by Hodge, Brian
They snickered at his flight into the building. The children didn’t dare throw stones at them.
The Ministry gathered him under its Gothic crenellations and turrets. He bolted down the former museum’s rambling halls, past looted displays and sealed off ruins, until he reached the nest of his Head Investigator office in a wing of mostly empty rooms. Heart racing, he settled into the cozy space between packed book cases and a mahogany desk piled high with files.
His desk was not as he’d left it the day before.
Daylight streamed in through two leaded glass windows, miraculously preserved. Six pellets lay in the bowl at the center of his desk. The large tracks of mold on the vaulted ceiling hadn’t shifted or grown larger. The wall separating him from the empty Bureau Chief’s office remained unblemished. The situation was not yet serious.
He collected his day’s pay, raised the small flag by the door indicating his office was occupied, opened the plastic container of khli. The stench permeated the room. Something skittered across one of the upper wooden shelves, raising dust from the book tops. He dipped his fingers into the warm fat, drew out a sliver of mysterious brown meat sliced from what miners found dead in tunnels under the city, and shoved the morsel into his mouth. Swallowed. It was best not to chew, or keep the food too long in the mouth. Otherwise, reflexes took over. Metallic-tasting spices from the Wilderness did their best to numb his sense of taste and smell.
He reeked of something dead, and was safe for another day.
But a stack of case files had been shifted to the center of the desk, and an old folder moved to the top. The cover was stained by oily fingerprints. A packet of government memos he’d received weeks ago and put aside had been placed next to the stack. A splotch of fungus had staked a claim to the topmost document.
No time to fire up the small stove for the ritual of his morning tea. Marican carefully wiped his hands with paper from the mound of canceled folders piled on the floor behind his chair. He reviewed the directives from the provisional government’s upper echelons first.
More productivity, they demanded. He was a senior member of the government. A role model for his fellow survivors’ children and for the trainees recruited from Orphanage cast-offs. Greater involvement with new staff was expected. There were few left to teach them what it meant to be caretakers of humanity’s future.
Marican squeezed the paper between his fingertips. Things couldn’t be critical, yet, but they must be getting worse. There’d been rumors about survivor birth rates. He’d seen the transfer papers coming out of the nurseries and academies.
He had reasons for avoiding memos. Yes. He was busy.
He opened the top case folder delicately, as if the remains of a body might be found inside, and fingered the details of another missing person. This one was an orphan. A runaway, hardly more than a teenager. A man, in this world. Another potential Alexander the Great. He forced himself to keep reading.
The missing man had joined the lonely cadre of survivor miners as a youngster. He’d used skills learned in the orphan gangs to find new pockets of precious resources entombed beneath the city’s ruins. Having lost the gangs’ advantages in numbers for the work, and facing hostility from former rivals among the survivors, the boy must have suffered in the city’s ruins.
But he’d adapted, and by a force of will and personality Marican couldn’t imagine, developed a network of miner cells capable of exploiting new finds, and taught tactics that helped his new allies to defend scavenging operations from orphan gangs. He’d organized a string of individual vendors into an organized merchants in the city’s market, established a bank and a credit association, even an alternative to the currency of stone-like pellet droppings that, like the khli, had the added benefit of protecting carriers from what lurked in the ruins waiting to be awakened by infestations of humanity.
The missing man had transformed himself into an entrepreneur, finding ways to grow and prosper at world’s end like a weed sprouting from cracked concrete slabs. For an orphan, burdened by the weight of stories about where he came from and what he was, he’d carved a deep niche in the lives of ordinary survivors. He was the kind of individual the times needed: hungry, ferociously alive, aggressively human.
His work also threatened the provisional government’s control over humanity’s legacy.
He’d followed the Ministry’s rules and registered, paid taxes, succumbed to examinations and security checks. But under the man’s influence, survivors had begun working more closely with cast-off and runaway orphans who had sought refuge in government territory. He’d strayed from the government’s mission of providing security for what was left of humanity. Like a vast, invisible force, his presence had sent cracks through the walls of old fears and prejudices.
The folders on Marican’s desk, his years in the Bureau, were filled with men and women like him. They disappeared all the time. The walls remained tall and strong.
Marican closed the file. Message received, but not understood.
He wasn’t supposed to pass this case on to one of the part-timers who normally pursued the hopeless assignments, or simply let it fade away in a pile. He was handling the investigation personally.
Even if no one cared about missing orphans. They didn’t contribute to humanity’s preservation. Survivors did. They were the ones who needed to be found, when they lost their place between annihilation and redemption.
Those missing people could eventually be discovered hanging from exposed beams in their homes, poisoned in what remained of an old, favored haunt, or hiding in the ruins along their route to work, unable to face another day. He’d even traced connections among missing individuals implying tightly-knit groups too large to be safe. The lack of bodies proved they’d challenged the rule of three and paid the price.
This case wasn’t going to be so easy to resolve. There were no protocols, no routine paths to inevitable answers, when it came to runaways. Getting involved with them was an invitation to a walk in the Wilderness.
Marican took a deep breath, gathered up the case file. Everyone knew where the new orphan had been placed. The Bureau of Boundaries. The initial batch taken in by the government had been relegated to the Bureau of Records. The girl was the first to break out. Whether she’d slipped through a crack or had been recruited out of necessity, she was a sign of the future. There was no one else to go to for help.
In the Elections, it seemed people were for voting for Change rather than Stability.
Boundaries was located at the other end of the Ministry from the Bureau of Investigations. Not an easy walk. He took his time, folder in hand, yielding delicately to the flow of rank, seniority and the color coded bands of messenger priority determining traffic patterns centered on avoiding congregations greater than three. No one hurried through the wake of echoes. He was just as careful, allowing the susurration of mysteries to pass through him.
He found her alone in an office deep in the Bureau’s nearly empty wing. A dozen offices looked like they were being used, but only one other had an occupied flag raised. The Chief’s, like him, presiding over a shrinking staff of workers no longer showing up every day.
It was still early. A courtesy call could wait until he had a better idea of the girl’s usefulness. There was no danger of hurt feelings over a mistaken intention to poach staff, Marican was certain. He’d already turned down the opportunity to take on orphans in the Bureau of Investigations.
He paused at the entrance, watched her pushing pins into a city map on the back wall while glancing at a report in her other hand. The map was from before the Turning, with streets depicted as they had been, not as they were now. Her work confirmed what he’d thought in the square: she’d been more than a house worker tending to the hordes of children the Orphanages seemed to produce. She’d spent time with orphan gangs, competing with miners for the city’s buried resources. Just like the missing man. She knew the lay of the new land, from experience, and reports from her old friends. Her plac
ement in the Bureau would serve the government well.
He was going to talk to her. Hear her voice. She was about to become real, and he might lose her in his dreams.
Fear tugged at the fibers of his nerves. He winced as a cramp seized his foot.
He was distracted by her short, black hair bobbing as she turned back and forth between board and paper. His gaze slid along the curving line that began at her outstretched hand as she leaned to one side, stood up on her toes to push a pin into a far corner of the map, and ended at a hip draped in smooth cloth. A faint trace of her scent, sweetly musky, wild like summer herbs in the fields of his youth, made his heart jump.
He felt Naja’s hand on his cheek, her breath in his ear.
He was being ridiculous. He was too old for her, for this. Naja had been dead too many years for him to remember her touch. Get on with business, he told himself. Let’s hear that voice.
But he stood quiet, watching, enjoying the gift of a moment between dream and waking.
Something crashed in a distant corner of the Ministry, a wall, or a ceiling, finally giving way. Echoes carried like distant thunder. His stomach tightened. Instinct chilled his spine.
Anything was possible in this new world.
He felt the walls of a trap rise like ghosts of the city’s fallen towers. It was not impossible to have been lured to this place and moment. He wouldn’t be the first to think so, even with the Bureau of Security’s reassurances. “Ticks on a dog’s back” was practically their dictum.
He’d heard worse during his investigations.
He reached for his faith in the provisional government. But night and shadows made their own compelling arguments. So did the sky’s rumbling. He couldn’t name the President, or say how he or she had been elected. Representatives, judges, Bureau Chiefs all came and went without a word reported about whether Change or Stability was the choice of the people. An office flag was up one day, gone the next. The drums talked only about what was seen and heard.
The Cabinet, founding core of the provisional government, was sequestered in the Ministry’s basement levels like temple oracles, feeding on offerings and the flora growing around their private vents. Sometimes the mold stains grew, shadows lingered, doors closed and would not open. Oily fingerprints remained. Files were moved, memos issued, proclamations posted. Consequences delivered. Workers were promoted, transferred, retired. The khli and pellets did not always protect; some said they served as lures. Offices emptied when workers failed to correctly interpret messages they were given. Silence thickened in the open, empty places.
Antennae slipped through cracks to taste the void. Invisible neighbors knocked on doors.
No one gave reasons for what happened. He couldn’t always be sure of who he was or had been, or if this world actually existed; if he was lost in a coma, a dream, or in hell. People, it seemed to him, were not always people. Including himself.
Naja. Cari and Camille. There were mornings he hoped he’d only dreamed they were less than memories.
Marican took a long and slow breath. If there was a message in this moment, it was beyond his grasp. He couldn’t decide if he was being warned, trapped, punished, or given a gift. It seemed almost irrelevant whether he’d let twenty-five years of loneliness grow into a mad creature inside himself, or had been invaded by the darkness bordering dream. Either way, he was not in control of his actions.
Racing thoughts tumbled over themselves. Control. He nearly laughed at the assumption that he ever had any.
The main hall echoed with approaching footsteps. The rule of three focused him on reality. Quietly, he took a step away from the orphan.
His hands shook. He searched for the other way out. There were always alternative routes in the Ministry. He glanced at the woman, still lost in her work. Or dream. He rummaged through the compulsion to stand his ground and speak, grasping for the words that would break through the wall between them and give voice to whatever he was feeling.
He opened his mouth even as he took another step back from her.
Dropped the file.
The papers whisked across the marbled floor: an unexpected sound, like a whisper. It would have drawn any survivor’s attention. But she ignored the sound, just as she’d disregarded his presence, even the approaching steps.
Clipped footsteps sounded behind him, veered to the far wall. He could smell the new boots. Security. They stopped behind him.
The balance was delicate. They knew just how close to cut distances. He imagined wide, strong, close-shaved sons of survivors, born after the Turning, raised defending crop gardens and farming pools, competing with orphans for treasure in the ruins. Maybe they were the same pair from the Ministry gate. Their kind frightened him as much as the gangs.
A man’s voice, rough and raspy, barked a phrase in a language Marican had never heard.
She turned, eyebrow raised. Not startled. She glanced past him at the guards. “Can I help you?” she said, settling her gaze on Marican.
Her voice was pitched higher than Naja’s, and her eyes were smaller, her lips a bit too thin. She was pale, her cheeks sunken. Wrinkles gathered by her eyes and mouth, and a slight deformation bulged along the jaw line, as if she’d suffered a blow that never healed properly. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought. Or, she’d lived a harder life than he’d expected
Still, an erection stirred. An old school-days truth held: sometimes a cigar was more than a cigar.
He introduced himself, name, rank, and Bureau, crisp and formal. She stared at him while he stooped to quickly gather papers, and barely looked at the missing man’s file when he presented them like evidence to a jury. “I need assistance tracking this man’s last movements,” he said, nearly breathless, struggling to keep eye contact with her.
“You usually don’t come down this way, do you?” she asked, ignoring the folder, turning away to press a pin into the map.
A final word shot past him, seemed to bounce off the woman’s back. Footsteps started up, moved on. Harsh whispers were exchanged. Marican couldn’t tell if he’d passed or failed a test. “My personal attention was requested in the matter.”
She kept her back turned, squinted at the report in her hand. “Don’t mind the guards. Security likes to check on me. Do I know you?”
“We both work for the government.”
She paused, looked back at him, let go of a laugh that echoed in the hall and lingered in distant corners, like the smile that made her beautiful to him, again.
She asked him to sit, raised another flag by the door as warning, accepted the folder, and sat back in a broken executive chair behind a desk made out of a hollow wooden door covered by peeling paint, positioned over two short, weathered filing cabinets. Mold streaked the door’s edge.
She flipped through the hand-written reports and the sketch of the dead man while he covered the obvious questions first—did she know the missing man, had she heard about him; was his description familiar; did she have any connections to the kinds of businesses he’d been running, perhaps through friends who’d worked for and helped him, or considered him a rival.
She never asked why he’d singled her out. Instead, she took off like a bird that had nearly forgotten how to fly, eagerly soaring over his questions to talk about what the missing man might have been like, making his way through a new world she was only beginning to explore.
The Orphans down in Records were also compliant. He didn’t have to deploy techniques of intimidation. He could listen to her as she filled the room with her voice, and let his thoughts drift over them both like a soul released at the moment of death.
He licked his lips, as if preparing to ask a question. But he was only imagining what she might taste like.
The room took a turn. Walls pushed in, pressured by the emptiness they held back. Memories thundered, echoed with screams.
He’d strayed too far. He was slipping without the foundations of work and family. He closed his eyes against her, fighting to remember
what she was and who he’d been all his life since the Turning.
Orphan. That’s all she was. No one grew old where she’d grown up. Orphans died giving birth to monstrosities, or ate one another. They were killed by collapsing tunnels, or by whatever else lurked in the ruins. They were sacrificed, or executed when they were too weak to contribute to the survival of their Orphanage. The curse of their diseases took them. The lucky ones were cast-out and, in the despair of their exile, wandered off into the Wilderness or drifted through the ruins. Sometimes, like the missing man, or this woman, they sought refuge with the provisional government.
Dirty. Savage. Inhuman. They were not the ideal of humanity represented by the rest of the Turning’s survivors.
He saw her clearly among the regimented ranks, raised under military discipline, making more orphans as she labored like a mythological dwarf to dig deeper into the earth for shelter from what haunted the sky. She hadn’t died, like the rest. Her children weren’t really orphans. And though she’d lived in darkness and ignorance, she’d been spared whatever disease that made most of them cover-up from head to feet as if daylight was enough to wound them.
Marican shifted in his seat, pressed pencil to paper harder than necessary.
Men and women his age, the remnants of the old, defeated governments and their armies, had raised her. And she’d been one of those children who’d made terrible bargains, sacrificed their guardians, and decided to keep to themselves in shame, or in arrogance.
Between the words she spoke, he felt her cold breath on his neck. He hadn’t been a part of that regime, he wanted to say. He wasn’t responsible. But he didn’t owe her an explanation.
People whispered that exiled orphans were not as passive as they seemed. They were dangerous, even as they took on the work no one wanted, or was left, to do. They never talked about their lives in the Orphanages. They kept to themselves. They were animals. Monsters.
And yet, in her presence, everything Marican had heard about orphans sounded absurd. Unreal, like everything else after the Turning. Her voice was a lullaby bringing comfort. Her expression was open, her gaze steady, without the flicker of a threat. She’d cleared Security, after all. Perhaps there were deeper truths to be found. She was more than simply all the things she’d seen and done, all that had happened to her in the past.