The agency calls on Monday. They apologize three times in ninety seconds for the timeline. Never for the assignment. That tells me the timeline is fine and the assignment is the thing they’re sorry about.
“We’re sending someone,” the woman says. She’s reading from a script. I can hear the paper. “A contractor. Experienced. Very experienced. Thirty-one years in the field.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It’s a very long time. He’s very—he’s got a lot of—” She stops. Starts again. “He’s available.”
Nobody who’s good at this job is available. Available means the agency ran out of places to put him, or the last employer dissolved, or he’s been flagged as difficult, or some combination of all three that the agency has decided to route to the villain with Infamy 14 because routing problems to the bottom of the list is how bureaucracies maintain structural equilibrium. I know how this works. I’ve been the bottom of every list I’ve ever been on.
“When does he start?”
“Tomorrow.”
* * *
Wendell Parr shows up at 8:47 a.m. on a Tuesday with a thermos, a canvas bag, and reading glasses he puts on before he looks at anything. He’s fifty-two. I know because the agency sent a file, and the file is four pages, and the first page has his age and his union card number and a photograph that looks like it was taken at a DMV that gave up trying, and the remaining three pages are a work history so long it required a continuation sheet.
Seven employers. Thirty-one years. The Meridian Collective, which lasted nine years before the hero Prism dismantled it. The Hargrove Organization, currently listed in the Registry’s historical index under DISCONTINUED. Dr. Voss, who is serving four consecutive life sentences. A name I don’t recognize, followed by two more names I do, followed by an employer entry that’s been redacted entirely — just a black bar where the name should be, which means either the information is classified or the employer’s file is sealed, and sealed files are the Registry’s way of saying we know and you don’t need to.
He stands in the doorway of the pump house and looks at it.
For a long time.
He looks at the monitoring array, the workbench, the intake manifold, the generator housing, the cable management system I built myself and organized by function, the cot in the corner, the whiteboard with my operational timeline, the secondary whiteboard with my infrastructure research, and Six, who’s hovering near the ceiling running its patrol loop and who looks back at Wendell with the camera array I installed in week two.
“Dad,” Six says.
Wendell looks at Six. Looks at me. Doesn’t comment.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF PERSONNEL ASSIGNMENT
CONTRACTOR: Wendell Parr
TYPE: Henchperson (General), Union-Affiliated
REGISTRATION: Local 441, International Brotherhood
of Henchpersons and Allied Trades
YEARS OF SERVICE: 31
PREVIOUS EMPLOYERS: 7 (6 defunct, 1 incarcerated)
PLACEMENT TYPE: Standard Reassignment
NOTE: Contractor registration requires processing.
Estimated timeline: 4-6 weeks.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Four to six weeks. The Registry needs a month and a half to process one man with a thermos.
Wendell sets the thermos on the workbench. He sets the canvas bag on the floor. He takes his reading glasses off, cleans them with a cloth he keeps in his shirt pocket, puts them back on, and walks to the far wall.
“How many exits?” he says.
“One.”
He looks at the door. He looks at the far wall. He looks at the window I sealed during the second week because the pump house’s original ventilation system was designed for equipment, not habitation, and the window didn’t lock.
He doesn’t say anything.
He walks to Six. Six drops altitude by two feet, which is Six’s version of approaching a stranger — cautious, proximity-adjusted, the behavioral pattern I programmed during the first week and haven’t modified because it works and because modifying behavioral patterns in a subordinate that calls you Dad raises questions I’m not qualified to answer.
“If you go down,” Wendell says, “what does it do?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
Six doesn’t have a contingency protocol. If I’m incapacitated, Six keeps running its patrol loop. Figure-eight, intake manifold to generator housing, every ninety seconds. No escalation procedure. No distress signal. No protocol for what happens when the person it calls Dad stops responding. Just the loop, repeating, in a pump house nobody knows about, until the power runs out or someone finds it or neither.
“I’m working on that,” I say.
Wendell cleans his glasses again. He has a system — left lens, then right, then the bridge — and the system takes exactly the amount of time required for the silence to do its work.
“Who else knows you’re here?” he says.
“The Registry.”
“People.”
“My mother knows I have a lair. She doesn’t know where.” This is true. Mom knows I’m doing this. She doesn’t approve, but she doesn’t not-approve either, which is her way of saying she’s decided the argument isn’t worth the oxygen, and her oxygen is limited, and she’s right about the allocation. “There’s a woman — Marisol Quintana. She knows my identity. She doesn’t know this address.”
“So the Registry.”
“The Registry,” I confirm.
He nods. The nod doesn’t mean approval. It means acknowledgment, the same way a gauge confirms a reading without telling you if the reading’s acceptable.
He walks to the whiteboard. The operational timeline. He reads it — I can tell he reads it because his eyes track left to right and his reading glasses are on — and he doesn’t comment on the timeline, or the color-coding, or the forty-seven individual entries, or the fact that I’ve planned operations through the next fiscal quarter with contingency branches for three different hero-response scenarios.
“What are you working with?” he says. “Budget.”
“Negative seven hundred and ten dollars.”
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He takes his glasses off. This time he doesn’t clean them. He just holds them.
For the record, Capital isn’t supposed to go negative. The Registry’s financial tracking module has a floor of zero for most classifications, but provisionals can dip below because provisionals can dip below everything, because the system treats Petty Nuisance as a category that includes the possibility of failing at finance along with everything else. Mom’s bills draw monthly. The prescriptions draw weekly. I haven’t bought components in three weeks because the last batch went into the monitoring array upgrade and the monitoring array upgrade was necessary because the intake manifold readings were drifting and drift in a sealed system is a diagnostic emergency that I couldn’t ignore, and I’ve stopped justifying it, because justification requires an audience.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF LAIR ASSESSMENT (CONTRACTOR-INITIATED)
FACILITY: Ossining Street Pump House
DEFICIENCIES IDENTIFIED: 4
Single point of egress
No subordinate contingency protocol
Operational security: Minimal
Operating budget: Non-viable
NOTE: Contractor-initiated assessments are advisory
and do not affect official League compliance rating.
Current rating: 11/14 standards met.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Four questions. Four deficiencies. He asked them the way a plumber taps a pipe: confirming where it’s broken after hearing the rattle from the doorway.
I go to the filing box and pull the League inspection report, because I keep the League inspection report, because I keep everything. Standard 5. Secondary Egress (Emergency). PASS.
The pump house has one door. It has had one door since the day I moved in. The Registry inspected this building on a Tuesday in March, from wherever the Registry inspects things from, and it passed me on an exit that does not exist.
Wendell found it in eleven minutes. He found it by walking to the wall and looking at the wall.
I put the report back in the box. I take out the notebook instead, and I make the entry in the right column, and I don’t write anything clever next to it, because there isn’t anything clever to write.
“I have a briefing prepared,” I say.
Wendell looks at me.
“It’s comprehensive. It covers the operational mandate, the infrastructure research, the Infamy projections, the engineering capabilities, the subordinate integration timeline, and the revenue model. I have handouts.”
“Handouts,” Wendell says. It’s the first time he’s repeated a word.
“Handouts.”
* * *
The briefing takes forty minutes.
I’d planned for thirty-five, but I add a five-minute section on the Bellweather scheme post-mortem because Wendell’s silence during the revenue model slide feels like a question and I’m compelled to answer questions that haven’t been asked. This is a personal deficiency. I’m aware of it. I’ve been aware of it since the Kessler Street water authority, where I delivered fourteen minutes of material to nine people who wanted to talk about the water, and awareness has not produced correction.
I cover everything. The Registry’s measurement gap: the distance between what heroes do and what heroes are credited for, and how that gap generates a false Infamy differential that penalizes villains whose schemes produce positive civic outcomes. The infrastructure mapping project: every system in the eastern grid, documented, cross-referenced, fourteen months of data. The engineering specs: device reliability, fabrication timelines, Ingenuity allocation tables. The Infamy strategy: the spreadsheet from last week, minus the formula column, plus a new section on deliberate civic truth-telling as a fear vector. Six’s integration: the imprinting event, the vocabulary acquisition rate, the patrol protocols, the designation issue I haven’t filed paperwork on.
I have charts. I have charts on the whiteboard and charts in the handouts and the charts are consistent because I checked them twice, and Wendell is sitting on the supply crate by the far wall with his thermos balanced on his knee and his reading glasses on and his expression — his expression hasn’t changed since minute one.
He’s read the handouts. I can tell because the pages are in a different order than I gave them. He reordered them. I don’t know what order he put them in and I’m afraid to ask.
I finish. I finish on a strong note — the ten-point Infamy roadmap, color-coded by quarter, with milestones and contingency branches and a dedicated section titled THREAT CLASSIFICATION ADVANCEMENT: TIMELINE TO NEIGHBORHOOD HAZARD — and I stand by the whiteboard with my hands at my sides because I don’t know what to do with my hands because I’ve been gesturing for forty minutes and I need to stop.
Wendell takes a sip from his thermos. He puts his glasses in his shirt pocket. He looks at me.
“This could have been an email,” he says.
The pump house is quiet.
Six, hovering near the ceiling, says, “Loud.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. I’ve spent forty minutes being as thorough and prepared and comprehensive as I know how to be, which is very thorough and very prepared and very comprehensive, and a man with thirty-one years of experience in this industry has looked at all of it — the charts, the handouts, the ten-point roadmap, the color-coding — and his assessment is that the entire thing could’ve been transmitted as a text-based communication requiring no scheduling, no audience, and no forty minutes of my life.
He’s right. He’s obviously right. The whole briefing could’ve been an email — a good email, a detailed email, an email with attachments — but an email, and the reason I didn’t send it as an email is that sending an email requires someone on the other end who asked for it, and nobody’s asked, and nobody was going to ask, and the briefing was never for Wendell. The briefing was for me. The briefing was forty minutes of talking to someone who was required to be in the room, because being required is the only kind of audience I can get.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
SKILL OBSERVATION
SKILL: Monologue (Lv 1)
AUDIENCE: 1 (contractor, non-civilian)
DURATION: 40 min 11 sec
NOTE: Contractor-class audiences do not qualify
for Monologue skill advancement. A minimum of
5 registered civilians is required for XP
generation via extended verbal presentation.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Forty minutes. Not even Monologue XP. The Registry watched me give the best briefing of my career and classified the audience as insufficient.
I start cleaning up the handouts. There are four copies because I didn’t know how many people the agency was sending and I wanted to be prepared and being prepared for contingencies that don’t materialize is — apparently — what I do instead of being effective.
“Where’s your supply closet?” Wendell says.
I stop. “What?”
“Supply closet. Cleaning materials, spare parts, standard consumables. Where do you keep them?”
“Under the workbench. The blue bin. Why?”
He stands up. He puts the thermos in the canvas bag. He puts the canvas bag against the far wall, about eighteen inches clear of the corner and exactly between the two load-bearing supports, which is where you put a bag if you’ve spent thirty-one years in buildings that sometimes stop being buildings. He pulls the blue bin out from under the workbench and looks at it.
“You need more zip ties,” he says. “And your cable management’s good, but you’re missing redundancy on the secondary feed. One cut and you’re dark.”
“I—yes. I know. The redundancy’s on the timeline for—”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.” He pushes the bin back under. Straightens up. Puts his reading glasses back on. “I’ll need access to the electrical panel and a key if there is one. If there isn’t one I’ll make do. What time do you start?”
I don’t know what’s happening.
“Seven,” I say.
“I’ll be here at seven.”
He walks to the door — the single exit, the one he’d identified as a deficiency eleven minutes into the assessment — and he stops with his hand on the frame.
He doesn’t look back. I keep expecting him to look back. He doesn’t.
“Your cable routing,” he says. He’s looking at the wall, at the conduit path I ran along the header beam during the second week. “It’s clean.”
He leaves.
I stand in the pump house and I don’t know what just happened. A man walked in with a thermos and four questions and thirty-one years of experience, and he told me my briefing was too long and my budget was non-viable and my exit strategy was a single door, and then he asked where the supply closet was and told me he’d be here at seven.
He’s staying.
I don’t know why. The placement is a punishment — the agency made that clear without saying it, the way agencies always make things clear without saying them — and a man with his experience, his credentials, his thirty-one continuous years of union membership, could’ve walked through that door and told the agency to reassign him. Seven previous employers. Six defunct. He knows what a failing operation looks like. He’s standing in one.
He stayed anyway. He said my cable routing was clean, which is a compliment the way a plumber saying “nice solder joint” is a compliment — specific, technical, not the kind of thing you say to someone you’re planning to abandon.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF CONTRACTOR REGISTRATION
CONTRACTOR: Wendell Parr
STATUS: Paperwork received.
Processing time: Estimated 4-6 weeks.
Contractor may begin duties during the processing
period. Contractor is not classified as a Registered
Subordinate until registration is complete.
Do not file Form 7-S (Subordinate Integration)
until notified.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Four to six weeks. The Registry needs a month and a half to decide if a man who’s been in this business longer than I’ve been alive is allowed to officially work for me.
I pick up the handouts. All four copies. I stack them neatly, because neatness is a form of control and I need some form of control right now.
Six drops to eye level.
“Stay,” Six says.
I look at the drone. “What?”
“Stay,” Six says again. The word is from my vocabulary — Six learned it during the third week, when I was soldering a connection and muttering instructions to myself, and Six doesn’t really know what it means. Six knows when to say it, and that’s close enough.
“Yeah,” I say. “He’s staying.”
I don’t know why.
But the cable routing on the secondary feed is going to have redundancy by tomorrow, and the zip ties are going to be restocked, and for the first time since I registered, someone who knows what they’re looking at has looked at what I’ve built and said one thing that wasn’t a deficiency.
Clean.
I’ll take it.