---
Outis kept his hand on the wall until Polites stopped laughing.
Then he took it away, and looked at it, and made it stop shaking. It took a while. When it was steady, he stood up, buttoned his jacket, checked the baton on his belt, and opened the door.
He knew exactly what he would see. Eurylochus beside his door, jacket buttoned, tie centered, glaring at the elevator. The door of 004, closed.
"He's still asleep," Eurylochus said, before Outis could ask.
"I know," Outis said, and then caught himself. "I mean. He always is."
Eurylochus gave him a look, but said nothing.
Polites came out of 002 already talking about cake. He knocked on 004 twice. He opened the door. He said, "Elpenor, wake up, it's day six, there might be cake," and from inside came the same long, muffled groan that might have been five more minutes and might have been what's a cake.
Outis stood in the corridor and listened to it, every word exactly where it had been, and felt something cold walk slowly down his spine.
Everyone else has forgotten.
He went in and hauled Elpenor up by the arm before the other two could start, and Elpenor blinked at him in mild surprise and said, "Oh. Hi. You're fast today."
"Big day," Outis said.
. . .
It was like watching a play he'd already seen.
Malkuth was six minutes late. Angela said "This will be reported to the Manager," and Polites flinched in exactly the same place. Malkuth's pen raced across her clipboard. Elpenor's tie hung open. Polites tied it, badly.
"The Manager unlocked another file last night! T-04-06, the new one, the bear... Its name is Happy Teddy Bear!"
"Happy Teddy Bear," said Polites. "Oh, that's perfect."
"It's a bear," said Eurylochus. "It isn't happy. It's clingy."
Outis kept his face still and his eyes on the monitors and tried very hard not to mouth the words along with them.
Yesod appeared in his cold purple frame. "One tie, crooked." Elpenor asked what a penalty point was. "Twenty." Polites whispered viper. Eurylochus almost laughed.
Then the elevator dinged, and James walked out, lost and freckled and tired, and said "This isn't Information, is it," and Outis had to look at the floor for a second.
He'd seen this man only hours ago, in a day that didn't exist anymore, flat on his back on a mauve-lit floor, laughing helplessly at a clown that had blown up in his face. And James didn't know him. James looked at him with the same easy, polite curiosity he'd shown the first time, and introduced himself again, and learned all their names again, and told the story about the vending machine in the WARP station that only took exact change.
Again.
"Word chain?" James said. "You've never played word chain? Bucket."
"Tea!"
"Apple."
"...Elevator."
It was Outis's turn. He could have said anything. He thought about it: one small change, just to see what would happen.
"Rope," he said.
"Eel," said James, delighted, pointing at him. "See? You're all naturals."
Outis let out a breath. He didn't know why it mattered so much that that one stayed the same. It just did.
"James. You are on the wrong floor."
. . .
The thing about having seen a day before, Outis was learning, was that you couldn't stop looking for the seams.
He sat on the bench after James left and watched the Main Room with the same blank, patient face he'd worn through four years of warehouse shifts. Inside, his mind was working faster than it ever had.
Two in the afternoon. That was when the lights had flickered. That was when Angela had said the Qliphoth Meltdown level has reached two. So was it the time? Did something happen every day at two?
He went back through the days. Day 1, two o'clock: he'd been mopping the skull's room. Day 3, two o'clock: Polites had been trying to get a clerk to say good afternoon. Day 5, two o'clock: Elpenor had been asleep in the cupboard.
Nothing. Not once.
So it wasn't the clock.
He crossed it off, and kept thinking.
Level two. Levels went up. Something filled. Something that had been filling all week, a little more each day, and had finally tipped over.
He thought about what changed in this building. Not much. The same doors. The same benches. The same rotation, Polites to the skull, Eurylochus to the fairies...
The work.
Every time one of them went through a containment door, something happened in the building. Energy went up the vents in little glowing cubes. Malkuth wrote it down. The Manager kept count.
What if something else kept count too?
He started counting.
It was the kind of thing he was good at. He'd counted pallets, boxes, shifts, dollars, the minutes until a bus. He counted now without moving his lips: every time a name was called and a door opened. Polites, skull, one. Eurylochus, fairies, two. Elpenor... He couldn't see the floor below, where James and whoever else Yesod had were working. But he could guess. One agent, a new department, one Abnormality. Slow, careful orders. He rounded it.
By the time the clock on the wall read noon, he had a number in his head. It wasn't exact. He knew it wasn't. But if he was right, if the thing that tipped over at two o'clock was the work, then the number was getting close.
He didn't say any of it out loud. It was only a theory. He'd need more than one day to know.
But he wrote it down in the back of his mind, the way Malkuth wrote everything on her list. It's the work. Watch the work.
. . .
Then he started changing things.
Small things, first. Careful things.
"Employee 004, Attachment work on Happy Teddy Bear!"
"Ma'am," Outis said, before Elpenor could even stand. "Could he do the fairies instead? He did really well with them yesterday. And I don't think he's awake enough for a hug yet."
The speaker paused.
"Oh! Let me ask." Another pause. "The Manager says that's fine! Employee 004, Fairy Festival instead!"
Elpenor blinked at him. "You're looking out for me," he said, sounding faintly surprised.
"Somebody has to," said Outis.
[ ...That's one. ]
"One what?" Outis murmured.
[ One change. Every change you make moves something else. Remember that, too. ]
He remembered it.
He asked, later, whether the Manager might send him to Scorched Girl before lunch, "since she seems to like it when I do it." The Manager said yes. He went into the hot orange room with a mop and a bucket and did the best work of his life. He met the burned girl's white eyes and nodded to her every time he turned, I see you, I'm here, until the flickering light around her steadied into a low, almost peaceful glow.
"Work result: good!"
If something was going to set her off today, he wanted her as calm as he could make her before it did.
And he kept Polites close. Not obviously. Just... close. On the bench beside him. In the hallway with him. When Polites wandered off to say hello to a clerk, Outis wandered too.
"You're kind of clingy today," Polites said finally, grinning. "Like Teddy."
"Don't compare me to the bear."
"You'd be a great bear. I'd give you a cake."
Outis didn't answer that. He couldn't.
. . .
The lights flickered at a quarter to two.
Fifteen minutes early.
Outis was on his feet before the tone had finished sounding. The work. I changed the work, so the timing moved. He had the number in his head and it was close, it was close, and he didn't have time to think about whether that meant he was right.
"Manager. The Qliphoth Meltdown level has reached two. An Ordeal has begun. Crimson Dawn."
"Batons," Outis said, before Malkuth could open her mouth. "On your belts. That's what they're for."
Polites looked at him, startled. Elpenor looked at his hip. Eurylochus already had his in his hand, and his narrow dark eyes went straight to Outis's face, as if trying to read something written there.
"Everyone, listen to me!" Malkuth said, on every screen. "An Ordeal is..."
The laughter started down the hall.
"Eurylochus," Outis said.
The older man turned.
"There's a clown. It's going to go for the containment doors. It'll go for Scorched Girl's." Outis kept his voice low and level, the voice he'd used once before, in the hallway with the fairies. "Don't walk. Run. Get to it before it's been in there long. When you hit it, it's going to explode. Hit it, then get back."
Eurylochus stared at him.
For one second, Outis thought he would ask. How do you know? It was the obvious question. It was the question Outis had no answer to.
Eurylochus didn't ask.
He ran.
And then the second sound came, the harsh two-note alarm from the containment hallway, and the monitors flashed red, and Angela said:
"Qliphoth Meltdown. One Sin and Hundreds of Good Deeds. Happy Teddy Bear."
Outis's stomach dropped.
Not the fairies. Last time it had been the skull and the fairies. This time it was the skull and the bear. Every change you make moves something else.
"Employee 002, One Sin! Employee 004, Happy Teddy Bear! Go, go, inside, before the timers run out!"
Elpenor stood up, swaying. "The happy one," he said, and looked almost pleased. "Okay."
Outis looked at him for one long second. It's his first time with the bear today. One work. That's fine. One is fine.
"Hey," he said. "When you're done, come straight back to the bench. Don't go anywhere else. Okay?"
"Okay," said Elpenor agreeably, and loped off down the hall.
Polites was already halfway to the skull's door. He glanced back over his shoulder, the same way he had last time, and Outis's heart slammed against his ribs so hard it hurt.
"Go!" Polites called. "Go help James! We've got this!"
Outis was already at the elevator.
"Employee 001!" Malkuth's voice caught up with him as the doors slid open. "The Manager needs you downstairs, the Information Team has..."
"On my way, ma'am," said Outis, and the doors closed.
. . .
It was easier the second time.
He knew where the clown would be. He knew it would be standing in front of James, giggling, skipping toward the door marked T-01-54, where the gray man in the straitjacket sat shaking on his floor. He knew James would say it just wants the door, and he did.
What Outis didn't know, until he swung, was how much stronger he'd gotten.
The baton didn't snap against the clown's shoulder this time. It broke it. The thin body folded sideways with a sound like a dropped chair, and the clown went skidding across the tile, its painted grin still stretched ear to ear. One blow. It twitched once and lay still.
Outis was already grabbing James by the collar.
"Down."
They hit the floor together. The clown exploded over their heads in a hot red bloom, and the burnt-sugar smell rolled over them, and when it cleared, there was a scorched black star on the tile and James was staring at Outis from about six inches away.
"How," James said, "did you know it was going to do that?"
Outis thought about it for a second.
"Lucky guess," he said.
"That's not a lucky guess. That's a really lucky guess." James sat up, rubbing the back of his head. "And you hit it like a truck. Have you done this before? Is this a thing? Do they train you up there?"
No, Outis thought. I died a week ago. And a few hours ago, in a day nobody else remembers, I watched my friend die. And I didn't stop being stronger when it reset.
[ Your body remembers everything you've done. Even the days that didn't happen. ]
"Something like that," he said out loud.
"Ordeal entity suppressed on the Information floor," came Yesod's voice from the speaker. A pause. "That was fast."
It wasn't adequate, this time. Outis noticed.
"James. Are you injured?"
"No, sir. Control knocked it flat in one hit, sir. It was honestly kind of terrifying."
A longer pause.
"Good," said Yesod.
Outis was already back at the elevator.
. . .
The hallway was not full of orange light.
That was the first thing he saw when the doors opened on Control's floor, and his knees almost went out from under him.
There was smoke, a little. A scorched black star on the tiles outside Scorched Girl's door. Eurylochus was sitting on the floor beside it with his back against the wall and his jacket off, a long red burn up one forearm, breathing hard. But Scorched Girl's window was still glowing its thin, steady orange, and through it Outis could see the burned girl, standing in the center of her room where she belonged.
"Scorched Girl's counter is holding!" Malkuth was saying, almost sobbing with relief. "Employee 003 stopped the clown before it finished! It was only in her room for eight seconds! Eight! He ran! I've never seen anybody run so fast!"
Outis crouched down beside Eurylochus.
"You ran," he said.
"You told me to run." Eurylochus looked at him. His face was gray with pain, but his eyes were steady. "I don't know how you knew."
"Neither do I."
It was the truth, sort of. Eurylochus looked at him a moment longer, measuring, and then, very slightly, nodded, as if he'd decided that was an answer he could live with for now.
"It exploded," he said. "Like you said."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." Eurylochus looked down at his burned arm. "You said get back. I got back. Most of the way."
The skull's door opened.
Polites came out.
He came out blinking, a little pink around the eyes the way he always was after the skull, saying something over his shoulder to the silent thing inside, and he saw Outis crouched in the hallway and his whole face lit up.
"Hey! You're back! Did you help James? Is he okay? The skull was really... why are you looking at me like that?"
Outis didn't know how he was looking at him. He only knew that Polites was standing there, whole, in the gray hallway, with his crooked tie and his curly hair, saying why are you looking at me like that, and that Outis had heard the last thing he'd said in the other version of this day, and it had been stick close.
"No reason," Outis said, and his voice came out rough. "You're okay?"
"I'm great! I'm alive! We all are! Malkuth said Elpenor did the bear and it hugged him and he came out and fell asleep on the bench immediately. Like, immediately. It's incredible." Polites peered at him. "Are you okay? You look like you saw a ghost."
Outis stood up. He put a hand on Polites's shoulder, briefly, and squeezed, and let go.
"I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay."
[ He's alive, Outis. ]
"I know," he whispered.
[ You did that. ]
He didn't answer. He didn't trust his voice.
. . .
The rest of the afternoon was quiet.
Malkuth announced that the Ordeal was cleared on both floors, and the Manager was very pleased, and she put it on her list in letters so big they could see the pen strokes from the bench. Yesod's frame appeared on the monitors just long enough to say "Acceptable work, Malkuth," which made Malkuth glow so bright she nearly whited out the screen. Eurylochus's arm was bandaged.
It didn't need to be. Malkuth had explained, earlier in the week, that the Main Room did something to people who rested in it. Burns closed, cuts knitted, bruises faded, faster than they had any right to. By the time the Ordeal was cleared, the long red burn up Eurylochus's forearm had already gone pink and shiny and smooth.
Polites had bandaged it anyway.
He'd found a first-aid kit in the supply cupboard and sat down beside Eurylochus on the bench and wrapped the arm, carefully, wrist to elbow, with his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. Eurylochus had let him. He'd watched Polites do it with an expression Outis couldn't read, and when Polites finished and said, "There. Now it's definitely better," Eurylochus had looked down at the neat white bandage for a long moment and said nothing at all.
"It's healed," he said now, to no one in particular, resting the arm on his knee. "I know it's healed."
"Does it still hurt?" Polites asked.
Eurylochus flexed his fingers. Outis saw his jaw tighten, just slightly.
"It aches," he admitted. "It shouldn't. There's nothing there." He looked at the bandage. "It's just my head. I know it's just my head."
"Then the bandage is for your head," said Polites cheerfully. "So your head knows it's fixed too."
Eurylochus looked at him for a long time.
"That," he said finally, "is a very stupid way to think about medicine."
"Yep," Polites agreed.
But Eurylochus didn't take the bandage off. He sat on the bench with it resting on his knee and let Polites tell him three separate times how brave he'd been.
"I ran," Eurylochus said. "That's all."
"You ran really fast."
"I'm aware."
Elpenor slept. He'd come straight back to the bench after the bear, just like Outis had told him, and stretched out across it with his feet in Eurylochus's lap, and Eurylochus, unbelievably, had let him.
Outis sat at the end of the bench and let himself breathe.
He'd done it. Polites was alive. Eurylochus was hurt, but alive. James was alive. The burned girl was in her room. The clowns were scorched black stars on two floors' worth of tile. Everyone was here.
Everyone is here.
He let his eyes close, just for a second.
"Employee 004!" Malkuth's voice, cheerful, easy, the voice of someone whose worst day had just turned into a good one. "Attachment work on Happy Teddy Bear, please! The Manager says it liked you!"
Outis's eyes snapped open.
Elpenor was already standing up, yawning, scratching his head. "The happy one again," he said sleepily. "Okay."
He was three steps down the hall before Outis's mind caught up with what he'd heard.
Again.
He thought of the meltdown. Elpenor, sent to the bear to stop the timer. That had been his first work on it today. And since then, nobody else had gone through that door. Not Polites, not Eurylochus, not Outis. Nobody.
It doesn't like it when people leave.
Remember that.
Twice in a row. The same person. Twice in a row.
"Elpenor!"
Outis was off the bench and running. Behind him, Polites said "What, what is it," and Eurylochus's head came up sharply, and Malkuth said "Employee 001?" in a puzzled voice from every screen.
The hallway had never been so long.
He came around the corner just in time to see the door of the bear's room swing shut. And above it, a small red light flicked on.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Outis grabbed the handle and pulled.
It didn't move. It didn't even rattle. It was locked, solid, a slab of steel set into the wall, and the handle was nothing more than a piece of metal his hand was wrapped around.
He went to the window.
Elpenor was inside. He'd sat down on the floor in front of the bear, cross-legged, the way Polites always did, long legs folded up like a grasshopper's. He was saying something. Outis could see his mouth moving, slow and easy. He was smiling his sleepy, crooked smile.
The bear's head tilted. Its one button eye caught the light.
Its arms opened.
"No," Outis said. "No, no, no. Ma'am!" He was shouting at the speaker on the wall. "Stop the work! Get him out! Open the door!"
"Employee 001, what...?"
"It's the second time! He's done it twice in a row! It won't let go, it's going to... open the door!"
"I... the doors can't be opened during a work, they lock until it's finished, I can't..." Malkuth's voice cracked. "I'm telling the Manager. I'm telling him right now."
Inside, the bear's arms closed around Elpenor.
It was a hug. It looked like a hug. A big, soft, careful hug, the kind Outis had felt himself, the kind Polites always came out of beaming and covered in fuzz.
Elpenor laughed. Outis could see him laugh. He hugged the bear back, his long arms around its matted neck.
The bear didn't let go.
The seconds went by. Elpenor's arms loosened. He shifted, trying to sit back. The bear's worn paws pressed harder against his back. Elpenor's face changed, puzzled at first, then startled, and Outis watched him push against the bear's chest with both hands, and watched it not matter at all.
The bear held on.
Outis hit the glass with the flat of his hand. Then with his fist. He was stronger than he had been yesterday, stronger than he'd been this morning, and the glass was thick and wired and it didn't even crack.
"Let him go!"
Behind him, running footsteps. Polites, then Eurylochus, his bandaged arm pressed to his chest. Polites said "Oh god, oh god, Elpenor," and started pulling at the door handle too, and it didn't move for him either.
Inside, Elpenor wasn't pushing anymore.
His long arms had gone slack. His sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes were open, looking at nothing, over the bear's shoulder. His fingers uncurled, and something small slipped out of them and fell to the floor with a sound Outis couldn't hear through the glass.
A worn wooden pencil, chewed at the end, with flat, smoothed sides like a tiny paddle. It rolled a little way across the white tile and stopped.
If you write your name on something, somebody will find it someday and know you were there.
The bear held Elpenor for a long time after that. It rocked him, very gently, the way a child rocks a doll.
Then, slowly, as if it had finally been satisfied, it let him slide to the floor. It slumped back into its corner, exactly the way it had been when it arrived, with its arms open and its one button eye on the door.
The red light over the door clicked off.
The handle turned in Polites's hands.
Nobody went in.
. . .
Outis stood at the window with his palm flat against the glass.
He didn't look away. He couldn't. He looked at the long, thin shape on the white floor. At the little pencil lying a hand's width from its fingers. At the bear in the corner with its arms open, waiting for the next person who wanted a hug.
Behind him, Polites was crying. Eurylochus had put his good hand on Polites's shoulder and was standing very still, staring at nothing.
And slowly, Outis turned his head.
He turned it away from the window, up and to the left, to the small round speaker set into the wall above the door. He didn't know why. He wasn't looking at it, not really. He was looking through it, past it, at the place where the orders came from.
At the Manager.
And he felt it.
He couldn't have said what it was. A weight. A pressure. The same feeling you get in a crowd when someone is staring at the back of your head, except that it came through a speaker and a wall and a screen somewhere he'd never seen. Deep, and heavy, and very, very still. Like someone on the other side of the glass had stopped breathing.
Outis didn't look away from the speaker. The weight didn't look away from whatever it was looking at.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
You sent him in, Outis thought. He didn't know who he was saying it to. You sent him in twice.
The speaker crackled, very faintly, the way it did when someone on the other end was about to speak and then hadn't.
Then Angela's voice. Calm. Even. As always.
"Manager. An agent loss has been recorded. Employee 004, Control Team."
A pause.
"...Understood."
Another pause, longer. Then, quieter, almost as if she were speaking to herself:
"Resetting."
The world went white.
---
The buzzer went off at the start of Day 6, flat and loud.
Outis didn't sit up this time.
He lay on his back on the crinkling mattress and stared at the ceiling, at the tiny red light in the corner watching him, steady and unblinking. His hands were whole. Soft. His knuckles weren't split from hitting the glass. There was no pencil on the white floor.
[ Outis. ]
"I know," he said.
[ He's alive. Right now, in 004, he's alive and asleep. ]
"I know."
[ The Manager reset the day again. ]
"I know."
The window was quiet for a moment. Then:
[ I'm sorry. ]
Outis closed his eyes.
He thought about the clock he'd crossed off, and the number he'd been counting, and the meltdown that had moved from the fairies to the bear. He thought about every change you make moves something else. He thought about pulling Polites out of the fire and walking right past the door where Elpenor was going to die.
He'd been watching the wrong thing. He'd watched the one thing that went wrong last time, and he'd stopped watching everything else.
Pay attention, the System had said, the night before any of this happened. To everything. To everyone.
Not to one person. To everyone.
Knock. Knock-knock.
"Morning!" said Polites, through the wall. "Day six! Almost a whole week! Do you think they give you a cake at a week? I think they should give you a cake."
Outis opened his eyes.
He sat up. He buttoned his jacket. He checked the baton on his belt. He looked at the paper cup on the shelf, with its single white pill, and left it there.
Then he stood up, and put his hand flat on the wall where the voice had come from, and said, steady this time, steady all the way through:
"Yeah. They should."
And he went to wake up Elpenor himself.