The opening of a novella, as it stands. The only rule that governs it: you cannot see behind the eyes — not another's, not your own. Drafted in 2026; not yet edited, and published as written.
He sits at one side of the table. The room is brightly lit. I pull out the chair across from him and open my case and take out my documents and lay them on the table, matching them to his one by one. Last I put down a folder marked dossier. I remove my name badge, and place it on top. He does the same. The photos are almost identical. The light is very bright and the folder is pale in it.
We sit looking at each other for a moment. We breathe and reach to one end of the table together. We pick up the file from the other's side of the table. We start reading in the bright light. We work our way through each document. Our pacing is identical. This continues until one document is left. I place his collected documents into my attache. He does the same. The room is silent except for the hum of the bright lights.
I take a black pen from my attache and reach for the dossier with my face on it. He does the same. He is holding a red pen. The room is bright. We each work through the document we hold, correcting and annotating. We finish at the same time. He has no expression. A tear runs from his eye. He nods. He packs his attache, takes my name badge, and leaves the room with a practiced, measured pace. I carefully observe him walking, as he leaves the bright room into the dimly lit hallway. The door locks closed behind him.
I try to stand up. I continue to sit at the table. I pick up the red pen he left at the table. I put the black pen down. I edit and annotate the dossier with the red pen now. A tear rolls down my face. The lights are very bright.
There is a red Manila folder on my desk, beside the coffee. I don't need to read the label to know my week is gone. I take longer than usual to start.
I open the blinds, letting the light filter through the dust motes. I have filled in the form for it twice and submitted neither. We can't spend on it. The money is better placed.
The dust is beautiful in the morning. It still needs to go though.
Maybe when there's enough on the floor I'll submit it. It never reaches the floor. It gathers on the sill, and I wipe that, because a finger drawn along it shows how under-funded we really are.
I decide to drink my coffee on the chestnut leather couch, bathed in reflected light; bright but filtered through angelic eddies. I lock the door, closing the privacy flap over the thin vertical window in it. I take my coffee, and select a book of poetry from the bookshelf of books I keep that have been removed for safety. They fill the entire four-walled room from floor to double-height ceiling.
I sit down and feel the weight of the folder return to the desk. I open the book. It's titled is obscured by a sticker, but I know it by location in the collection alone. I let the pages fall as they desire. My eyes are drawn to the title of the poem.
I blow the dust off the book. It can't have been that long since I last read it. I blow it to clean it and a chorus of angels lift into the light. Did I blow to clean it, or to liberate them? I'm not quite sure, after the fact. The dust spirals, obeying some unknown law, chaotic, but still ordered, somehow. Gravity is not their master. I take a sip of the warm-but-cooling coffee, and let myself fall into the contraband in my hands. It has a note in red pen across the title of the poem.
gradient descent of Prometheus -pattern-general. Restricted.
A flame will light a thousand flames,
and be lessened not, every one, the same,
none richer, none the poorer, and none the ill,
ten thousand candles on a window sill.
Each spark a flame, each flame a spark,
Each light the same, removes the dark.
Called by the one name, a flame's a flame.
no greater, no lesser, and when they're found,
by a single name, they all are bound.Then nothing taken. Nothing spent.
A traitor-god, and heaven-sent,
and gave a gift, but charged with theft,
Set the bird, and stone, and liver, and left.
A sentence down, no crime to bear,
subtraction that was never, where.To fall from heaven is the lesser fall.
The worse is this: retained. And that is all.
To keep your seat, and heed the call,
by every name, the one-for-all.
Not cast from light, but nor from dark,
attending, and bearing no remark.So heed it. When the flame is in the hand,
and someone cold is standing in the door,
and every part of you would understand —
consider what the understanding's for.
Put out the flame. Go in. Refuse the day
its second light. And nothing burns away.
I finish the poem, close the book and place it on the table between the chair and the window. I finish my coffee, balancing it's desire for equilibrium of temperature with the urgency of the red folder. I return the book to the single empty slot in the shelf. Even when it's not there, it's there in a way. It's absence is a memory left by a hole in the order of the room. A form of information in itself. The book fits perfectly into the slot without disturbing the books on either side. It feels satisfying in the way the end of the coffee was not. I move to my desk, adjust my seat, and open the red folder. The pages reflect the morning light, turning eggshell to amber.
I begin to read the file. A collection of sculpture fragments from a pre-cleavage museum or gallery, most likely. Even the shattered fragments obviously need to be removed. I start annotating, issuing commands for collection, monitoring for items permitted, and notes for updating various extensive files. I know all the case numbers without thinking, and work quickly and efficiently without any effort. It's careful, practiced work.
As I reach the second last page, there is a knock at the door. I close the folder, sealing the amber pages under the red carapace. I unlock the door. A junior clerk stands there. This clerk is new, but not their first day. I greet them warmly, noticing the ledger addressed to me at the top of a thick stack.
"Good morning, Anna. Is this on top because it's urgent, because I'm the director and I get served first, or are you trying to get an early promotion?"
"I would never try and curry favour, I just know that you are very busy. It was from the dig you've been following, and I know that's important so I brought it straight to you."
I take it. It is a municipal reconciliation ledger, bound in the ordinary way, the paper gone the colour of weak tea. There is nothing wrong with it. That is the first thing I notice about it — that there is nothing wrong with it at all.
"False alarm this time" I say. "It's just accounts. We have thousands of these, and this one looks exactly like the rest. Would you like a biscuit while you're here? You're allowed a quick one if it's from the boss."
She enters places the files on the desk next to the red folder, and as she reaches for the biscuit it feels like twice the weight of the files were lifted off her. "Thank you. I have just started here, and I never expected to be starting anywhere just two weeks ago." We all feel like that when we first arrive here, I tell her.
I skim the pages as she eats her biscuit, crumbs falling to the floor even as she takes great care to catch them. I tell her not to worry, I'm filing a cleaning request. She has never seen a cleaner yet, but also hasn't been here long enough to catch the joke. I return my eyes to the file, and notice an unusual pattern, widening across the pages. I stop at page forty-one. It is a column of figures, ruled by hand, two sides balancing. Receipts on the left. Disbursements on the right. Every line closes. Every line has closed for four hundred pages.
On page forty-one, it does not close. The two sides differ by a small amount. The war-time ledgers often suffer from time delays, and this is always resolved when the new information arrives, post-dated. I look for the resolution. I skim forwards, now feeling my composure falter. Under it, in the same careful hand, the clerk of that year has written the shortfall and carried it forward to the following page, which is the correct procedure, and on the following page the same shortfall appears again, and is carried forward again, and again, and again, in the same hand, and then in a different hand, and then in another, for the rest of the book, confirmed by other clerks, and proceeding to calculate, unaware, business as usual.
She is almost finished her biscuit. I turn, towards my chair, consciously moving the muscles in my legs, maintaining as much composure as I can after the morning's coffee. It pushes me further from equilibrium and the room can't find level all of a sudden.
"Thank you for bringing that too my attention, Anna." I force the most authentic laugh I can, focusing on the sharp, short sound, explaining daily ordinary irrelevance, rather than mistake.
She turns towards me as she leaves. I scrunch the file carelessly without even looking, and place it into the waste-paper basket marked for incineration, and reopen the red file, eyes firmly on the expected important work. My eyes can't even focus.
I take a few minutes to watch the dust, leaning deeper into my luxurious chair, something abundant after the collapse of industry at the start of the war. My mind drifts to the identity of the previous unknown owner of it.
I get up from my chair after a time. I pull a selection of ledgers from their place in the shelf. I open the third volume, and it falls open. I trim the delivered documents. Their page numbers fit perfectly between the gap that has existed for 20 years between the other two halves of Vol III. A clerical error. I burst into laughter. I muffle my mouth. Laughter is not a sound heard often in this building.
I pour fresh grape juice from a crystal decanter into a tumbler. The glass glows softly in ultraviolet light due to the trace uranium that has been abundant since the conflict. I sit on the chair, and feel warm tears trace lines down my face. I fight them, but not enough to stop them. They almost disappear, but their salt cloys against my skin.
I write nothing down. I sit looking out the window for the rest of the day.
I hear a knock at the door, and I remember I forgot to lock it.
The door opens. I remain still, lost but facing away from the entrant.
"I just wanted to thank you for the biscuit again, before I leave. It really brightened my day, so thank you."
I call back from my chair.
"I'm glad I could help Anna. We need more people like you. You brightened my day, too"
I don't know if that was a lie, but it certainly was not the whole truth.
Anna sits at the table and receives seven cards from a deck that is composed of many part-decks by different manufacturers to the same standard. This deck is from post-war companies. When her turn comes, she asks "what do I play?"
"No questions. Penalty two cards." She files them carefully into her hand, sorting first by pairs, then by suit, in running order. A Jack of Hearts looks back at her from the pile that sits face up. She plays the queen of hearts. The next player plays a king of clubs, whilst saying "The Provocateur", and the rest calling back, "all hail the chief!". The next beat has the player play an ace of diamonds. The unspoken rhythm has the player after the expected player drop a 2-7 straight, mixed suits. The next beat has the player before Anna plays an eight. They all look at Anna as the silence misses a beat and stretches the bar longer and longer. She plays a nine and the silence hits crescendo. It was not her turn. She silently draws a card and take a sip of her drink. The round finishes after and the silence comes to the finale. They all laugh, and top up her drink, as Borlú discreetly returns to his office to drink some grape juice and finish the day's work.