CyberCinder
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Chapter 355: Papers, Please
🕑 Added 2025-10-21 12:31:43 +0000 UTC“Hey, did you see the flyover? Crazy, huh?”
I smile behind Call’s mask and nod at the person behind a pane of plexiglass. Whatever it is muddles and shifts my view of them into a formless blob, and their voice is so garbled that I can’t make out a single identifiable tone in it. Somehow my awareness feels the magic inside of them but absolutely nothing else. I can’t understand how that works.
Call chuckles normally. “I can’t believe they do that over the city. What happens if something actually goes wrong? Would the plane just fall right into the city center?”
The blur of a person behind the glass pauses in stunned silence. Call chuckles again, this time a little darker, and makes a noise that I accompany with a wave of my hand.
“Just in a foul mood, sorry; don’t take me seriously,” he says. “The papers are where they usually are?”
“Uh… yes, they are…” the person smacks their lips. “I’d never even thought about that possibility before. If it’s a test flight to make sure everything’s working fine… then… well… I guess that is a possibility.”
“Might be. I trust our people, though.”
I snort in amusement and take the directions Call already gave me. Walk to the right, then two doors down. They’re actually pretty far from each other–a good thirty feet between doors–and each of them seems to have more than a few people in desks behind them. I step up to the door and cock my head ever so slightly to the side.
“This the one?”
“It is,” Call confirms. “Knock first to be polite, but open the door right after anyway. That’s how I do it.”
“Gotcha.”
My fingers wrap around an old-fashioned doorknob, complete with a keyhole at the center and a slight dull to the varnish from thousands of hands over the years. It scrapes against Call’s suit just hard enough to make a very unpleasant noise as I twist it, click it into place, and remember that I’m supposed to knock. Which I do twice in quick succession and then push the door open right after.
“Call? That you?” a quick, nasally voice calls from across the room. “I thought I told you to quit knocking when it’s just you! Makes it hard to…”
A man in a pinstriped suit kicks out from behind a cubicle wall and freezes mid-sentence. He narrows beady eyes at me, the bags under them underlining his suspicion with tired intensity. Call clears his throat as he clicks his voice projection active.
“Sorry, Sal, it’s just us here. Whatever you’re thinking doesn’t hold any weight,” he says easily, but there are undertones in his words that I can’t place. “I need the usual papers. Just let me get the door first.”
That’s my cue. I gently kick the door shut behind me and walk up to the man, who seems to be the only person in this cubicle farm of an office space. All the other desks are just… empty. No monitors, no keyboards, no papers, no nothing. Not even extra chairs. I round the cubicle wall as Sal grumbles to himself and wheels back into place.
There’s a massive sea of chairs right next to him, barely disguised by the cubicle wall. Each occupied by a… plastic halloween skeleton dressed for a different holliday. I stare at them for a little longer than Call would, just taking in the sight of an entire office full of cheap decorations dressed with care.
“You got a new one,” Call says, bailing out my lingering gaze with a tone of warning. “Maybe more than one. Who’re the lifeguard and viking supposed to be?”
Sal leans back and squints at the skeletons. “Spring break and Lief Erikson day. You think I should go with a swimsuit for spring break?”
“Bikini bottoms and a university t-shirt.”
“Ooh, good call,” Sal turns to his computer and tabs over to a shopping website. “Where’d you go?”
“Didn’t,” Call says. “But if I did, I would’ve loved to go somewhere in Canada. Or Mexico. Or Europe, or anywhere else, really. See the world before the Preservation took all the fun out of it.”
Sal nods and taps the corner of his computer. The monitor flickers to a pure black background as magic starts to hum to life… inside of all the plastic skeletons. A candle’s worth of flickering firelight illuminates the inside of their brittle ribcages each, most the colour of actual flame, but some of the more elaborately dressed skeletons flicker with a flame that burns bright blue and flutters like it's made of tissue paper.
“Are we good?” Call asks.
“We’re good,” Sal confirms. “No eyes on the cause yet, but we’re getting a little more heat than I’m comfortable with. So who’s wearing the suit right now? A prisoner or a friend?”
I turn and tilt my head at the man. Call’s voice clicks off and a thin wisp of awareness spreads from somewhere inside of the helmet to the outside, putting my voice out there for this ‘Sal’ guy to hear.
“I’d say we’re a little less than friends,” I say. “More like co-conspirators, if you want to call it anything.”
Sal’s eyes widen ever so slightly at the sound of my voice. “You wouldn’t happen to be the one very specific woman Call’s told me about, would you?”
I shrug. “That depends what he’s been telling you. And if it’s safe enough to repeat that shit right here.”
“Oh, it isn’t. We’re only safe by the virtue of the psychics not being powerful enough to constantly be listening to everyone’s thoughts,” Sal says as he stands and walks over to the other side of the room, motioning for me to follow. “I won’t ask your name, since that’s something a psychic could latch onto if they decided to interrogate me. Call, is she strong enough to bet on?”
Call’s voice clicks on with a grim laugh. “Alone? Probably not. But she is not alone.”
Sal shudders at the warning in Call’s voice. “Duly noted, thank you very much. Now, what do you need these papers to say, and for how many? Make sure you register the same number of people you were seen with, or else you’ll get called in again like last week.”
“There were six of them. You know that,” Call snaps.
“Yeah, I do,” Sal snaps back. “And when the brass got hold of them, officially there were only ever five. The hell did that kid do to get erased like that, Call?”
Call grinds his teeth loud enough to hear. “If I knew, he wouldn’t be gone.”
“Yeah. Getting harder to do goddamn nothing every day that goes by,” Sal mutters. “You never answered me. How many?”
I hold up a single finger. “One’s all we need.”
Sal turns with a frown. “One? How the hell’re we going to spin that yarn to the higher ups?”
“I’ll think of something,” Call insists. “This is really important, Sal. The big one.”
A cough sticks in Sal’s throat. “You’re shitting me. Already? Didn’t you say you had years to–”
“That’s his timeline, not mine,” I interrupt. “Based on what I know, things have to happen much sooner than before. I’ll do my damndest not to blow your covers, but I have every intent to bring this organization to its knees as soon as I physically can. If that’s too inconvenient for you, then you can just stand to the side and make peace with what they’re going to do.”
Sal stares at me for a few long seconds like he’s trying to parse whether I’m bluffing or not. He scratches his perfectly shaven chin and shoots a few furtive glances over at his collection of magical halloween decorations for… I don’t know, some inspiration maybe? The guy’s obviously been helping Call for longer than I’ve known the speaker. Plans they’ve had brewing for literal years could be obliterated by my presence here.
“Yeah. I–yeah. One person’s worth of papers, coming up,” Sal says.
He leans down and fishes through a drawer filled with loose leaf paper, each glimmering ever so slightly with magic. They all have a simple form inked onto them in pure black with an empty box where a picture should be, but instead of empty spaces for every other thing that should be filled in, there’s a wriggling mass of constantly shifting letters. Sal wipes a handful of letters off a page with the side of his hand, pulls it out of the drawer, and closes it before the things can try to escape.
“Okay, here you go,” he places the form on the table, now completely un-filled-out. “One refugee residency form, ready to accept whatever you put into it as gospel. Just make sure nobody can get a good scan of it before you fill it out.”
I grab the sheet and send it to my Class Card. Sal nods to himself and turns away, walks right back to his desk, and turns his monitor back on. Call’s voice clicks over mine as the sensation of outward projection dims to nothing. The skeletons don’t go dim, though; they burn as bright as ever.
“Thank you very much,” Call says. “Are we still on for cards this weekend?”
Sal nearly chokes on his spit. “This weekend? Isn’t that way too soon?”
I shake my head as Call laughs. “You only lost a few bucks; don’t overblow things. Be ready for this weekend or you’ll definitely lose more than that.”
“Obviously, yeah. Should’ve told me a little earlier, though; at least when we’re not on the clock. Now I won’t be able to focus.”
“Think of it as a little break from the monotony. See you Saturday.”
“Yeah, yeah, saturday… Saturday,” Sal shakes his head as returns to his work. “Saturday’s going to come all too soon.”
