said. “If I overwrite it, it flags.”
“Then it flags.”
“It goes in the log. The panel sees that the first entry on your week is a corrected field.” Not unkind. A warning, plainly meant, from the person who would have to type it.
“The letter’s dated,” Robyn said. “If the field says the thirteenth and my body does something the field doesn’t expect, that’s a worse entry.
I’ve read the scoring notes.” She had written half of the scoring notes, but there was nothing to gain from saying so twice, so she put her finger on the letter’s date instead.
“The fourteenth. The day after the report files.”
Okonjo held her look for a moment, and then the level voice came back into the room like a coat being put on, and she opened the field, and overrode it, and typed fourteen March, per clinic letter of 26 February into the box with room to spare.
The tablet made a small sound, accepting it.
Somewhere a database Robyn had migrated in October recorded that the first entry against Bracken, R.
E., unit four, was a correction, and she watched it happen and felt nothing she had not already decided to feel.
“Sign at the bottom,” Okonjo said.
She signed. Her handwriting on the glass was small and square and nothing like the clinic’s idea of her, and the date stamp came up under it, Monday the ninth of March, 08:41, and that was the week started. Whatever happened now, it happened on the record.
Okonjo took the tablet back and tucked it against her, and some of the corridor voice came back with it.
“I’ll be in the unit daily, usually late afternoon.
Today about four. The three candidates assigned with you are confirmed as of this morning —” she glanced at the screen " — Sunde, Osgood, Asare-Hill. Shuttle up at half ten, bay two. Driver’s on the roster, so you’ll have met him by lunchtime whether you like it or not. "
Osgood. There were Osgoods on half the rosters Robyn had ever filed; the name came up in the clinic database like a stone in a field, every spring, however you plowed round it.
The other two were just names on a screen, letters arranged into men she had never met, and she noted them and put them away.
“Anything you’d ask, if you were on my side of the desk?” Okonjo said, and it took Robyn a breath to understand that this was not the form either — that it was the assessor, Marguerite, spending something of her own at the end of the recitation.
Robyn thought about it properly, because the question deserved it. “Does the report say anywhere what the room was for?”
Okonjo’s thumb stopped on the screen.
“The unit’s laid out to a diagram,” Robyn said.
“It’s in the unit handbook — bed on the north wall, two chairs, nothing on the sill.
I’ve read it. If the week is four people in a room, and the report is the log, then somebody decided the room before we got there, and I can’t find the field where that decision goes.
” She picked up her folder and stood, because the cold had got through her boots and into her bones an hour ago and staying seated was starting to cost her more than the answer was worth.
“It isn’t a complaint. It’s a records question. ”
“I know what it is,” Okonjo said, and her voice did the level thing again, but slower, as if she was translating for a box with a drop-down menu and had not found the right entry yet.
“It isn’t in the log,” she said at last. “The diagram isn’t scored.
What happens in the room is scored.” She stood too, and she was very tall in the small cold room, and the kindness and the job sat on her shoulders together like two coats.
“Half ten, bay two. Wear the boots you’ve got, the paths are gritted but the grit’s losing. ”
Robyn stepped out of the office into the corridor and then out of the admin block into the morning, and the cold took her like a hand — clean, thin, enormous, the snow-glare off the upper lots so bright she had to stop and let her eyes come down to it.
Above the switchbacks the ridge stood white against a sky so blue it looked painted, and a little thread of smoke from the control hut hung over it and did not move.
The mountain did not know her designation.
The mountain did not have a field for her.
She stood in the middle of the path with her folder under her arm and read the morning the way other people read a page, and then she went to find out what four days’ preparation and three years of somebody else’s paperwork were going to be worth when she stopped typing the form and started living in it.