Grave Encounters [4]
It took most of three hours, seventy percent of the food in Taly’s box-sized refrigerator, and approximately a handful and a half of Astra’s fancy peanuts before Gunner admitted he’d been fired from his gig with the pharmacy. By that point he’d also polished off three quarters of his liquor bottle, blamed his misfortune on no less than three people, and omitted himself from the list entirely. That was all, of course, before he sank onto the edge of her bed and—gradually, so he might have plausible deniability—let gravity pull his shoulders to the mattress.
He looked at her with his one open eye, smiled vaguely despite nothing being funny, and exhaled like it was the last time his lungs would taste oxygen. As upset as he’d been when he arrived, a full belly of her food and a soft place to rest his head—commandeered as it was—had clearly brought him peace. One that Taly would now not be afforded.
She lingered just long enough to be sure he was down for the count, gathered whatever of her remaining sundries could be cobbled into a meal, and slipped out towards the headquarters building, Astra on her shoulder. If nothing else, her curiosity would be satisfied tonight.
Rays of setting sun streamed through Afar’s sloping glass facade as her feet hit the dusty floor on the other side of the open window. The lower workspace was bathed in orange and pink light, igniting the scattered acrylic chairs like so many bonfires on a barren beach. Not that Taly had ever set foot on the coast to know.
When she reached the unexplored fourth floor, she expected either Merit or Rafe to have beaten her there and ransacked whatever was worth looking at. But the hallway and rooms remained silent, as lifeless now as they had sat for decades.
She toed a door open next to a plaque that read Chief Logistics Officer and breathed in the stale air. Unlike the offices below which seemed poised for their workers to return at any moment, this one had been cleaned out. A half-full wastepaper basket sat near the empty desk—the only thing still sitting atop it being an overturned nameplate for Alex Pham, who’d apparently seen no need to take it with him.
Taly couldn’t imagine willfully forfeiting evidence that you had become someone or done something worth taking note of, even a job title that no one understood or cared about. She ran her fingers along the engraving as she tried to not think of all the people who had come and gone without so much as a piece of mail leftover to keep their name alive. She tried even harder to imagine a world where she wouldn’t be one of them.
The next office over was mostly intact, though a cluster of pale rectangles on the wall suggested that someone had walked away with souvenirs. A single photograph remained propped on the desk depicting a smiling, be-stubbled family man with his beautiful wife and two happy children in front of a gingerbread Victorian. Wildflowers and climbing sweet peas spilled over the fence of their yard to the left, as vibrant in the clean sunlight as the neon strips covering low-town were now.
It was strange to think that people had once lived like that. Cozied up in sprawling wood houses with nature clamoring at their doorstep. Peaceful, maybe. Idyllic.
She doubted he’d spent a single night of his tenure sleeping in The Blocks.
Taly absently opened the box of crackers she brought with her and chewed one as she riffled through Family Man’s things in search of treasure. There were memos, a flimsy award for fifteen years of service, and not much else but a money clip with a couple of useless banknotes and a defunct company credit card.
A hand-scrawled to-do list in the letter tray showed he had been tasked with picking up carrots on the way home last time he was in the office. Capers and parmesan cheese as well. “For Vera’s dinner party” it said to the side, circled and underlined in green highlighter.
“I wonder if he remembered the capers,” she said to Astra, whose beak clicked twice before she cocked her eye expectantly at the box in Taly’s hand.
“Such an opportunist.”
The half cracker Astra was given littered Taly’s shoulder by the time she stepped back onto the walkway overlooking the lower three floors. Beyond the glass, the squat cubist silhouette of The Blocks looked out of place among the natural curving edges of the rest of the campus. Like it was an accident—belonged to some brutalist enterprise downtown and got left there by mistake. A barnacle in a field of wild growth.
The design had to be intentional, Taly thought as she paused above where Merit almost let herself slip over the railing, like they wanted everyone to know that the best thing they’d ever have was their desk.
From up there, she could just barely make out a sliver of the wildlands between the distant mountains. A slowly dwindling smudge of green against the gray baldness of the Cascades. It was the only place Taly assumed nature still managed to clamor, though maybe it was more of an amble or shuffle these days. As if to prove her right, a meager group of birds circled the distant tree line, barely more than streaks of shadow in the dying light.
Rafe had once suggested going there under the pretense of reuniting Astra with her fellow crows.
“People used to head out there all the time, spend days in the wilderness,” he’d said eagerly.
She hated reminding him that even getting to the wildlands meant crossing the moat—the desolate stretch of scrubby, sun-scorched land that filled the space between the city and the surrounding mountains.
“There’s a reason they’re called the wildlands,” Taly said definitively. “They’re supposed to stay wild.”
“And you think I’m not wild enough?”
Rafe grinned, his eyebrows raising suggestively. But all he got back was a half-smile and a warning glance. Astra—and Taly for that matter—would be staying firmly where she was.
But it was hard not to think about it again as she watched the distant birds cut through the air. What might it be like to step under the canopy? To feel dirt and stones and green earth beneath her feet and, just once, not hear the electric hum of the city. To step outside of range, where the only way to reach her would be to stand right in front of her and use actual words.
It was even harder to put it out of her mind as she stepped into the office at the far end of the floor. There were no pale rectangles on these walls, instead every spare inch was covered in old-style photographs of those very mountains, more lush than she’d ever seen. In one, a group of grinning faces stood before a forest waterfall, the mist casting a halo over the surrounding moss-coated basalt. Thick, corky-barked conifers filled in the rest of the negative space, dappling two of the smiles in mottled shadow.
She could recognize one of them as Family Man from the office down the hall, but the rest—three other men and two women—were chipper-looking mysteries.
Many of those smiles repeated across the other photos. Mountain climbing. Kayaking. A big party full of dozens more faces with them at the center, celebrating Afar’s first successful launch. In some of them they looked like a team. Others, something closer to a family.
If she had to guess, the brown-haired man that appeared at the center of each photo was Clint Mok, the name under the Chief Engineering Officer title on the door outside. Maybe one of the others belonged to the nameplate she found.
Taly placed her box of crackers on the edge of the desk and fished her prized lump of soft cheese out of her jacket pocket as Astra hopped down from her shoulder. She chewed as she looked through the remaining photos, grateful that it didn’t take finesse to make cheese taste good on a cracker. In fact, it was so nice that for a second she almost forgot about Gunner or that she would likely have to make her bed in one of the empty offices for the night.
Her attention was pulled away by the sound of frustrated flapping wings. Astra had slipped off the desk and was fighting to pull a scrap of fabric out of a closed closet door. She tugged with all her might, her little feet stamping and wings pumping in an attempt to give her leverage. When it was still stuck, she tossed her head back and emitted a low, crackling groan before diving for it again.
Taly reached for the knob to help, anticipating celebratory squalls when Astra finally had her prize.
But when the door swung open the fabric was much more than a scrap, it belonged to a pair of pants outdated by several decades. Specifically, pants that still had a set of legs in them.
“Oh,” Taly said numbly before scrambling to scoop Astra up and away from it.
And ‘it’ really did seem like the thing to call the grim discovery, all shriveled and gray and wrong-looking. Its upper body curled against the far wall of the shallow closet; knees tucked as close to their chest as they could be—as though it had been cowering from something with nowhere left to go.
After sitting in the circulating air for so long, the corpse had become nothing more than dry skin stretched tight over sharp bones, barely recognizable as a person. Yet the longer she stared, the more familiar the figure became. Petite, narrow shouldered, feminine. Taly glanced back at the photos lining the wall and then at the figure laying in the closet. Though what was left of her hair was different now—cut to an economical bob instead of flowing past her shoulders—it was the same sandy shade as one of the two smiling women in the photos.
Taly’s fingers curled tensely around the closet knob, unable to look away as she catalogued the dead’s appearance. Her clothes looked expensive, the kind that might’ve been taken to a tailor before that work was done by mechanical arms right in front of you in the department store. What stood out, however, was the pair of bright pink and blue running shoes she wore in contrast to her otherwise neutral tones—like she’d been on her way somewhere, or was coming back from something and hadn’t totally put herself back together yet. Like she hadn’t expected to be stopped.
If it really was one of the women in the photos, she couldn’t have been much older than Taly herself. Old enough to have made something of herself but still young enough to stay hungry and curious.
A pit yawned in her stomach as she realized it was a high chance she was standing in the office of the very person responsible.
Clint Mok, what have you done?
The sound of heavy feet hitting the ground filtered up from the bottom floor, followed almost immediately by Rafe’s trilling, carefree whistle.
She quickly closed the closet door again, making sure the pant leg made it all the way in this time. There were some things best kept to herself.