4. Zuri
ZURI
Renee kept me out past my bedtime, and I dragged into work this morning on too little sleep. I’m on my second coffee before I notice the floor isn’t making its usual noise. The phones are silent and the copy room sits empty.
A box lands on my desk with CONFIDENTIAL stamped across the lid in red.
Huh?
Confidential crosses my desk all the time. Wanting to open one is new. I check the room.
Two security guards stand by the shredder bank. In a year on this floor, I have never seen security set foot in records. They’re just standing there, hands folded, watching us work.
Renee comes around the shelving with a cart of matching boxes. Her face is doing its work face.
“Top priority project,” she says, parking the cart between our desks. “These get destroyed today. All of it, straight from upstairs.”
I stand and lift the box, and it’s heavier than it looks. It occurs to me that my work phone hasn’t rung all morning. Whitney has gone quiet, and I don’t trust it.
I pop the lid to load the first stack, and the folder on top is labeled SHADOW WOLF CREEK.
The shifter town? That raises an eyebrow.
Millbrook hates the shifter town the quiet way: stickers in shop windows, barstool talk, nothing anyone signs their name to.
The town can’t afford louder. Millbrook is dying, and the paychecks holding it up come from Stillwater and whatever money crosses the valley to do deals here.
So people hate carefully. None of it was ever my business.
But I process records for a living, and records get destroyed on a schedule, with sign-offs, with a manifest I type myself. This is a cart, two guards, and no paperwork.
I’ve watched a company clean house before. I know what it looks like when paper starts disappearing.
I want to open that folder so bad my fingers itch. One of the guards clears his throat, and I feed the first stack into the shredder instead.
The machine chews through Shadow Wolf Creek one folder at a time. I keep my face bored and my hands moving, and the wrong feeling sits in my stomach.
Then the bigger guard mutters something about his lunch and pushes through the door toward the break room. The other one turns to walk the far shelving row. Renee is deep in her own cart, reading glasses down on her nose for once.
I slide one folder off the stack and into my tote under my desk, between my cardigan and my wallet. I’m quick about it.
I feed the next stack into the shredder and don’t look at my tote again.
The rest of my shift crawls. The guards stay until the last cart is empty, and by late afternoon the whole room carries the burnt-dust smell of chewed paper. When the big one finally walks the shredder bins out, I sign off my queue and gather my things.
I stop in the bathroom on my way out and wash my hands at the sink. The soap pump is the same new white bottle, and it still smells like nothing at all. I’ve used a lot of soap in my life. All of it smelled like something.
I turn the bottle around, and the label has no ingredients list and no manufacturer’s address, only the Stillwater name and a quieter clean.
I wrap the bottle in a paper towel and tuck it into my tote next to the folder. If today is the day I lose my mind, I might as well be thorough.
Outside, the evening has cooled the square. I check behind me at the first corner, and again at the next one. What I did today gets people fired. Depending on what’s in that folder, fired might be the good outcome.
Halfway home, the feeling starts. The hair creeps up on the back of my neck, and I check every window I pass for what’s behind me. There’s no one there when I turn around. The feeling stays anyway.
I pick up the pace until I’m one bad thought short of running. My building comes up out of the trees, and I have never been so glad to see it. Inside my apartment, I throw both locks. I paid for the second one myself. Tonight it feels like money well spent.
I pull the curtains before I turn on the lamp. My tote goes on the kitchen table, and I stand over it in my quiet apartment, deciding whether I want to know.
Dinner is the spaghetti pot from the weekend. I warm a bowl and pull out a chair and eat facing my tote, and I get through half before I quit pretending this is a normal night. I wipe my hands on my dish towel and pull out the folder.
The first page is a memo on Stillwater letterhead. PROJECT UNMATCHED runs across the top in bold, and under it, FATED SCENT SUPPRESSION, PHASE THREE.
I don’t know what a fated scent is. I know what suppression means.
The pages behind it are product sheets: an industrial solution in drums, a spray, a laundry additive, a hand soap, with diagrams of bottles I could reorder from memory.
There are dosage tables, and a column labeled DURATION, HUMAN SUBJECTS, and every entry in it reads the same: temporary, a matter of hours, reapply daily.
I dig the stolen bottle out of my tote and stand it next to the diagram. The white pump on my kitchen table matches the drawing down to its blank label.
They put it in our bathrooms.
“Damn,” I tell my kitchen. “Millbrook hates them that much?” Shadow Wolf Creek is the shifter town across the valley, and shifters don’t even come over here.
I close the folder and wish I could unread it. What am I supposed to do with this? The right answer is probably a journalist, and I wouldn’t know how to find one worth trusting. The last time I reported what a company was doing, the company reported me.
I carry the folder and the bottle to my desk in the corner, drop them in the bottom drawer, and push it shut. My spaghetti has gone cold and unwanted. I scrape the bowl into the trash and wash it.
Then I check every window latch in the apartment, and I test both door locks again on my way past.
In the bathroom, I undress and start the shower hot. I’m not sure tonight is something that washes off.
I stand under the water until it starts running cool, and then I go through the steps that put me back together.
My cap comes off. My bun comes down, and the ease of it spreads from my scalp on out.
I work shea butter through my ends and take my time with it, finger by finger, section by section.
My silk scarf goes on last, tied the same as every night.
By the time the knot is set, I feel more like myself than I have all day.
I’m under my quilt with the lamp still on when my phone buzzes. It’s Renee.
You were OFF today. You good?
I type out the truth and delete it. I’m good. Just tired, I send instead, and the lie sits sour on my thumbs.
Three dots appear, then: Also. That man from last night who jumped up and sent his whole booth screeching across the floor? Bartender says he left a hundred on a twelve-dollar tab. RAN out of there.
I missed all of it, I type back. Some of us were eating.
He was FINE, Zuri. Big. Tall. He can shove MY booth around any day.
I huff a laugh at my screen, tell her goodnight, and put the phone face down on my nightstand. Renee would flirt with a hurricane if it had shoulders.
The lamp goes off. The apartment settles into its nighttime sounds, the refrigerator hum and the tick of the radiator, and my eyes finally agree to close.
The dog at the blue house wakes the whole block.
I know that dog. It barks at delivery trucks and squirrels and men who walk too slow past its fence, and it has never once sounded like this. The barking climbs, furious at something, and then it quits all at once.
The quiet after is worse.
I’m out of bed with my quilt still hanging off me. I cross to the window in the dark and open the curtain a finger’s width. The street is empty everywhere the working streetlights reach. I can’t make out anything under the oak across the road, and nothing on my block is moving.
I stand there anyway, watching nothing, until the cold of the floor comes up through my feet.
Back in bed, I lie in the dark doing the math I’m best at: what I know, who knows I know it, and how fast a quiet life can end.
The math keeps coming out the same. If I stay quiet, I keep my job and my name and my little life. If I move, I lose some of that or all of it, and there’s no version where I get it back.
Tomorrow after work, I start researching how to get this to Shadow Wolf Creek. I’m skipping the channels that chewed me up the last time. Someone in that town deserves to know what’s being built across the valley, and this time the information goes straight to the people it’s aimed at.
It will probably cost me the job. Depending on how loud it gets, it will cost me the quiet too, and the small name I’ve spent a year keeping small.
I’ve tried talking my conscience out of things before. It doesn’t negotiate.
I turn over one way, then the other, and my thoughts keep trading places: the job against the folder, the quiet against the town. Sleep doesn’t come until the window starts going gray.