Chapter 30
The key to not getting caught was to act natural.
People who belonged didn't look over their shoulders or press themselves against walls or hold their clipboards at strange angles.
And yet, Greg was doing all three of these things.
He couldn't help it. Every sound in the corridor made his shoulders climb toward his ears. Even the buzzing of the overhead lights seemed louder than usual, as though the building itself knew he was here for the wrong reasons and was trying to alert someone.
But it was fine.
He was fine.
He had a reason for being here. Morrith had told him to investigate, and he was investigating. The fact that he was investigating at 11 p.m. when the office was mostly empty was simply because he was... diligent. Thorough. A dedicated employee who didn't limit his work to business hours.
Nobody would question that.
Nobody was even here to question it. Another department was responsible for night-time deaths, and so all the cubicles were empty, the break room was dark, and the only sound besides Greg's own treacherous footsteps was someone in Accounting doing whatever Accounting did at this hour.
Greg didn't want to know what Accounting did at this hour.
He turned left at the end of the main corridor.
Then right. Then left again. Each turn took him farther from the parts of HQ he knew.
The carpet got thinner. Greg walked past a bulletin board that displayed a memo about a filing protocol change dated fourteen years ago that had apparently never been taken down or, more likely, never been read in the first place.
He walked past doors with interesting labels like Spectral Disputes. Threshold Maintenance. Liminal Property Management.
He stopped in front of the one that read: RECORDS — INTERDEPARTMENTAL CASES.
Underneath, in smaller letters: Authorized Personnel Only.
Greg stared at the sign.
Authorized personnel.
Was he authorized personnel?
Morrith had authorized him to investigate. That was essentially the same thing. He had a clipboard.
Maybe he could hold it more authoritatively. He shifted his grip and tried a firmer angle. No, now he just looked like he was offering someone an award.
Pull yourself together, Greg.
He held the clipboard normally and pushed the door open.
The room beyond was large and very still.
Metal shelving units stretched from floor to ceiling, arranged in rows that disappeared into a dim distance where the fluorescent lights had apparently given up.
Everything was coated in dust—the shelves, the files, the single desk near the entrance where a reaper sat reading a book.
The reaper at the desk was old. Not in appearance—reapers didn't age—but Greg could tell by the way she held herself. Settled. Compressed by time into something dense and immovable, like a rock formation that had developed opinions. Her nameplate said EDA.
She didn't look up.
“Can I help you?” she asked the page she was reading.
“Yes,” Greg said. “I'm here to access files for an investigation. An official investigation.”
He hadn't needed to say “official,” and now the word hung in the air, immediately suspicious.
“Which files?”
Don't say Um.
“U-” Greg opened his mouth and immediately cut himself off.
Eda still did not look up.
Greg tried again. “I need files about cases involving supernatural interference with scheduled collections.” There, that sounded reasonable.
“Row fourteen,” Eda said, turning a page. “Section C through F. Organized by century.”
“By century?”
“There are a lot of them.”
Greg processed that. “How many is a lot?”
“More than you'd think.” She turned another page. “Fewer than there should be.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means most cases get resolved before they make it to the archives.” She still kept her attention on her book. “The ones back there are the ones that didn't resolve without Oversight.”
Greg waited, hoping she'd elaborate. She did not.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Mmhm.”
“I'll just... go to row fourteen, then.”
“That's where the files are.”
“Right.”
He turned toward the shelves, then turned back. “Is there a— do I need to sign in, or—”
“No.”
“Is there a log of some kind? For security purposes?”
“There's no log.”
“Shouldn't there be a log?”
Eda looked up from her book for the first time. She had the expression of someone whose patience had been tested by centuries of existence and was now being tested by something more annoying.
But it wasn't Greg's fault that security here was so criminally lax.
Someone needed to bring that up.
“Young man,” Eda said. “Nobody has visited this room in six years. The last person who did was looking for the bathroom. Do you want to see the files or do you want to discuss my security protocols?”
“The files,” Greg said quickly. Maybe the person who reviewed the security protocols didn't need to be him after all. “I want the files. Thank you. Sorry.”
He fled to row fourteen.
He found it toward the back of the room.
Greg carefully set his clipboard on the edge of a shelf and pulled out the first box full of files he could reach. It was labeled 1600–1650 and the cardboard was soft with age. Inside, the folders were…
Well…
They were not, as far as Greg could tell, organized by anything. The first file was written in script so old he had to squint. The second was a printed memo from 1987 about refrigerator etiquette in the break room. The third was a noise complaint involving a poltergeist.
He went back to Eda's desk.
“The files in row fourteen aren't in order.”
“No,” Eda agreed, turning a page.
“They're labeled by decade, but the contents are from completely different time periods.”
“Yes.”
“Some of them aren't even interdepartmental cases. There's a memo about the refrigerator.”
“Norbert in Spectral Disputes used to borrow our filing cabinets,” Eda explained. “He didn't always return things to the correct location.”
“That's—” Greg struggled. “How does anyone find anything?”
Eda looked up for the second time. She seemed to be wondering why Greg was wasting her time like this. “They don't,” she said. “That's why nobody comes here.”
Unbelievable.
Greg returned to row fourteen, seething.
He would have to go through every box and every misfiled, disorganized, incorrectly shelved document in this section until he found what he was looking for.
And the whole time he would have to resist the urge to reorganize the entire archive from scratch. That was the worst part. He didn't have the time to clean up this mess.
He could only start digging.
The first hour was an exercise in bureaucratic archaeology.
He found case files mixed in with performance reviews, lunch orders, a strongly worded complaint about a haunting in Zurich that had been filed under “Miscellaneous,” and two cases of “divine interference” that had nothing to do with demons.
He found a folder that contained only a single sheet of paper on which someone had written “Find Norbert” and underlined it twice.
He did not find Norbert. He was beginning to develop strong feelings about Norbert.
But between the refrigerator memos and the misfilings, he started pulling actual cases that involved demonic pacts.
He opened the first relevant file.
Case: Interference — Demonic Pact (Maternal)
Subject: Mercy Hollis, 34
Contract Holder: Patience Hollis (mother) Terms: “No harm shall come to her daughter so long as breath remains in her body.”
Source: Entity classified as Collector-class demon, identity unconfirmed
The summary was brief. Patience Hollis had made a deal with a demon after her daughter nearly died of fever. The protection held for eleven years. The system flagged the interference, investigated, and identified the contract holder.
Greg turned to the resolution page.
Interference identified: Patience Hollis (contract holder).
Obstruction clearance: Authorized.
Contract holder collected: 14 March 1638.
Protection dissolved. Subject collected within standard window.
Case closed.
Greg stared at the document. He'd never heard of 'obstruction clearance'. That wasn't in any of the manuals. Was there a form for it? Did someone have to approve it the way Morrith approved collection assignments, or was it automatic?
Was there a waiting period?
Greg read the file again, and then the true horror of it caught up to him.
Contract holder collected.
A chill went down Greg's spine. The system had identified Patience Hollis as an obstruction, authorized her removal, and sent someone to collect her the way Greg had been sent to collect Dustin.
Except Patience Hollis hadn't been dying. She'd been living. She'd been a mother who'd made a deal to save her daughter, and the system had made dying happen to her so the math would work.
But that was only one case. One outcome.
Greg opened the next file.
Case: Interference — Demonic Pact (Spousal)
Subject: Thomas Ashby, 29
Contract Holder: Margaret Ashby (wife)
Terms: “My husband will not die before me.”
Obstruction clearance: Authorized.
Contract holder collected: 9 November 1672.
Protection dissolved. Subject collected within standard window.
Case closed.
Greg's hands were cold. He opened another file.
It read much the same way.
No, no, no.
This couldn't be.
Greg started flipping through files, scanning only the resolution pages. His fingers left tracks in the dust on the folders as he read about a mother in France, 1723, a wife in the Qing Dynasty, 1801. A father in Ohio, 1943… All the stories ended the same.
Someone flagged the problem. Someone authorized the removal. Someone carried it out.
Not once had the system tried to break the contract itself. Not once had it negotiated, sought an alternative, or attempted to dissolve the deal. It just killed the person who'd made it and collected the soul it was owed.
In one file someone had written a note in the margin.
Contractual interference cannot be permitted to stand. The natural order requires restoration. The system's position is and has always been clear: you don't get to cheat death and live.
Greg read the note three times.
Then he sat down on the floor between the shelves because his legs had stopped working.
Never lose another child in my lifetime.
That was what Cathy had said. Those were the terms.
The system knew exactly how to work around that.
Greg thought about Cathy at her kitchen table, jaw set, eyes dry. She'd done what she could to keep her remaining son with her.
And the system would kill her for it.
Greg pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw colors.
He thought about Morrith in his cubicle, running Dustin's file through the system four times.
Investigating. Morrith didn't know about Cathy yet.
But Morrith was looking, and Morrith was thorough, and sooner or later the same machinery that had processed these files for centuries would turn toward a woman in Colorado who loved a little too fiercely.
He couldn't let that happen.
But how could he stop it?
He was a rookie with a clipboard and no plan.
Not knowing what to do with himself, he stood and put the files back on the shelf, carefully, in order, because even now he couldn't bring himself to leave things in disarray.
He walked back through the rows of shelving. Past Eda, who was likely on a new chapter and still didn't look up.
“Find what you needed?” she asked.
Greg chewed his lower lip.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
He left the archives and walked back through the quiet corridors of HQ, past the empty cubicles and the dark break room and the poster that said Every Soul Counts.
Every soul counts.
He wondered if whoever made that poster had ever actually believed it.