Chapter Text
The morning at Hawthorne operated on a logic of its own.
0600 came, and the lights in the residential corridor brightened from their overnight dimness. 0615 and the coffee in the common room was fresh. 0630 and the administrative corridors started filling up with people who had things to do before they'd had enough coffee to feel good about it.
Lena had been waking up before the lights for eight months now.
She’d lie in the grey pre-light and listen to the building breathe.
She got up at 0558.
By the time the corridor lights came on, she was already dressed, shoes on, hair in a
bun, and moving toward the administrative wing.
She had somewhere to be.
A life. A day with a shape.
She was still, occasionally, surprised by this.
Andy was in the case review office at 0845. He had two monitors open and a third tab
he'd minimized the moment she came in.
"What are we doing today?" she asked.
"Case review at nine," Andy said. "Med eval at eleven-"
"Pass."
"-non-negotiable, it's in your contract-"
"I hate my contract."
"-then briefing at two, then you have a three-hour training window that Wes has
already emailed me about twice this morning, so don't even think about skipping it-"
"I wasn't going to skip it."
"-and then there's a debrief with Garrett at 1800 that's been bumped from Thursday,
so clear your evening."
Lena dropped into the chair across from him and pulled the case file toward her. "You
said the med eval is non-negotiable."
"It is."
"It's been three weeks since the last one. Rodriguez said I was in 'aggressively good
health,' and he seemed almost disappointed about it."
"Scheduled evaluations exist independently of individual results," Andy said. "Also,
Rodriguez's 'aggressively good health' note was flagged by Dr. Park's assessment team,
who want a follow-up on the atmospheric pressure readings from the last training
session."
"Those were fine."
"They were interesting," Andy said. "Fine and interesting are different categories." He
looked up from the screen briefly. "Don't skip the med eval."
"I wasn't going to skip the med eval."
"You were thinking about it."
"I was thinking about the training window and the briefing and whether there's time for
lunch between the briefing and Garrett, which there isn't, by the way, there's forty-five
minutes and that's not-"
"There's forty-five minutes," Andy said. "Which is enough time if you eat in the debrief
room."
"In the debrief room."
"Ramirez does it all the time."
"Ramirez has no shame."
"Ramirez is efficient." He made a mark on the schedule visible on the nearest monitor.
"The case review starts in twelve minutes. I've flagged three items for your input
specifically."
She looked at the file. The top sheet was a cross-reference summary, dense with the
particular shorthand that Hawthorne's documentation had evolved over the years.
"Is one of the flagged items the Daniels thing?" she said.
"The Daniels request, yes."
"It's not a complicated request."
"It involves three separate operational parameters and a clearance level question that
nobody in this building agrees on," Andy said pleasantly. "It's somewhat complicated."
Lena flipped to the relevant section. She read. "It's still not that complicated."
"Noted," Andy said, in the tone that meant he was noting it and would continue to
believe what he believed. He reached over without looking and set a coffee on the edge
of her side of the table.
She picked it up.
Michael appeared in the doorway six minutes before the case review was scheduled to
start. He had coffee and a folder that looked like it had been through something.
"Is the Hartley file on the agenda?" he said.
"Section three," Andy said.
"Okay, good, because I have-" He stopped. "Is that my chair?"
"You don't have a chair," Lena said.
"That's the chair I always use."
"It's the chair that's there," Andy said. "Chair allocation in this office has never been
formalized."
"It's been informally formalized." Michael dropped into the remaining chair-which was,
in fact, a slightly worse chair, being positioned further from the coffee and at an angle
that required him to crane slightly to see the main monitor. He assessed this
arrangement. "I'm putting a note on that chair."
"You're not putting a note on that chair," Andy said.
"A small note."
"Michael."
"My name on a piece of tape. Very professional."
"The administrative resources of this facility exist for operational purposes," Andy said,
"not for informal chair reservation."
Michael looked at Lena with the expression of a man seeking solidarity. Lena looked at
the case file. "Don't bring me into this," she said.
"You're sitting in my chair."
"I'm sitting in a chair. The chair has no name on it."
"Yet." Michael set his folder down. "Okay. What are we actually doing?"
"Case review at nine," Andy said. "Which is in four minutes. Do you want the summary
or have you read the file?"
"I've read most of the file."
"Which sections?"
Michael looked at the ceiling.
"One through four," Andy answered for him. "I'll walk you through five and six."
"That's very professional of you."
"That's my job."
Lena opened to section five.
"Tell me about the Hartley file," she said.
The case review took ninety minutes. The Hartley file was the interesting one, one
she'd mentioned to Matty later.
She laid out her read on the Hartley documentation gap. Andy listened, asked two
precise questions, and agreed with her on the first and partially on the second. Michael
said she was right about the jurisdictional issue and wrong about the timeline, and
then spent ten minutes explaining why in a way that was, infuriatingly, mostly
accurate. She updated her position. Andy noted the update. The case review moved on.
This was how the work went. She was good at it. That was new- or not new exactly,
she'd been good at it for a while, but she'd become someone who could say that
without the word feeling strange in her mouth.
-
Dr. Rodriguez's med bay at eleven had a kind of enforced calm. Rodriguez was at his
desk when she came in.
"Lena," he said. "Nothing broken?"
"Nothing broken. I told Andy this was unnecessary."
"Andy's right, this is necessary." He gestured toward the evaluation chair. "Sit. How's
the shoulder?"
"Fine."
"Scale of-"
"Fine as in no pain, full range of motion, stopped noticing it about three weeks ago."
Rodriguez made a note. "That's actually what I wanted to hear. Park’s team flagged the
atmospheric readings from Thursday's session."
"They were interesting."
"That's the word they used too." He moved to begin the standard check: vitals, reflexes,
the atmospheric sensitivity assessment that Park's team had developed specifically for
her. She was, apparently, interesting. "How are you sleeping?"
"Well."
"That's new."
"That's eight months new."
"Fair." He looked at the readout. "You're in aggressively good health."
"You always say that."
"Because it's consistently true and I find it professionally baffling." He set down the
equipment. "When's the last time you had a panic attack?"
She thought about it. "July"
Rodriguez looked at his notes. Then at her. "It's November."
"I know."
"That's five months."
"I know."
He made another note. "Okay," he said. "Come back in three weeks. Unless something
interesting happens."
"Define interesting."
"If you do something that makes Park's team send me two emails before noon. That's
interesting, and I want to hear about it."
"That's a very specific threshold."
"It's calibrated to my actual experience." He closed the chart. "You can go. Tell James I
said hello."
"James is here?"
"He's in the back. He's been in here for an hour reading a paper. He'll want to see you."
James was, in fact, in the small back room with a journal and a coffee. He looked up
when she appeared in the doorway.
"Rodriguez said to tell you hello," she said.
He gestured toward the second chair.
"How are you doing," he said. Not a check-in. Just the question.
"Good," she said. "Genuinely."
He looked at her. "I believe you."
"You don't always."
"I believe you now." He turned a page in the journal. "Diego mentioned the Garrett
debrief moved to today."
"1800."
"The framework update?"
"Section 7(b) revision. Andy's been on it for months."
James nodded. He didn't say anything about it.
-
Diego was in his office at eleven-thirty.
He gestured toward the chair without looking up from the document he was reading.
She sat. He finished reading. He set it down.
"How was the case review?" he said.
"Good. The Hartley file's interesting."
"Michael's wrong about the timeline."
"He was mostly right about the timeline," she said. "Eighty percent."
Diego looked at her. "Did you tell him that?"
"I told him he was right about the jurisdictional issue."
"You're diplomatic."
"I'm accurate. There's a difference." She pulled her legs up, then thought better of it
and put her feet back on the floor. "Rodriguez says I'm in aggressively good health."
"Rodriguez said that at the last eval too."
"He seems to find it baffling."
"Rodriguez finds many things baffling when they don't fit his expected parameters."
Diego picked up his coffee. "The atmospheric readings from Thursday."
"Park's team flagged them."
"Park's team flags everything."
"These were apparently interesting-interesting, not just flagged interesting."
Diego considered this. "I'll read the report when it comes through," he said.
She told him about the case review, the three flagged items, and the Hartley file. He
listened and asked two questions. One of them she could answer and one she couldn't,
which she told him, and he noted the second one with the air of a man who was going
to find out.
"The briefing at two," she said.
"Mercer's presenting the Q2 operational update." He looked at her with something that
was almost humor. "It runs long."
"How long?"
"Plan for an additional forty-five minutes."
"Andy said there'd be time for lunch before Garrett."
"Andy was optimistic."
-
Lena had been halfway out the door of the rec room, badge clipped to her hip, when
she’d passed Andy’s open door and caught the smell. Yeast. Rosemary.
She’d stopped. She always stopped for that smell.
“Andy.”
He was at the little counter in his room, hunched over a baking sheet. Gerald sat on the
windowsill.
“It’s not a big deal,” Andy said, without turning around. “I just needed my hands to be
doing something.”
“What happened?”
“The classification review caused a documentation discrepancy. It’s being handled. It’s
fine.” He cut the bread with more force than was strictly necessary. “There’s rosemary
in this one. I don’t know why I had rosemary, but I had it, and it felt important to use
it.”
“Andy.”
“It’s focaccia, Lena. It’s not a metaphor for anything. It’s bread.”
She’d looked at the clock. She’d looked at the bread, which smelt like the kind of thing
you couldn’t, in good conscience, walk away from. She’d looked at Andy’s shoulders,
which were up by his ears.
She ate the focaccia, standing at his counter, while he talked at her about formatting
requirements for revision requests until his shoulders came down half an inch, and by
the time she made it to the galley, she was eleven minutes behind schedule. She did
not regret a single second of it.
When she rounded the corner, she saw Daniels, who did not look impressed.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Andy got stressed about a report and made focaccia and then I had to eat the
focaccia,” Lena said, without looking up. “It would’ve been rude not to.”
“God forbid.”
“It had rosemary on it, Marianne, I’m not a monster.”
“It’s called you have feelings,” Daniels said, grinning like a shark. “Gross.”
Lena smiled.
Daniels leant against the wall. “Sparring’s at sixteen hundred. Bring the version of you
that slept.”
“I always bring that version.”
“You bring the version that argues with the version that slept.” Daniels picked up her
briefing packet. “I want the first one for the full hour, not the back half.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“Don’t work on it. Just do it.”
-
The briefing room door was propped open with someone’s boot.
The memo had said 1100 hours, mandatory attendance, all active personnel with Tier 3
clearance or above.
Which was a lot of people.
Lena had not fully processed what “a lot” meant until she walked through the door.
The briefing room was technically rated for eighty.
There were maybe a hundred and forty people in it.
Someone had dragged in folding chairs from what looked like every adjacent room,
possibly every adjacent building, and stacked them in rows so tight that Lena had to
turn sideways to get through. The air smelled like bad coffee. Every flat surface had a
cup on it. Someone in the third row was already asleep with their mouth open.
Someone in the back was having a full whispered argument on their phone. A man near
the wall was eating a hard-boiled egg.
Lena stood in the doorway for three full seconds.
“Yeah,” said Ramirez, appearing at her shoulder from nowhere, “it gets worse.”
“How does it get worse?”
“The projector’s broken.”
“Then why are we-”
“No one’s figured that out yet.” He shouldered past her and started scanning for a seat.
“Also, the mics feedback. Don’t stand near the left side.”
“Why is there even a left side-”
“Myers.”
Diego’s voice cut across the room. She turned.
He was already seated four rows in, arms folded. James was beside him with a coffee
cup and an expression suggesting he found the whole thing mildly amusing. Wes was
on Diego’s other side, leaning back in his chair at an angle that suggested he had also
considered leaving and then just… didn’t.
Diego pointed at the empty seat next to Wes.
Lena made her way over.
This involved stepping over someone’s laptop bag, apologizing to a woman who had
her eyes closed, and briefly making eye contact with Okoye, who was somehow sitting
in the second row with the regal composure of a man who had simply decided the
chaos did not apply to him.
He gave her a small nod.
She gave him a small wave.
She sat down between Wes and Andy who was already typing something on his tablet
with the focused energy of someone trying to impose order on a fundamentally
disorderly universe.
“How are you doing?” she asked him.
“I’ve categorized seventeen protocol violations in the last eight minutes,” he said,
without looking up.
“Is that good or bad?”
“Occupational therapy,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Michael appeared from the crowd three minutes later, dropped into the seat next to
Ramirez, and immediately leaned over.
“There’s no presentation materials,” he announced.
“We know,” said Andy.
“The projector-”
“We know.”
“So what are we actually-”
“No one knows,” said Ramirez. “That’s the bit. That’s the whole experience.” He had
acquired coffee from somewhere despite there being no visible coffee station within
ten feet. “Welcome to mandatory all-hands. You will be here until someone figures out
why we’re here, and then you’ll be here for an additional forty-five minutes after that
for reasons that will not be explained.”
Lena twisted in her seat to look around.
She recognized maybe sixty percent of the people in the room.
The other forty percent were strangers who all looked like some variation of I work
somewhere in this building and I have been doing so for years.
A man two seats to her left- unfamiliar, mid-forties, the kind of face you could
describe to a sketch artist but which would still somehow fail to be distinctiv- was
reading a physical newspaper.
A newspaper.
“Wes,” she said.
He leaned forward slightly. “What.”
“Does that guy have a newspaper?”
Wes glanced over. Something in his face settled into grim respect. “Yeah.”
“Where did he get a newspaper?”
“Probably planned ahead,” said Wes. “That’s someone who’s done this before. That’s a
veteran. Learn from that man.”
The front of the room had a lectern, a broken projector, and Lieutenant Hale, who was
standing with a clipboard.
Hale was in his forties, formal, professional, with the rigid posture of someone who
believed in institutions. He believed in this institution specifically.
He tapped the microphone.
The microphone let out a sound like a cat being slowly murdered.
Thirty people covered their ears.
“-sorry-”
Another feedback shriek.
Someone in the back said, “OH COME ON.”
A ripple of dark laughter went through the room.
Lena pressed her hands over her ears. “Is it always-”
“Last month someone threw a stapler,” said Ramirez.
“At the mic?”
“At Hale.”
“Did it-”
“It missed.”
“Was anyone-”
“He finished the briefing. There was a standing ovation.” Ramirez paused. “Not for
him.”
Hale finally stepped back from the microphone, consulted his clipboard, and then just
started talking at full volume.
This was, it turned out, more effective.
“Alright,” he said, “we’re here today because of the Incident Log from-”
Someone’s phone went off.
Full ringtone. We Will Rock You.
The owner fumbled it with both hands while approximately a hundred and forty people
either looked at them in judgment.
Diego’s jaw tightened slightly.
James very carefully looked at the ceiling.
The phone was silenced.
Hale continued as if nothing had happened.
“-from the fourteenth. As most of you are aware-”
Someone’s other phone went off.
Different ringtone. Some kind of pop song Lena distantly recognized.
More fumbling.
The room let out a collective exhale.
“Is this-” Lena started.
“Shh,” said Diego.
“I’m just saying-”
“Myers.”
She shushed.
The briefing, once it actually started, lasted forty-seven minutes.
Twenty-three of those minutes were relevant.
Lena knew this because Andy had a timer running on his tablet and had, at seventeen
minutes in, tilted it toward her so she could see the ratio and the small note he’d
added: 37% useful content, current running average.
She’d bitten her lip to keep from laughing.
Andy had pressed his mouth flat. His eyes crinkled.
The remaining twenty-four minutes were allocated to Mercer who was going over a
procedural update that three departments had already received via email, a safety
reminder about the loading dock that everyone in the room agreed was primarily the
fault of one specific person who was not present.
At some point, Wes had stopped taking notes and started drawing a small, detailed
skull in the corner of his legal pad.
He was on the third skull now.
Lena watched him add crossbones.
“Are those for me?” she whispered.
“They’re for Mercer,” he said, without looking up. “But I’ll make you one.”
She looked around for whoever was actually running this. Mercer was at the front with
a binder, mid-sentence about interval compliance rates, utterly unaware that he had,
somewhere in the last forty minutes, become art.
“What did Mercer do?” she murmured.
“Existed,” Wes said. “Within range.”
Mercer’s voice rose from the front of the room- something about compliance
percentages, something that made three people in the front row visibly age- and Wes
added a fourth rib to his skull with the focus of a man who had finally found his
calling.
Garrett put his head in for exactly nine seconds and said, “Carry on.” Nobody
commented on this.
It was another twenty minutes before anyone said anything Lena actually cared about.
Mercer turned a page in his binder and said, without warning, “Myers. Your input on
the variable-load segment.”
Every head in the room turned toward her at once.
“My input,” she repeated, stalling.
“You ran the segment on Tuesday. What’s your assessment of the modified protocol?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again.
“Right, uh, in my-in my day-to-day-”
“Operational context,” Diego said from the back of the room.
“Operational context,” Lena repeated, nodding, apparently finding this helpful. “In my
operational context, it’s not really the-the default I’m working with.”
Mercer looked at her for a long moment. “Noted,” he said, and moved to the next item.
Wes, without looking up from his skull, murmured, “Smooth.”
“I panicked.”
“You panicked into a complete sentence. That’s growth.”
“-and effective immediately, all requisition forms must be submitted forty-eight hours
in advance, rather than the previous-”
“We know,” said a voice near the front, not unkindly, just tired.
“It’s procedure,” Mercer said. “It has to be read into the record.”
“Into whose record?”
Mercer checked his clipboard. “The record,” he said.
The loading dock segment, when it came, opened with Mercer saying the words “recent
incident” in a tone that made roughly a third of the room sit up straighter and the other
two-thirds visibly relax, having apparently already confirmed they weren’t the recent
incident in question.
“There’s been an unauthorized use of the forklift,” Mercer said.
“There’s always an unauthorized use of the forklift,” someone muttered.
“This is a reminder that forklift certification is required prior to forklift operation.”
“Tell that to Brandt.”
“Brandt is not present,” Hale said, “for reasons unrelated to this meeting.”
That got a laugh- a real one, rolling through the back third of the room.
The scheduling software tangent started small. Someone near the middle asked, mildly,
whether the new system was actually live yet, and Mercer said yes, and a woman two
rows up said, “It’s worse.”
“It’s not worse.”
“It logged my hours as negative four.”
“That’s a known issue. It’s being patched.”
“It’s been a known issue for six weeks.”
“The patch is scheduled-”
“The old system never did that.”
“The old system crashed every Friday.”
“At least it crashed consistently.”
This produced a ripple of agreement that Mercer visibly had not anticipated, and for
ninety seconds, the briefing room transformed. Diego’s expression did not change.
Ramirez nodded along like he was watching a tennis match. The newspaper man
turned a page, apparently unmoved by software discourse one way or the other.
Mercer eventually regained control by the simple expedient of raising his voice and
continuing as though the previous ninety seconds hadn’t happened.
During the loading dock discussion Wes leaned over to Diego and said something in a
voice too low for Lena to catch.
Diego’s expression shifted exactly two millimeters.
James rubbed his mouth with one hand.
Lena looked between them. “What?”
“Nothing,” said Diego.
“It’s not nothing.”
“It’s not relevant to you.”
“Why does everyone-”
“Myers.”
She slumped in her chair.
The projector turned on.
No one had touched it.
It had simply decided.
It displayed one slide.
The slide said: UPDATED PROTOCOL 7(B): ENTITY CLASSIFICATION REVIEW.
There was a pause.
“There it is,” said Ramirez, softly, with great suffering.
“What’s 7(B)?” Lena said.
“It’s the one about you.”
Lena looked at the slide.
The slide continued to exist.
“That’s- there’s a whole protocol about me.”
“There are forty-seven protocols about you.”
“Forty-sev-”
“Myers,” said Diego, quiet and final.
She stopped talking.
She looked at the slide.
She looked at it for a long time.
Entity classification.
Entity.
The thing was, she knew. She knew what she was to the building, to the paperwork, to
the fourteen different departments that had opinions about her clearance level and her
testing schedule and whether she should be allowed unsupervised access to the
airspace above the facility.
She knew.
But something about seeing it on a projector slide in a room full of exhausted people
eating hard-boiled eggs made it-
Andy’s hand covered hers on the armrest.
Not a squeeze. Just weight.
She looked down at it.
She looked back at the slide.
“-at this time,” Mercer was saying, “we’re reviewing the language in the classification
framework to ensure it reflects current-”
“It says entity,” said a voice from the back.
Everyone turned.
A woman in a comms uniform- Specialist Fields- had her arm up.
“It says entity,” Fields repeated. “She’s right there.”
Mercer looked at the slide.
Mercer looked at Lena.
“Noted,” said Mercer.
“I’m just- I’m pointing it out.”
“It’s noted, Specialist.”
“Does she know-”
“She knows,” said Ramirez loudly.
A ripple. A shuffle. People turning back around.
Lena looked at the specialist in the back, who gave her a slightly helpless shrug that
seemed to say I tried.
Lena shrugged back.
It’s fine.
It wasn’t entirely. But it was fine enough.
-
The briefing ended at 1226.
People stood with collective relief. Chairs scraped. Cups were gathered. Someone
started a conversation immediately, loudly, that indicated they had not actually been
listening for at least half of it.
Wes closed his notebook. The skull had acquired a top hat, for reasons he declined to
explain, and Andy had three new annotations on his tablet he wouldn’t show her, and
Okoye had somehow acquired and distributed an entire bag of clementines without
anyone noticing him leave the room.
“Wednesday,” Okoye said, on his way out. “Conditioning at oh-six-thirty. Bring layers.”
“It’s not that cold,” Lena said.
“It will be.”
Andy appeared at her elbow with her jacket, which she had left on the chair behind her.
“You left this,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He handed it over and then stood there for a moment, and she could see him working
up to something.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, finally, “I flagged the language in the classification framework six weeks ago. To Records. They said it was-” he made a small, deeply pained expression, “-legacy terminology.”
She looked at him.
“I’ve submitted three revision requests,” he said. “The third one went to Admin Leigh,
who’s actually sympathetic, so there might be movement.”
Lena looked at him for another second.
“You’ve submitted revision requests,” she said.
“Technically four. The second one was rejected on a technicality, so I resubmitted with
corrected formatting.”
She didn’t say anything.
He pushed his glasses up. “It probably won’t change anything immediately, but the
language matters. I think the language matters. So.”
“Andy.”
“It’s fine, it’s just paperwork-”
“Andy.”
He stopped.
She grabbed his arm and held on for a second, just a second. She kissed his cheek. He
went slightly stiff and then relaxed, and she let go, and they stood there for a moment
in the emptying room.
“Thanks,” she said.
He straightened his tablet against his chest. “It’s just paperwork.”
“Shut up, it’s not just paperwork.”
“…No,” he said quietly. “It’s not.”
Diego appeared from the front of the room, where he’d apparently been having a
separate, private conversation that had ended.
He looked at Lena.
“Ready?”
“Did you just-were you talking to Hale about the-”
“Ready, Myers?”
She looked at him. He looked back. His expression gave up nothing.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Good.”
He turned and walked toward the door, and she and Michael and Andy followed, and
James fell into step beside her and put a hand briefly on the top of her head and then
moved it to her shoulder.
The slide was still on the projector when they left.
She didn’t look back at it.
In the hallway, Wes was leaning against the wall, eating something from a vending
machine bag. He shook the bag at her. “Want a chip?”
She stared at him.
She took a chip.
“Next briefing’s Tuesday,” Diego said, without turning around.
“There’s another one-”
“Tuesday.”
“DIEGO.”
He kept walking.