The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  Tonight, entry itself is straightforward. It’s warm for an October night and the house is old, so there are several standard ways to get in. The fumes of whiskey and garlicky kebabs wafting on the sawing snore coming from the adult’s room put Frankie at ease. But she should know by now that this job’s not made for ease. She can hear Barry Spades’ voice dripping in her head: Relax on your own bloody time, not mine.

  But Sadie 53 Wharf Street has such soft curls and such snuggly PJs—they’re synthetic fleece with blue and white strawberries and unicorns—that Frankie lingers a little too long, just touching her fingertip to the antidepressant silkiness for a moment or two before drawing her breath and starting the extraction.

  Anyone else but Glitterwings would chide her to get a move on. As per usual he’s darting around, nosing around in the human’s belongings instead of keeping guard.

  Frankie checks the job card again. Despatch hasn’t filled the parent/guardian/carer checkboxes so she doesn’t know if the kebab-eater in the next room is the only adult in the house, but she’s pretty confident. According to the card, Sadie 53 Wharf Street is the only donating child registered here and there’s definitely no sign of a sleepover, so it should be fine.

  For some reason, she’s feeling drifty tonight, when she’s always taken this work seriously. Her retrievals and conversions are always in the top five per cent of the division and she’s never had a complaint lodged against her. She treats this job like it’s hers, as if she takes ownership of the company’s results; she should be proud of herself—that’s what Amber from HR said to her when she passed on the ‘Star of the Month’ certificate some time last year. That’s why they teamed her up with Glitterwings, who’s long been dangling on his last warning.

  The certificate didn’t come with a raise; it came with a supermarket gift voucher and an extra shift. She blew the voucher on chocolate and stickers for the kids and, for herself, a bar of orange-scented soap that wouldn’t turn to sludge after her first shower.

  Proud? Yeah, she is. She prides herself on doing something well if she does it at all, and that’s why she can’t really understand why she’s procrastinating here by Sadie’s pillowside. Maybe she’s coming down with something.

  Glitterwings swoops close to Frankie’s face and whispers, “Do you want me to do it?” It’s a half-hearted offer. She’s always the one who does the heavy lifting.

  Frankie shakes her head to snap herself out of it, waving Glitterwings away before his buzzing wakes the girl.

  The carer/parent/guardian, or maybe Sadie herself, has wedged the tooth so far under the pillow that Frankie needs to burrow in and scratch around for it. There’s no special tooth box or jewellery case, just a bundled-up old tissue. Just as Frankie burrows all the way towards the bundle, Sadie moans and turns, flopping her head with a heavy whack right over the parcel. Now, the way Sadie’s lying, her head is pressing through the thin pillow and right over the tissue-ball and Frankie can’t budge it. She pulls at the edge of the paper, but its corner rips away. Damn it: disruption of original packaging, that’s an instant five debit points. But still she takes care: destruction will get you twenty. Detection will get you a formal warning at the very least. Pressed onto her back and worming through the musky crevasse, Frankie squeezes herself out the back of the pillow and casts a gentle levitation spell.

  The girl’s head floats barely perceptibly above the pillow, and Frankie is able to duck back under, unbundle the tissue, switch in the coin, bag the tooth and get out, all in a well-practised second. This is the single second that makes every extraction worthwhile, despite the drudgery and corporate mortification that surrounds it; it makes Frankie’s heart beat a little; it’s fun. Frankie’s fug has cleared, and she’s ready to get onto the next job. Glitterwings has other ideas. He’s now investigating a naked blonde doll lying at the foot of the bed. He drapes a strand of the doll’s hair over the top of his head and pouts. “Whaddya think? Or am I better as a redhead?”

  Despite herself, Frankie laughs. It feels good. She hasn’t laughed for ages.

  Something changes in Glitterwings’ demeanour, and before she can stop him, he darts at her and clicks off her TeenyGoPro. Her first instinct is to snap at him and turn it back on—a disabled cam will set off an administrative enquiry at the very least—but then she realises he’s done the same to his own, the status light on his body camera fading to nothing. And he’s staring at something over her shoulder.

  She turns.

  An old human’s in the doorway, cutting a gnarled silhouette into the jaundiced light seeping from the passageway outside Sadie’s bedroom and blocking the exit. Oh, shit. This is why Glitterwings made them go dark; Frankie’s stomach plummets.

  Sadie groans and shifts. The three other souls in the room freeze and wait for her to settle again.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” the woman says. “Knew you’d pitch up.”

  Glitterwings flashes out before the woman. “Yeah? And?” It’s false bravado. He’s as shaken as she is. Being detected by a human is one thing, but talking to one is taboo.

  The woman’s been bracing her hand against the doorjamb, and now she slides it down to her side and shoves it into the pocket of her grubby dressing down. Her knobbled fingers come back out, balled into a loose fist. “Knew you’d come. Soon as I heard Sadie’s first tooth was wiggling. Haven’t seen your type for donkey’s years; haven’t had a kid around for that long and I guessed you’d come an’ prey on her. Your type never give it up, right?”

  Frankie appalls herself with a flush of pride. Yes, you’re right, ma’am. We don’t give it up. We do our job, and we do it well. The knee-jerk response of a five-star zero-hours wage-slave.

  She can still hear the soft grumble of Kebab Breath’s snores down the hall and she checked the other rooms when she came in, as per protocol. Where has this woman come from?

  Glitterwings reads her mind. “Do you live here?” he asks the woman.

  She chuckles. “Nah. Live over the road, innit. Arbour House. Residential care they call it, but it’s more like sodding Wormwood Scrubs. Been watching for you. Been waiting. Know where Sadie’s folks keep the spare key, thought I’d take a chance.”

  “Why?”

  “Wanted to see if things have changed, or if your sort still practised the old ways. Used to be we’d scratch each other’s backs. Back in the day. Back when I could scratch, that is.” The woman raises her knobbled fist to Glitterwings’ average location and opens her hand. Glitterwings gasps and Frankie hurries over from where she’s been hovering by the little girl’s head and stares into the wrinkled palm. Six bright inverse-cavity-shaped nuggets of gold. The woman performs something like a smile, gradually revealing snaggled and purpled gums. “Your type would always come around pick-pick-picking wherever there was pain and misery. We cut a deal back in the day. So how about it? Old times’ sake.”

  Frankie always assumed the rumours about the black-market tooth trade were old elves’ tales. The kind of thing that went on before the regulations, before the industry was regulated. Before DRRC was even founded.

  Glitterwings touches his TeenyGoPro toggle to make sure it’s off. “What do you want for them?”

  Frankie is appalled. “Glitterwings… no.”

  “You tell me. Golds are hard to come by these days, innit? A dying breed, we are.” The woman pauses to laugh and the cackle turns to a crackle and a wheezing cough. She pants it out, aware now of Sadie turning and muttering, disturbed, in the bed. She takes four steps backwards into the passageway, and Frankie and Glitterwings follow. “I was thinking maybe a hundred? Could get much more down the pawn shop, but they’ve stopped the outings and my corns give me murder these days.”

  Glitterwings folds his wings and does a showy little free fall, his version of a double-take. He gets back to her eye-level and snorts out a laugh. “Sorry, love. We’re only carrying fifteen quid for the fifteen extractions on the cards tonight.”

  Our customer service oper
atives do not carry cash—the slogan pops ridiculously into Frankie’s head.

  The woman turns to Frankie. “What about you, pet? Just a little pin money, that’s all I need. Something for the mushy biscuit fund. I can get more. I know where.”

  Frankie shudders. “Glitterwings, come on. We’re going.”

  He’s wavering, still transfixed by the woman’s haul.

  She raises her voice, risking waking the child. “We’re going now.”

  He nods.

  “Ere,” the woman whispers after them as they zoot past her. “Always wondered… What do you do with them teeth anyway?”

  Neither Glitterwings nor Frankie answers.

  The rest of the night’s extractions are, for the most part, unremarkable, and through them all, Frankie carries the image of that old woman’s gap-jawed leer in her mind. Over the course of the night, the crone’s darkening gums begin to bleed in Frankie’s imagination, the remaining dental outcrops in that ravaged landscape get sharper, yellower. The gold nuggets in her withered grip become weightier, glint brighter, drawing in impossible light and bouncing it back. And shadowing this is the fear. The terror of being disciplined. Glitterwings says he’ll tell them the cams malfunctioned; but if they see through that lie, her perfect record will be marred. And it’ll be worse for him. He’s on his last warning.

  Around four in the morning, the two fairies fly back to the Dental Repurposing and Reclamation Company’s Incoming Processing Block, take a number—there are seventeen teams ahead of them—and perch on the cracked vinyl of the faux-tree-branch seat-set in the waiting area among the scattering of exhausted shift-jobbers eager to get home or anxious to make their next gig.

  Frankie passes her eyes over the assembled workers’ faces: patient, contented, humiliated, frustrated; some even laughing, some with their heads buried in their hands, some asleep; the younger ones showing off with loud stories and acrobatic manoeuvres. “Not what most people would expect from a mood-lit hall full of fairies,” she comments. The trepidation is making her weary; now she just wants it to be over.

  “Yeah,” Glitterwings says, disturbed from whatever he’s thinking. “They think it’s all sequins and absinthe, Kirlian glow, belly buttons and diaphanous wings.”

  “What am I going to do?” Frankie says.

  Glitterwings gives her a look. “I get it. If you want to come clean, I’ll take the rap. Tell ’em the truth. That I wasn’t doing my job. Let my eye stray off the ball, tried to cover it up.”

  It’s too late for that. She should’ve reported it immediately.

  A constant swirl of movement marks the paths between the entrance and the waiting area, the check-in desks and the exit as workers log their take and move out. In a ceilingless, carpet-tiled limbo like this, there’s no reason to linger.

  Despite the queue, processing is pretty quick—the check-in desks are staffed with a team of well-drilled agents logging job cards, checking in body cams, and inventorying the new stock. When their number’s called, Frankie places the job cards and the pouches of tiny teeth on desk number three while Glitterwings slides the bodycams across, not wasting his breath on a greeting.

  But Frankie always does. “Hi, Angelique. How are you this morning? Had a good shift?” It’s Frankie’s tendency to private rituals like this, her fundamental belief that social form matters, that makes her such a fine operative. Will Angelique see the guilt and fear on her face?

  It seems not. Angelique frowns, presses her finger on the printout she’s consulting to mark her place, glances up at Frankie as if she’s an inopportune figment of her imagination and, with a microscopic tic around the chin, turns back to cross-checking her list against the quality guide on the screen and the teeth in front of her. On her desktop is a list of the transactions she’s handled tonight; she’s filled lines to just past halfway. Frankie’s seen Angelique’s portrait behind one of the laminate frames in the staff tearoom, though—she’s probably onto her second page.

  As the desk-fairy settles back to concentrating on the log, and while Glitterwings clenches and unclenches his jaw, slumped on the perch beside her, Frankie cranes around the desk partition to see if she can get a glimpse into the inner workings of the building. Once labelled, the pouches of teeth are sorted and sent off down a conveyor behind the check-in desks and into the yonder. Once or twice, Frankie’s seen a flicker of movement as the flap of the conveyor gate is lifted, or as something bigger gets hitched in the workings. She swears she’s seen the flurry of indentured elves who don’t often stray beyond the processing block. On occasion she’s overheard a few of the administrative staff joking about the lack of “elf and safety”.

  The old woman’s question comes back to her. When she started at DRRC, Frankie used to try to engage with the other collection fairies in the waiting room, find out if anyone else knew where all these teeth were going; she used to air her fantastic theories—vampires’ castles, genetic experiments, an army of zombie clones, a cure for cancer, carbon-neutral spacecraft insulation, Flammarion Hurst’s next exhibition—but she eventually gave up. None of the other shift workers wanted to discuss it; they only collected their pay packets from the bursar’s window at the end of every week, not caring what machine they’re a cog in. She chooses to believe that whatever it is, the teeth are used for good. That’s what she tells her children, anyway.

  The seconds tick by. Angelique’s pencil scratches. Everything seems to be proceeding in the same way as it does every morning. She allows herself to relax, believe that they’ve got away with it.

  It’s only when they’re halfway out the door that Angelique’s laconic voice says behind them, “Wait. There’s an inconsistency with your cameras. You’ll need to report to Anomalies.”

  “It’ll be fine. Trust me.” Glitterwings is trying to spark a little light around the bleak space, but his spell casts less light than the low-wattage bulb in the beige-shaded lamp on the bare table in front of them. Behind them, around them, only shadows, and in them Frankie can imagine in terrifying detail the outlines of all the rumours she’s heard; she can swear she hears the stifled echoes of past inquisitions gasping out of the darkness.

  Frankie and Glitterwings have been waiting for the Discrepancies, Discipline and Anomalies committee for twenty minutes now. Frankie’s heard of The Cell, but had thought it was only rumour. They’ve been made to sit in straight-backed chairs in an unnatural, human-like position, their thighs and backs cramping and their wings forced painfully against the wooden planks of the backrests. The only thing shoring back the flood of panic is her exhaustion.

  It’s rare that she craves a drink. She could almost pretend this gloomy room is some annex of the Keg and Glitter, where Glitterwings often goes after a shift. Sitting alone on a weekday morning, when most fairies are asleep or doing something more gainful than sitting in a bar.

  “Don’t worry,” Glitterwings says. “Despite what they’d have us believe, we have some special skills. Burglary’s an art form. Robots can’t replace us just yet. They’ll just apply some ritual humiliation and move on.”

  “You should know, right.” Frankie snuffles a forlorn half-smile to herself. Glitterwings has the patchiest disciplinary record of any operative she knows. But even he’s held back from out-and-out insubordination. That was something Glitterwings was always banging on about: that the hierarchy doesn’t stop just with the Corporation. All things are connected. Being marked as a dissident at the workplace would brand you in the wider world too. You have to keep your head down and your opinions to yourself.

  “We’d like to hear your opinion,” says the second Discipline fairy, a baggy-faced male wearing a nametag reading Moshpit Krill, Tier 2 Disciplinarian. “We’re giving you an opportunity to state your side of events. As we can see it, the evidence is entirely clear-cut, but we’d like to hear your side of the matter.”

  The disciplinary committee consists of three fairies, grey-suited uncomfortably like people on human TV, and an unctuous, bored face wat
ching on video link.

  “Who’s that?” Glitterwings points at the screen. “Is that… is that him?”

  “As you know,” the third Discipline fairy enunciates in a crisp voice officious enough for the smarm to be received clearly enough through the CCTV at Head Office or in his yacht or wherever Spades is currently sitting. ‘Mr Spades is the boss of this hub, and he likes to be involved in any and all operational matters. And he has every entitlement to…” The fairy is distracted by an impatient movement on the screen and loses her train.

  Discipline Fairy One pipes up, “In fact, it’s because of the director’s hands-on involvement that the company continually achieves such—”

  “Time is money,” Barry Spades blares from the screen. “Get on with it.”

  When the committee fairies came into the room, they offered a lukewarm apology for keeping them waiting and turned on the top striplights. Instead of her funky and virulent imaginings, there was nothing to greet Frankie in the floodlit Cell but scrape marks on the eggshell walls and a window to some inner HR sanctum venetianed with dusty blinds and the video screen bracketed to a cabinet with a dust-encrusted vaseful of sticks next to it. Now Frankie flickers her eyes around the space, desperate to find something to distract her from the Discipline fairies’ joy-drained faces.

  “Miss Bell, we’re surprised at you,” says Moshpit Krill. He scans across a printout of Frankie’s numbers. “We could accept that this is some sort of mix-up if you explain it to us,” he says, but not kindly. “Our records imply that the monitoring devices were turned off deliberately. Do you still contend that this was… accidental?”