Subject Zero: Faceless

Grier had been waiting outside the administration block when he came out of Marrow’s office. He had walked straight past her, the runner’s approach taking what attention he had, and she let him read the note before she caught up with him at the yard’s far edge, arms crossed against the morning chill.

You’re not supposed to be here. Nobody told me you were back.

”Nobody told me either,” she said. ”I told them. I requested attachment to the reliability-flag review three days ago, the moment the readout reached a distribution list wide enough that I could legitimately see it. Corps approved it yesterday, on the grounds that a subject’s standing handler has a reasonable claim to review input.” She fell into step beside him as he started walking, matching his pace without being asked. ”That’s the version I put in writing.”

What’s the version you didn’t put in writing.

She didn’t answer right away, which was itself an answer of a kind he wasn’t used to getting from her. They walked past the same gravel yard where the recognition formation had stood that same morning, quiet now, a work detail coiling tent line near the flagpole’s crooked base, and she waited until they’d cleared it before she spoke again.

* * *

They ended up at the same motor pool bench, empty now at this hour, busy enough by day, dead quiet past dusk. She sat first this time, instead of standing over him, a departure from how she usually ran conversations that mattered.

”I read Renner’s readout the day it circulated,” she said. ”Grade confirmed, reliability flag open, no timeline. I read Reyes’s memory-gap note the same afternoon. I read Marrow’s prep notes for this morning’s meeting while I was waiting outside his door for it to end.” She looked at her own hands rather than at him. ”I have read every single fact about what happened to you at Corvale from a distribution list. I have not once, since Corvale, heard any of it from you directly, because I wasn’t there to be told.”

You’re not supposed to need to hear it from me. That’s not what a handler is for.

”I know exactly what a handler is for.” Something in her voice thinned, narrowing to something more exposed than the register she usually kept. ”I could have stopped at the review input and let the attachment lapse when the review closes. Instead I asked for a seat outside Marrow’s door at six this morning so I wouldn’t miss you coming out of it.” She finally looked at him. ”I’m telling you that because you asked what version I didn’t put in writing, and because you deserve better than a version I only give you when you catch me at it.”

How long were you outside Marrow’s door this morning.

”Since before the base flag went up.” She said it without embarrassment, which cost her visibly more than embarrassment would have. ”The aide offered me the bench three times. Standing felt more honest. Marrow’s clerk fed me tea out of what I choose to believe was respect and suspect was pity, and I drank it, because a person who has petitioned her way across a war zone learns to take the terms available.”

You didn’t come here for the review. You came here before you had a reason that would hold up on paper.

”I came here because three days ago I was reading a routine distribution summary at my own desk and saw ’Ashfall-Zero, Corvale, three uses, one continuous engagement’ in a line I wasn’t cleared to expand yet, and I sat there for eleven minutes before I could make myself open the attachment.” She said it without flinching from how it sounded. ”I have read worse things about you than that in a file before. I want you to understand that it wasn’t the content that undid me. It was not knowing, in that moment, whether you were even still standing when the summary was written.”

Stolen from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I was.

”I know that now.” She exhaled once, something in her shoulders loosening that he hadn’t clocked as tight until it wasn’t. ”I didn’t know it for the better part of an hour, and Corps doesn’t build a form for that. There’s no field on any document I have access to for ’is he alive right now,’ only for what he’s cleared for and what he cost. So I built my own reason to come find out directly, and the reliability review happened to be sitting there, real and legitimate and completely beside the actual point.”

Why does it matter to you specifically. Marrow has a file. Renner has a readout. You have neither.

”Because a file can hold what you did. It can’t hold what it cost you to decide to do it, and I have spent every day since Corvale not knowing whether anyone in that clearing was asking you that question before they asked you for the third use.” Her hands, still in her lap, closed once and opened again. ”I’m not your case file. I stopped being only that a long time before either of us said so out loud, and I’m done pretending the distinction doesn’t cost me something to maintain.”

* * *

He held the slate a long moment before writing anything, aware that whatever came next would be the first time he’d volunteered something to her that wasn’t information she needed to do her job.

I don’t know if I decided to reach for it a third time or if something in me had already decided before I noticed. Renner called it a resource with a number on it. Some mornings since Corvale I’ve wondered if she’s more right than wrong.

She read it twice before she answered, and when she did, her voice had none of the careful modulation she usually used for things she suspected would hurt him. ”You wrote that down and handed it to me instead of writing nothing. That’s the part I actually needed to see.” She reached over, not for the slate, but briefly for his hand resting beside it, a plain, unhurried contact, undemanding, gone again after a few seconds. ”A resource doesn’t wonder whether it’s more resource than person. That question is the proof against her math, not the evidence for it. I don’t think you believe me yet. I’d like the chance to keep saying it until you do.”

That could take a while.

”I’ve requested a standing attachment through the end of the reliability review, minimum.” A small, genuine motion touched the corner of her mouth, brief and unpolished, the first expression he’d seen on her that hadn’t been arranged into something professional before it reached her face. ”I have the time if you do.”

I don’t know what to give you back for this. I’ve never had to figure that part out before.

”You don’t owe me a matching gesture. That’s not how this works, and if it were, I’d have priced myself out of it years ago.” She stood, brushing gravel dust from her knees, and offered him a hand up he didn’t strictly need but took anyway. ”Write to me next time before Marrow does. Before Renner, before Reyes, before any of them. I’m not asking you to tell me everything. I’m asking to be somewhere on the list you actually choose, instead of somewhere I have to petition my way onto after the fact.”

He started to write his answer and stopped, struck by something small and precise as a stone in a boot: any list he made would carry half a name for her. In three months — intake, the board, the transfer, Corvale, this morning — she had never once told him her given name, and he had never once asked, and neither of them had ever seemed to notice the absence until now, when he could not stop noticing it. He didn’t ask. Some questions had a right time, and he was suddenly certain this one’s hadn’t arrived yet — only that, for the first time, he could feel it out there, waiting, the shape of a door neither of them had tested.

I can do that, he wrote instead.

”Then that’s the whole reckoning, as far as I’m concerned.” She said it turning back toward the administration block and whatever paperwork her three-day campaign to get here had generated. ”Everything else, we’ll find out as it comes.”

He watched her go, and found that for once he wasn’t cataloguing the distance between them at all — not measuring how much of what had just happened was owed to procedure and how much to her, the two things he’d trained himself to keep separate, since the day she first stood a room down for him, out of habit more than necessity. He let the question go unanswered, and understood, walking back toward the billets in the thin morning light, that letting it go unanswered was itself the difference.