Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
It took a whole day for Ginny to figure out what Kate’s new assignment would be.
Now, it seemed to take forever to get to basement level fifteen, the second lowest floor in the whole huge building and Kate’s new home for the next few weeks.
Riding in the elevator reminded her of that one time she’d taken a trip with her family to the Carlsbad Caverns.
There was the same feeling of pressure, with hints of claustrophobia.
When the doors opened, there was an absolutely huge room, dark and dismal, like a big prison common area. Everything was a stark, dark gray, poorly lit with no windows, so it seemed almost black. There were tables, five long ones, set up cafeteria style.
She gaped at the stacks upon stacks of papers. Papers frickin’ everywhere.
“So this is Contracts,” she muttered, already mentally cursing Ginny.
Her spoken words drew attention. Once she looked past the papers, she saw men sitting on metal folding chairs, going through the documents.
The men all looked similar … some ethnicity she couldn’t quite place.
Slavic? Russian, maybe? Actually, the more she looked, the less she could place any characteristics—they had elements that might pass for Asian, or Latinx, or Native American.
As a biracial person herself, she knew that they could be any or all of the above. People were constantly mistaking her for other things. She was, essentially, human tofu—able to pass for whatever people wanted, more or less.
They did have one other commonality, she noticed. They all looked like mixed martial arts fighters: huge, with no necks and bulging biceps, veiny triceps, and squared off delts.
“Lookie what we have here,” a guttural voiced man said, getting to his feet as his chair legs scraped loudly on the floor. “Fresh meat.”
Slowly, all the men stood up, staring at her with hunger and violence in their eyes.
Kate swallowed hard.
Oh, crap.
“Hello, pretty,” one bull-neck guy said, walking up to her with an icky “serial killer special” smile on his face. He also had a fresh cut on his cheek, like a knife wound or something that only added to his creepy factor. “Don’t you look good enough to eat?”
Kate reached into her purse, finding the pepper spray in one second flat. She wasn’t going to let a few thugs spook her, for fuck’s sake. At her temp job.
Especially not paper-pushing thugs.
“Seriously? Really? Are you kidding me with this bullshit?” She glared at the men approaching, focusing on the one talking to her. “Back off, pal. I’m here to work.”
He laughed. “Work?” he echoed, looking her up and down unpleasantly. “On what?”
“Contracts,” she said shortly. She assumed, anyway. In Ginny’s usual passive-aggressive and completely disorganized way, Kate had been sent down blind.
“They’re a huge mess, completely unproductive,” Ginny had said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “Just the sort of thing a super secretary like you ought to be able to straighten out in no time at all, don’t you think?”
The guy was still staring at her, but some of the other workers were muttering amongst themselves. Finally, one guy who seemed easily seven feet tall stepped forward. He was wiry and thin, not brawny like the others.
“We’re already being punished for the last one,” the thin man said to the guy she was now mentally calling Dexter—the guy with the cut face. “We cannot anger The Overseer further. We have enough problems right now.”
Dexter snarled out something in a really weird language—something between German and a hairball.
Thin Guy ignored it. “Come on,” he said to Kate, standing between her and Dexter. “You can sit by me.”
“Dickless bastard,” Dexter snapped. Thin Guy kept walking, and Kate scurried quickly alongside.
“Don’t mind him,” Thin Guy assured her. “That is, don’t be alone with him, but don’t worry. I won’t let him hurt you.”
“Thank you,” Kate said, and meant it. Just because she had pepper spray didn’t mean she thought she was a badass. She wondered if the Dexter guy had some kind of complaints lodged against him. Then she turned to her protector. “I’m Kate. What’s your name?”
“Ah…” He quickly said something that seemed to be mostly consonants, with a little gag at the end. She blinked.
“Okay. I’m going to have to work on that,” she said, apologetic.
He smiled at her indulgently. “Perhaps you should call me by a nickname. Our language is… nearly impossible for those unfamiliar with it.”
She smiled. “Would Slim be okay?” When he nodded affably, she pushed forward. “So. How do I get started? What are you guys doing here?”
“I don’t know how you get started.” The tall guy looked at her curiously. “I’m surprised that you are on this level at all. Do you know what these are?”
“Um… contracts?” Hence the name of the department?
He didn’t even crack a grin. “Can you read this?”
He handed her one of the documents in the stack.
It was surprisingly thick parchment paper, and the writing seemed burned onto it.
The writing itself was odd, as well, like a cross between the angular runic symbols she’d seen at Prue’s bookstore, and the bubbly cursive that she’d seen in the Lord of the Rings movies.
“No. What language is that?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Not a language, exactly.”
She frowned, studying it more closely. “This is like a cipher or something, huh? Some kind of code?”
She felt a little tingle of excitement. She’d heard that Fiendish was super-secretive. The newspaper articles had suggested it was something sinister, but she’d assumed it was the usual tabloid bullshit.
This would suggest otherwise.
“That’s it,” Thin Guy said, and he sounded relieved. “A secret, ah, code.”
“So, what do we need to do?” Even if it was nefarious, she reasoned, if she couldn’t make sense of it, she couldn’t really feel responsible for it, right?
She shifted uncomfortably in the already-uncomfortable metal folding chair. She really, really hoped it wasn’t something terrible—like labor negotiations to hire orphans for a nickel a day, or something.
You need the job, Kate.
She felt a little nauseous.
“Since you cannot read this, I am not sure how you can help,” he admitted. “We are… searching. For a specific word, on a specific kind of document.”
She frowned, doing a quick headcount. “There are, what, forty of you?”
“Fifty.”
“Okay.” Her brain started whirring, juggling options like Tetris blocks, trying to get a handle on a system for the work.
Her uncle used to make fun of her when she got into this mode—but then, the only system he’d ever practiced was one he’d used to bet on horses.
And that was a complete failure. “There are like a million pages here. Are they at least in some kind of order?”
He shrugged. “Not that we know of.”
“Where are the ones that are already processed?” she asked, looking around. The whole place was one big, hot mess of documents.
He shrugged again.
“Jeez Louise,” she muttered. “This sounds like Ginny all over. You guys are going to be at this forever at this rate. Probably going over some of the same contracts more than once.”
He sighed, a little, gentle smile on his face. “The work itself is not so bad, really.”
“Stuck in this sunless hole?” she said. “It’s like an icebox in here!”
“Trust me. We prefer it that way.”
“So, I guess I should check in with this Overseer guy,” she said. “He’s your boss, right?”
That smacked the smile right off Slim’s face. “It would be better if you don’t see him,” Slim said slowly. “He does not particularly like your kind.”
“What, temps?” She frowned. What an asshole. “You guys are contract workers, aren’t you?”
Slim nodded. “But he has quite a bit more authority over us,” he said. “And he is like us. That is, he comes from where we are from. The Overseer wants us to find the documents, and we are behind schedule. He can be rather demanding.”
“Lotta that going around,” she said, grimacing. “What, does he yell at you guys?”
“Among other things,” Slim muttered darkly. “We work until we drop.”
Kate’s frown intensified. “How about I take you to lunch,” she suggested, “and you can fill me in on how everything works down here.”
“Lunch?” Slim’s eyes widened. “We’re not allowed meal breaks.”
She stared at him for a long moment, not comprehending. “Are you telling me they’re not letting you eat?”
“It is not so bad, really,” he repeated, glancing nervously over his shoulder.
“Are you kidding me?” Appalled did not even begin to cover it. She dug into her purse. “When was the last time you ate? Or drank?”
He looked nonplussed. “Truly. It’s not….”
“Here.” She pulled out a package. “Sorry. Sometimes I need a sugar rush, and it’s all I have…”
He stared at it for a long moment. Then he looked over his shoulder, and tore the package open with shaking hands. He stuffed one cake into his mouth. Then his eyes widened dramatically, and he looked at her in surprise.
“What?” she asked. “You’ve never had a Ho Ho before?”
He shook his head. Then, like a five-year-old, he smiled broadly.
“I can’t believe your supervisor is letting this happen,” she said, huffing. “Or that the higher-ups are okay with this. Can you imagine what a union would say? I should just…”
“No!” Slim’s look of panic and alarm cut through her self-righteous anger. “Please. Tell no one what’s going on down here.”
“Sure, okay, Slim,” she reassured him, and he finally calmed down.
It’s not my business, she reminded herself.
How many years was it going to be before she learned to keep her nose out of other people’s problems?
She knew too many people who, with great intentions, wound up trying to be the savior in incidents they had no business meddling in.
Maybe this was like that. “Um… Why don’t you show me what it is you’re looking for, and I’ll see if I can’t help? ”
He nodded, then took a bite of the other Ho Ho blissfully. When he was done, he took a blank piece of paper, and a pen, drawing a funny symbol.
“That,” he said, when he’d swallowed. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
“All right,” Kate said. “I’ll find one.”
He smiled again, this time more indulgently. “Even if you can read the writing, this symbol is difficult to find.”
She buckled down to it, flipping through the first contracts. The fact that the words all looked similar was a big part of the problem. The really weird thing, though, was that every now and then she’d come across a signature in English, sometimes with a thumbprint in dark brown ink.
After a few hours, her eyes were crossing, and she was feeling even more cranky and violent than usual, even on a corporate temp job.
“This is ridiculous, Slim. You know that.” She rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms. “There’s got to be an easier way.”
He shrugged, still blissed out from the Ho Hos. “We do what we’re told.”
She shook her head. “What if you don’t find any of them?”
“We will find them.” Still, his voice started to wobble a little.
“But if it takes too long…”
He looked worried as her sentence trailed off.
“Many of these others don’t understand,” he said in a whisper, nodding at the rest of the men bent over the papers.
“They think it couldn’t possibly be worse here than it was, back where we were,” he prevaricated.
“But I know the Overseer. I know what he is capable of. He told us his job is at stake—that it will depend on our performance. And I think we’d better find at least one name soon, or it will… ”
He paused, that look of panic and fear back on his face.
“…be very bad,” he finished softly.
This “Overseer” guy sounded like more than just a micromanager. He sounded like a brutal, narcissistic, abusive asshole.
“You know, I’ve met Thomas Kestrel a couple of times, and he knows me,” she said tentatively. “Maybe I could—”
“No!” Slim said, then quickly dropped his voice lower when others looked at them. “No. That would only make things worse.”
Kate sighed. She wasn’t going to go narc on this Overseer guy—she didn’t know him, and obviously, the guys were scared stiff. That said, she could help them find the names. She might not exactly be a caped crusader, but she knew paperwork, and she knew systems.
Besides, Ginny had just told her to come down here and “fix” stuff. She hadn’t really defined, or limited, exactly how that stuff was supposed to get fixed.
Kate smiled. More than just paperwork and systems, she knew people.
And one in particular, she thought with a grimace, would probably be just what this particular situation called for.
As long as he keeps his hands to himself, anyway.