Chapter 1: Deceased (Pending)

TRANSMIGRATION SERVICES BUREAU: NOTICE OF PLACEMENT
Host: QUINN, Ash. Age: 25.
Status: Deceased (pending).
You have been placed in World-Line 0417, Meridian Falls.
Please do not scream. Screaming is not a recognized form of appeal.

Ash Quinn screamed anyway, but quietly, into a cardboard tray of four coffees, because the elevator wasn't empty.

The other passenger was a man in a gray jumpsuit with a lanyard that said FACILITIES and a face that said he had seen worse before breakfast. He glanced at her, then at the coffees, then back at the doors.

"First day?"

"Something like that."

The panel was still there. It hung about eighteen inches in front of her nose, pale blue and slightly see-through, like a pop-up ad for the afterlife. When she turned her head, it turned with her. When she shut her eyes, it was printed on the inside of her eyelids, with a little cursor blinking at the end of appeal.

The last thing she remembered clearly was the laundromat on Dorsey Street at 2:40 in the morning. The dryer that ate quarters. A yellow sign that said CAUTION WET FLOOR, which she had read, understood, and walked straight past, because that sign had been standing in the same spot since before the pandemic and the floor had never once been wet.

The floor had been wet.

Then white. Then this: a glass elevator climbing the outside of a tower, and below it a city she had never seen, laid out on flat gray water like a circuit board someone had left in the rain. Trams slid along the seams. Mist sat on everything. The air coming through the vent smelled of salt and something hot and metallic, like the back of a server.

BRIEFING. World-Line 0417 is a corporate thriller in 412 chapters.
Host has read chapters 1–61 and chapter 412.
Host left a review.

Ash stared at the last line.

She remembered the review. She'd typed it on the night bus with one thumb, at an hour when nobody should be allowed near a keyboard. Two stars. Director Arden is the only person in this book with a pulse, and you wrecked her in the last chapter so the heroine could give a speech on a pier. She gets MIGRAINES, you cowards. Skipped the middle. Do not recommend.

Host's complaint concerned the character Celeste Arden.
Host has therefore been assigned to the character Celeste Arden.
Host's complaint has not been upheld.

"Oh, come on," Ash said.

The facilities man moved a little farther along the glass.

MISSION. Fulfill the role of: Assistant (unnamed).
Duration: 90 days, ending at the Harbor Hearing.
Do not alter the canonical outcome.
Villainess Affection must remain at 0.
Reward: death reversed. Penalty: death confirmed.

Assistant (unnamed). She knew exactly who that was. Chapter nine, a single line she'd skimmed past on the bus: Her assistant, whose name Arden never bothered to learn, stood by the door. After that the assistant came back every so often like a coat rack. Stood by doors. Carried things. Was not described.

"Why zero?" she muttered. "Why does it matter if she likes me?"

In canon, Director Arden forms no attachments.
Attachments are not in the budget.

The elevator chimed at fifty-eight. The facilities man got out without looking back, and Ash was alone with the coffees and the bureaucratic ghost and the slow, cold realization that she was going to have to do this.

She tried, briefly, to think about who back home would notice she was gone. Her manager at the call center would notice on Thursday, when she didn't log in, and would mark it as an unexcused absence. Her landlord would notice on the first. The pothos on her windowsill would notice in about two weeks, in its own way.

That was the list.

She looked at it for a while, the way you look at a bruise to see how bad it is. Then she shifted the coffee tray to her other hip and watched the numbers climb.

· · ·

Division Nine took up the sixtieth floor of the Concord Institute's main tower, and the woman at the front desk was talking before the doors had finished opening.

"Oh thank God, you're the new one. You're Quinn? You're Quinn. I'm Marisol, I run scheduling, I also run the betting pool, don't ask about the betting pool. Is that her coffee? Which one's hers? Give me that. No, give it back, you have to hand it to her, she can tell." Marisol Reyes was perhaps thirty, with a cloud of black curls held back by a pencil and a cardigan buttoned wrong. She took Ash by the elbow and steered. "Rules. She doesn't like perfume. She doesn't like the word just in emails. She doesn't like people who stand in her eyeline when she's thinking, and she's always thinking. Number eleven lasted a month and cried in the stairwell. Number ten went back to Records and changed her name."

"Legally?"

"Spiritually." Marisol stopped in front of a door of frosted glass with nothing written on it. "She's thirty. Youngest Director the Institute's ever had. She's never once raised her voice, and the board is terrified of her, and I have a theory those facts are connected." She straightened Ash's lanyard with a quick tug, like a mother before a school photo. "Don't be interesting. Interesting is how they get you."

TIP: Marisol Reyes is correct.

Marisol knocked twice and pushed the door open and was gone before it finished swinging.

Ash had pictured the office from the book: something black and chrome, a desk the size of a car. It wasn't. It was almost empty. Pale floors, a long low desk with nothing on it, a single chair on each side, and an entire wall of window full of fog. The light in the room was the flat white of early morning over water. It made everything look like it had already been photographed.

Celeste Arden stood at the window with her back to the door.

She was taller than Ash had imagined, and narrower. Dark auburn hair pinned low at the nape. A long dove-gray dress cut like a coat, with a high collar. And gloves: thin gray gloves to the wrist, the kind lab people wore for delicate work, buttoned with one small pearl each. She had her hands folded behind her, one gloved hand loosely holding the other's wrist.

She didn't turn around.

"You are late, Ms. Quinn."

Her voice was low, and very gentle, and that was the worst part. It was the voice of someone reading you your rights kindly.

"I'm four minutes early," Ash said.

"You were in the elevator for six minutes and fourteen seconds. The elevator takes forty." Now she turned. Her eyes were very pale, a washed-out green like sea glass, and they went over Ash once, top to bottom, unhurried, the way a person reads a label. "What were you doing?"

Getting read my terms and conditions by a dead-person HR department. "I was having a moment."

"What kind of moment?"

"A personal one."

"Have them on your own time." Celeste held out a gloved hand. Ash looked at it for a beat too long before she understood, and then she fumbled the tray and found the right cup (black, no sugar, the one Marisol had marked with a tiny star in pen) and put it in Celeste's palm.

Their fingers didn't touch. The glove was between them anyway.

Celeste looked down at the cup. Then at Ash's hands.

"Your file says you are left-handed."

Ash looked at her own right hand, which was still hovering in the air where the cup had been.

Something cold went down the back of her neck. She hadn't read the file. She didn't have the file. As far as she knew, she'd been born six minutes ago in a glass box.

"I'm trying something new," she said.

"Are you."

It wasn't a question. Celeste took a sip of the coffee and turned back to the fog, and the conversation was over in the way a door is over when someone has closed it.

NOTE: Host is advised to be less interesting.

I'm being so boring, Ash thought at it. I'm a beige wall. I'm a terms-of-service page.

Noted.

· · ·

She was not, it turned out, very good at being a wall.

She was fine at the job. The job was mostly calendars and doors, and she'd spent three years on a phone headset being yelled at about warranty claims, so she knew how to say I completely understand while thinking about something else. She sorted Celeste's meetings. She learned that the Institute ran the whole city: forty thousand people living on reclaimed tidal flats, every one of them an employee, every apartment assigned, every tram ticket a line on a budget somewhere. She learned that Division Nine studied memory, and that the labs on the floor below had windows you couldn't see into from the hall.

She learned that Celeste Arden didn't eat lunch. She had a glass of water at 12:30 and looked at it.

By nine at night the floor had emptied. Marisol had left at six with a wave and a whispered still alive, nice. The fog outside had gone dark blue and then black, and the city below had come up in long seams of green and white light. Ash was at the little desk outside Celeste's door, pretending to reformat a spreadsheet, because nobody had told her she could leave and she had a horrible feeling that asking would count as interesting.

Through the frosted glass, she could see Celeste's outline at the desk. Still.

Then, as Ash watched, the outline lifted one hand and pressed two fingers to the left temple. Held them there. Took them away. A minute later, did it again.

Ash knew that gesture.

Chapter seven, the board meeting. Arden pressed two fingers to her temple, as though the very presence of her colleagues bored her to the point of pain. Chapter thirty-three: the cold gesture at her temple, which her staff had learned to fear. Chapter fifty-eight. The author had written it maybe a dozen times and always, every time, as contempt. Ash had sat on that bus at one in the morning with her forehead against the window and thought: that's a migraine. That's somebody with a migraine sitting in a bright room, and you're all calling it a personality.

Don't, she told herself. Be furniture. Furniture does not have opinions about migraines.

She sat there for another three minutes.

Then she got up, went into the kitchenette, found the first-aid drawer, took out two tablets in a foil strip and filled a glass with water, and knocked once on the frosted door.

"Yes."

Ash went in. The office lights were at full, that flat white again, bouncing off the bare desk. Celeste looked up. In the hard light the skin under her eyes was faintly blue, like a thumbprint.

Ash didn't say anything. She put the glass and the foil strip on the desk, a careful distance from Celeste's hand. Then she went to the panel by the door and turned the lights down until the room was the color of weak tea and the city came through the glass, green and soft.

She was halfway out again before Celeste spoke.

"Ms. Quinn."

Ash stopped with her hand on the frame.

"Who told you?"

The voice had not changed. It was still low and gentle. But something under it had moved, the way a floor moves a little when someone heavy steps onto the other end.

"Nobody told me."

"Someone told you."

"Nobody had to." Ash turned around. She shouldn't have. She knew it while she was doing it. "You keep doing this." She put two fingers to her own left temple. "Every twenty minutes since about four o'clock. It's not exactly a state secret, Director. It's just a thing nobody in this building is brave enough to bring you a glass of water about."

The office went very quiet.

Celeste looked at the glass. At the foil strip. She didn't touch either of them. Her gloved hands lay flat on the desk, and Ash watched the left one curl, very slightly, the fingertips drawing in against the wood, and then go flat again.

When she looked up, her pale eyes were unreadable, and she was looking at Ash in a way she hadn't all day. Not like a label. Like a page she'd turned back to because she thought she'd missed a line.

"Seven tomorrow," Celeste said. "Not seven-oh-one."

"Seven. Sure."

"And Ms. Quinn."

Ash waited.

"Use your left hand tomorrow." Celeste reached out, finally, and picked up the glass of water. "I would hate for your file to be wrong."

· · ·

The elevator down was empty. Ash leaned her head against the glass and watched sixty floors of fog go up past her like a slow white curtain.

Ms. Quinn, she thought. Four times today. Celeste had said her name four times. The assistant in the book didn't have a name. The whole point of the assistant in the book was that she didn't have a name, and that Arden never bothered to learn it, and Ash had found that line sad on the bus at one in the morning without knowing why.

The panel came up so fast it made her flinch.

It was not blue this time. It was a sour, clinical amber, the color of a pharmacy label that says DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY.

WARNING
Villainess Affection: +5
Current value: 5. Permitted value: 0.