The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 10, pt. 2

“Was that … did you just—”

“No,” she said, softly enough that he had to lean towards her to hear her over the rain. “No, not quite like the other times. It was almost like that, but there were no ‘ghosts’ this time. Let’s—let’s just get this over with,” she said with a shiver.

She’d explained about the … images, the scenes she’d witnessed, the encounters she’d had—she still didn’t know quite how to refer to them—as best she could, and it’d been clear that Mike didn’t really get it. To his credit, he also hadn’t dismissed her as insane. At least not yet.

The water was working its way through the gaps between her gloves and jacket again, and a subtle burning sensation was beginning to make itself known to her in a ring around her wrists. Eyes half-closed against stray water, she started to jog in roughly the direction of the entrance they’d planned on using.

The entrance was a recessed door at the bottom of a short flight of steps. The concrete steps were crumbling with age and acid, the heavy iron door rusted so badly she could barely make out the seam, despite the partial protection of the overhang above them.

Jo stood in the shelter of that overhang and shook off as much of the water as she could; Mike arrived moments later and did the same. “Now, what was that back there?” he asked, face slightly reddened by the rain.

“It felt like the other times, but this time there was nobody here except for us. It was like I was seeing this place at different times. It was here, just like it is now, ruined and crumbling—” she touched the surface of the door with her finger, dislodging a sheet of rust almost as large as her palm—”but at the same time, it was brand new, no more than a couple of years old, and also not even complete, just a construction yard with building material everywhere.”

He was looking at her funny, or maybe he was distracted by the burning on his face. Either way, he sounded dubious when he asked, “Are you sure you weren’t just letting your nerves get to you? This place can do funny things to your mind. I’ve been here a couple of times already—”

“No, that’s not it,” she exclaimed. “Yes, it sort of gets into your head, but it’s—it’s like I was actually there. Here. You know what I mean.” But she could see that he didn’t. He didn’t look like he was paying her much attention at all, in fact. He was going awfully pale everywhere he wasn’t burned, and his breathing seemed a bit labored. She was starting to feel a bit light-headed herself.​

The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 7 (Complete)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Thirty minutes later found them stepping out of a cab in front of the Haldstad. Jo’s eyes were glued to her phone display; Mike swept his gaze over the building from side to side, top to bottom, eyes glowing a cool blue as data about the site was projected directly to him.

“What on earth could we possibly want with this place? I can’t see anything in its history that fits with any of the other holdings we’ve gone after.” Jo had spent the ride over digging into the Haldstad’s past. Built nearly two centuries before, it had started life as the burgeoning town’s police headquarters. The fire that Dunn had mentioned had raged through the first floor and up to the upper floor, though the cause of the blaze was poorly understood; it was believed to have been arson of some sort. After being repaired, it had continued to house the town inspectors for several decades before it was decommissioned and ultimately sold to a succession of owners who mostly used it for retail spaces.

It bore little resemblance today to how it had looked when first built. Originally designed as a two-storey building, it now rose five storeys high and had been renovated and restored many times. She continued, “This place has been torn down and rebuilt so many times there can’t be anything of value left, can there?”

“You never know. Sometimes it’s not the building itself, but the location. They’ve got their reasons, and it doesn’t really matter to us what they are.” Mike spoke with the absent tone of someone engaged in his own research. “You’re probably right though. With the history this place has, I doubt we’ll find much.”

There was no current tenant, and the arrangements had all been made with the property owner. Mike had the key and let them in the rather unimposing entrance.

Jo half expected the interior to be fire-blackened and burned, despite knowing better; instead, she was greeted by the sight of what looked to be a drugstore that had been shut down for a few years and seen better days. Rows of mostly empty shelves sat in the gloomy interior, cobwebs festooned every corner, and little pellets suggested a variety of rodents had taken up residence.

“What a lovely place,” she murmured. Mike smiled and headed straight for the lights. They didn’t work.

“Hope you’ve got a flashlight handy,” he said. She held up her phone, brightness cranked up to max; the device was as bright as any dedicated flashlight. Mike snorted, but nodded in approval. “Nice,” he said. “Those things do have some surprising uses, don’t they.”

“Yeah, it comes in handy sometimes. I’ll have to follow you though, I won’t be able to use it for much else while it’s lighting my way.”

He nodded and they headed down the aisles toward the basement entrance.

The beams of their lights probed the darkness down the stairs. The steps were solid concrete, and the hand rail was still firmly attached to the wall. Mike stood at the top, Jo just behind him; they methodically ran their light over the walls, Mike working on those further away with his more directional light, Jo using her phone to light up the closer walls.

It didn’t look terribly promising, Jo thought. The basement did have the look of ancient construction, but there were plain signs of upkeep over the years. Some sections of concrete were clearly much newer than the rest of the walls, which were made of brick.

They moved slowly down the stairs. After almost two centuries, the concrete steps, a relic of the original building, had worn down significantly toward the center. She had to be a little careful to avoid losing her balance and falling.

The basement showed clear signs of having served as storage for the drug store, and likely the previous tenants before them as well. Broken cardboard shipping boxes littered the dark space, stray packing peanuts lay on the ground or floated in small puddles where the damp had collected, and the floor surface itself was dirty and scuffed visibly despite the months of dust that had accumulated.

“It’s a bit of a fixer-upper,” Mike said dryly, inspecting several of the puddles more closely, undoubtedly recording the whole inspection, as Jo herself as. He frowned. “Does this look like condensation to you? I’d say it looks more like a leak in the plumbing somewhere.”

She looked at the puddle, but there was nothing special about it; there were pipes near it though, and they were streaked with rust. She followed them upward with her eyes, up the wall to where it met the ceiling. Her hand twitched a bit, and she realized she was tracing a climbing route up the wall; another moment and she realized she’d traced a route to a destination she hadn’t even consciously noticed at first.

There were a regular series of indentations in the walls, very narrow, but large enough to maybe get a hand in. They were almost flush with the ceiling, and looked like darker patches of shadow. She moved closer, letting the ambient glow of her phone illuminate one of them better. Mike followed her gaze.

“Huh, good eye, Jo.”

“Thanks,” she said absently; the recess looked deep, and there was something inside. “I’m going to climb up and see if I can pull that out,” she said.

“You could wait until we get more equipment down here, or at least better lights,” he replied, but she was already testing several handholds in the bricks higher up on the wall. In short order she was clinging to the recessed section she’d seen the object in, her feet swinging almost a meter off the floor. She braced her feet tight against the brick wall below and held on with one arm, reaching inside with the other.

She got hold of the object, which was largish and heavy; it felt like a box, maybe of metal. “Mike, come grab this, I won’t be able to carry it down, I’ll have to pass it to you.”

He stood ready to catch it as she pulled it from its resting place, then caught it as it fell. Jo climbed back down and took a look at what she’d retrieved.

The object was indeed a box; a metal one, long and wide but very shallow, corroded green with age and with an ornate lock on the front. It was heavily built, and the lock was of a very old design. Jo’s enthusiasm for the past didn’t extend to expertise in ancient locks or boxes, but she thought it wouldn’t have looked out of place around the time of the building’s origin.

Mike held his light for her; she lifted the box and inspected it carefully. The corrosion wasn’t too bad, all things considered. Certainly better than she might’ve guessed given the dampness of the environment and the apparent age of the box. “Think this thing could’ve been here since the police used this place?”

“Don’t know. It’s possible. I don’t know how you spotted that hole. I’d have walked past it a thousand times and never seen it.”

“Just looking for handholds,” she said, eyes on the lock.

“What?”

“I climb. Gives me the habit of looking for places to hang on.”

“Huh. Handy,” he said, unconscious of the pun. She stifled a groan and rolled her eyes anyway. The lock stubbornly refused to offer up its secrets to her, and a quick test proved that either the lock was engaged or the corrosion was bad enough to stick the box closed.

“It’s jammed, we’re not going to get this thing open here, I don’t think. Let’s take it back with us.”

“Can’t. We don’t own it yet. We’ll report on it, then open it on the property and investigate what’s inside.”

She sighed, frustrated. “Okay. We should bring some stools with us next time. There are a lot more of these little cubby-holes, and who knows what we’ll find in those?”

Mike nodded. “Sounds like a plan.” He sat the mysterious box in a dry corner.

When they got upstairs, Mike frowned and looked at the front entrance. “Hey, did you leave the door open when we got here?”

“No … I’m pretty sure I closed it.” It was open now, and creaking in the breeze. The sound of the rain was soft but clearly audible from where they stood.

They looked around, but there was nobody else visible. “I’m sure I closed it!”

“I know, I remember you closing it too,” he said. “Hello? Anyone there?”

The only reply was a creaking of the floor upstairs. They glanced at each other. “I don’t like this,” Jo said, voice low.

“Keep your cool,” Mike said, voice tinged with concern. “It could be anything.”

Jo had some private doubts about that; stepping lightly, she crossed the floor to the front door and put her finger to her lips, then pointed back toward the basement. Mike nodded in surprise. She couldn’t read his expression in the gloomy lighting, but he turned and headed back the way they’d come. She waited until he’d had enough time to descend, then pushed the door closed firmly before following him as quickly and quietly as possible.

“This is ridiculous,” he whispered as she reached the top of the stairs. He hadn’t gone down.

“I have a bad feeling. A really bad feeling,” she said. It was more than just a gut feeling; she was starting to feel a little like she had when she’d seen those odd people the last Friday. The head-rush feeling was different though. Much less intense. Maybe I’m imagining it, she told herself.

“If your bad feeling is right, we’ve just shut ourselves in with whoever it is,” Mike growled, sounding like he had his own bad feeling.

They waited, the silence of the basement pressing in like a pressure wave. Jo tried to imagine she was on a climb, an overhang, with just her hands between her and a long, fatal fall. That kind of pressure, she could handle. Waiting, scared in the dark, not knowing what was coming, if anything—that was harder.

The smallest sound reached them from upstairs, and Jo stiffened. In a building as old as this, it could have been floor boards settling as easily as a footstep. After several moments she let out a slow breath; there was no followup sound.

They waited a few minutes more; her eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. She could just make out Mike’s outline, black against the deep, dark gray of the room. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, no doubt as impatient as she was to be out of this situation.

She finally started edging toward the staircase, willing herself to make no sound. The scrapes and shuffles of her shoes on the floor made her cringe, but she kept going, moving slower; still nothing from upstairs.

The door at the top of the stairs stood open, just as it had stood when they originally found it. It outlined a patch of lighter gray; she couldn’t make out anything at the top. She stood by the foot of the stairs and they waited a bit more.

Ten minutes must have passed by the time Mike dared the faintest whisper. “I don’t think there’s anyone there.”

“Get the box,” she replied.

“We can’!”

“If we leave it, we risk losing it entirely.”

He was silent for a moment, silhouette unmoving against the gray. “Alright, fine.” He very, very slowly knelt down next to the box; she could see him fumbling around, unable to see it in the dark. She held her breath; his coat sleeve caught on the box and dragged it a moment, making a noise that she’d barely have heard under normal circumstances, but sounded like the collision of two planets to her here and now.

“Crap,” he whispered.​

The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 10, pt 1.

Jo stood under a reinforced awning, heart pounding in her chest. She’d been doing solo cases for a few days now and had been starting to get the hang of them, until the word came down from Dunn that she and Mark were to team up again for today’s case.

Rain poured over the landscape, and this time it was bad, acidic enough to sting and blind, quite possibly permanently. It wasn’t the rain that threatened to freeze her breath in her lungs though. She stared at the old Ironworks, the target of their current investigation.

“They really think they need both of us for this?” Mark said. “Not that I don’t enjoy the company, but this place has been picked clean ten times over.”

They’d been ordered to the Ironworks to locate anything old that wasn’t nailed down from a list of specific locations within the structure. Not that the place really had an “in” anymore, she thought. It was just as skeletal and dread-inducing in rain-soaked day as it was at night, and it was just as rotted out and exposed, as well. There was little left but the rusting bones of the old construction, twisting and rising into the air, suggesting where walls once stood.

They’d examined the plans earlier in the morning and she knew there was more to it than that; there were lower rooms, but … “Yeah, I know.” Even to herself, her voice had a hollow quality to it. She turned her eyes to the street in front of them; they had to cross it to reach the ironworks. It was terribly broad, and so very exposed. She hunched into her jacket, pulled the hood further out over her face, and wished she had her umbrella.

“Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” she said.

They sprinted. Rain pounded them as they left the protection of the awning, and their clothing couldn’t fully make up for it. Legs pumping, she felt a slow burn on her face as fine mist settled on the skin. It felt like the time she’d been in the sun too long. She closed her eyes, opening them every few seconds to check her footing.

Once they gained the walk on the other side, they stopped briefly, but there was nothing to shelter under on this side of the road. The burning sensation subsided on her face without the speed of their run, but Jo could already see larger rivulets of water running down her sleeves. They’d work their way into the space between jacket arm and glove soon. “We’ve got to keep moving,” she said.

They rushed to the gate in the fence, and Mike, key already in hand, wasted no time popping the lock open, then locked it behind them. As soon as she crossed the threshold into the Ironworks yard, Jo felt that same dizzy, spiky, pins and needles sensation wash over her, but far more strongly than before. It hit her from head to toe, and as she looked over the yard, the image was oddly doubled.

She could see the iron girders, bent and rusted with age, supporting the smallest fragments of remaining walls here and there. At the same time, she saw the Ironworks whole, a sight she’d never seen, even in pictures. It was clear as day; a bright, sunny day, in fact. It rose before them, walls a bit weathered but sturdy as the day they’d been built.

On yet another level, she saw those walls on the day they were built, the girder supports again bare, but strong, unbent, new, the yard strewn with scaffolding and wheelbarrows and stacks and stacks of construction materials, girders and concrete and wooden beams.

On none of those levels did she see any people besides Mike. She clutched at his arm; he was looking at her, mouth moving, trying to talk to her. His voice was faint, as though reaching her from a great distance.

“… ou okay?” he was saying. She shook her head and snapped out of it; her vision cleared, and the pins and needles faded from her body.

“I … yeah, I think I’m okay,” she said, while her mind raced. What is happening to me? she thought.

The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 6 (Complete)

CHAPTER SIX

“Jo, it sounds fantastic!” Sal exclaimed, setting a real china teacup on her living room table. “So much better than the mail room.” She said the last with a sly wink. Or had she? Jo sometimes had trouble reading Sal; it was hard to be sure with her sometimes.

“The mail room’s not that bad,” she settled for protesting. “The people are pretty cool. Quinn’s there, and the others seem decent enough.”

“But you don’t spend any time with them,” Sal said. Jo noticed a cab pulling into the drive outside; David, just arriving home, looking like he was yelling into his phone.

“Not much time to, so far at least. I’ve been too busy getting caught up on what the company’s doing. One of these days I’m going to have to pick David’s brain, when my own isn’t over-stuffed with all this—”

The door opened then, and David’s voice carried over. He was done shouting, if indeed he had actually been doing that, but he was still a bit heated. “Look, the bottom line is this project is costing a fortune, and now you tell me your initial success reports were wrong?” He paused for a response, nodding a greeting to them as he passed through. “No! You said brain-to-brain, not—…—yes, and that was how long ago?”

He climbed the stairs to the next floor, and the sound of a door closing muted his voice beyond hearing. “Sorry, Jo, he’s so busy lately,” Sal explained, sounding tired.

“I can understand a bit better now that I work for the same company, though actually, I’ve never seen him there.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “The company has several offices, he works out of a different one. It’s not far, though.”

Jo barely heard her. David’s one-sided conversation was intruding on her thoughts like a fly buzzing past an ear. She mentally swatted at it and returned her attention to her friend; she’d put her finger on why it had sounded so familiar later.

<> 

The following Monday marked the beginning of her second week, and that half-heard conversation still nagged at her. Not consciously; she didn’t keep herself awake thinking about it. But it poked at her from deep in her subconscious mind somewhere so that she only halfway noticed.

A series of strange events distracted her from the troubling thought over the course of the weekend, anyway. It started later that same Friday night, before the weekend had even properly begun.

She’d returned home after visiting Sal and noticed that they were running low on food again. She was about to signal a cab to head up to the store when she stopped herself, remembering the physical requirements of the job. “Aww, why not,” she told herself. Gran had been much better the last couple of days, and she wouldn’t be that long. “Gran, I’m going up to the store, I’ll be back shortly,” she called. A grunted response that sounded generally agreeable reached her from somewhere in the house. She checked her pockets for phone and fob and headed out.

It had been late enough that the sun had almost set. There was no rain, but a faint hint of ozone scent made her think a storm was coming soon. It took her a few minutes to realize that that hint of ozone was all she smelled; the air was uncannily clear, with no hint of the smog that usually clung to the area even out in old downtown Dolesham. It was like the air had never been dirtied. She envied the people who’d been able to breathe like this their whole lives.

She was just reaching the point where her regular path met with the path that led past the old ironworks when the ozone scent intensified greatly, and she felt a bit of a head-rush come over her. She stopped, shaking her head in a daze to clear it, and was startled out of her wits when someone nearly ran right into her.

He was average height, but her instant impression suggested he carried himself as though he was taller. His eyes were brown but sharp-looking, intense, observant, and his hair a little mussed, as though he didn’t give it enough thought. He was dressed—

Weird, she thought, mind still reeling from the head-rush. He was dressed like a cos-player or historical reenactor. He had a well-worn and somewhat scorched leather apron with a million pockets worn over a very out-dated suit, minus the jacket. White collared shirt, brown pants, boots, and all of it looking very two centuries ago. And then there were the goggles, an elaborate contraption of switches and too many lenses.

All of this detail slammed into her mind as she barely avoided slamming into him. He was in a hurry, rushing down the street in the opposite direction, back the way she’d come. There were others following behind, all dressed in ways just as out of date, though none with quite the mad inventor look to them.

He barely registered her; in fact, she’d almost have sworn he didn’t see her at all, except to jerk and move at the last second as they were about to collide. He carried on running, looking about as though looking for someone.

“Ann! What happened? Did you see? Were you here?” he called out to the empty street. His voice was so faint she could have imagined it though, and when she blinked, he was gone.

The head-rush faded, and she’d stood gaping, wondering if she’d just seen that, or was just having really weird daydreams brought on by the new job.

The beginnings of a rumbling in her stomach brought her back to her task, and she walked on towards the store, keeping away from the old Ironworks path this time.

That had shaken her a bit, but left her more confused than anything. She’d gotten to the store just fine, collected her groceries, caught up with Fred, and had largely forgotten the whole thing. By then the rain had started again, and she’d left her umbrella at home. Just a light rain though, and of a low acidity. She’d hunched over a bit to try and keep it out of the grocery bag. “If I can’t handle this, I’ll be hopeless at the job,” she told herself.

There was little light left by this point. The sun had long since set, and the last haze of light was leaving the cloud cover overhead a dark, damp gray. The wind began to pick up, whipping her longish hair into her face, wet strands clinging to her forehead and cheeks. There were no cars on the road, but a sound approached, a rhythmic clopping she was unfamiliar with. It rang a dim bell in her memory; a sound out of a movie or something, maybe. The air smelled of ozone; there was no hint of thunder or lightning in the sky.

She was struggling with her hair and the bag in her hand as the sound approached from behind; she labored to turn. The sound was practically on top of her. She’d never seen a horse in person before, but now two were bearing down on her, carrying dark-cloaked riders. The same head-rush feeling she’d experienced earlier settled over her again.

The figure just about to run her down looked like the same man she’d seen before, but subtly different. Larger, more filled out, a few years older maybe. Definitely more grim-faced and tired looking. He was dressed for travel, his outfit from earlier gone. He looked like he’d been on the road for days, and had been injured.

His companion was a woman, though not one of the figures she’d glimpsed earlier, she thought. Dark hair, maybe black. Very pale skin, and vivid green eyes.

I shouldn’t be able to see this much detail, she thought; it was far too dark. She couldn’t even make out the color of her own skin.

She tried to execute a leap out of the way, but she was too burdened. The grocery bag anchored her by one arm, and the head-rush feeling anchored her head. She managed a jerking lurch that was aided unexpectedly, and unhelpfully, by the shoulder of the horse thundering past her; it slammed into her and threw her in the direction she’d been trying to go. Pain exploded through her arm, though in her dizzy state she barely noticed.

She staggered to her feet as the horses thundered past, and she ran awkwardly after them. The the woman looked back at her, eyes wide. Jo staggered her way into a run after them. Her head began to clear, the head-rush receding, the ozone scent fading, and just as before, the strange figures had vanished.

“Hey! This is a serious story!” she snapped as Quinn glanced at his messages.

“Sorry Jo, but you do know how weird it sounds, right?”

They were at lunch at the Capital, sitting in a relatively quiet corner of the place. “Of course it sounds weird. That’s why I’m telling you,” she huffed. “Twice. In one night!”

“Has it happened again since?”

“No, thankfully. Just on Friday.”

“So who are they?”

“Who? The people I saw?”

“Yeah, you said you saw the one guy twice, right? Same one, only maybe older the second time? So who do you think they are?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t recognize them.”

“My money’s on some sort of renaissance faire event or something.”

“Do people even do that sort of stuff anymore?” She frowned. “Not that it matters. They disappeared, Quinn.”

“Well, you did make it sound like they were in kind of a hurry both times. You probably just didn’t see where they went.”

She cocked her head, suddenly wondering. “That’s … true. Maybe. I don’t think so. But … maybe you’re right.”

For the rest of her second week she tried her best to set the unusual events to the back of her mind and focus on getting the hang of the job. True to what she’d been told, she was introduced to field work quickly.

Her training partner was Mike. She was careful to keep disapproval off her face when they were finally introduced face-to-face; she didn’t know for sure that he had brushed her off, after all.

He was a little shorter than she’d expected. Something in his voice had given her the impression of a taller man. He was maybe half an inch taller than Quinn, which put him a couple of inches taller than she herself was. He kept in shape though, which counted for something, and if he had a problem with her, he was a good enough actor to keep it hidden; he was pleasant and professional through their first briefing.

Dunn briefed them, and he was as brusque as he had been the last time she saw him. “You’re going to the Haldstad building,” he instructed them. “Mike, you take the lead. Jo, you learn from him. I have no doubt you’ll do fine; you’ve absorbed practically all of the archives so far, from what I’ve seen.”

“Any special instructions?” Mike asked.

“Yes. The Haldstad is an historic building. It was rebuilt once after a serious fire destroyed most of the first floor, and severely damaged the second. We haven’t been able to determine the state that the basement is in; make a direct inspection of it a priority.”

“Is there anything specific we’re looking at down there?” Jo chimed in.

Dunn raised an eyebrow with a hint of a smile. “Yes. You don’t need to know the specifics, but the building is of immense historical value. The more intact the basement is, the better. Because of the fire and the reconstruction, the basement is the section of the building most likely to preserve details of what it was like back in those days.”

She nodded uncertainly. The heritage value of the place would make the acquisition more difficult; it would add untold levels of red tape to the process of buying the building and doing anything with it, especially if their plans involved tearing it down for whatever reason.

Dunn noticed her uncertainty. “What we’re after is your evaluation of the property and how well preserved it looks, and that information will be used to guide further decisions on whether to go ahead with the acquisition.”

Ahhh, they so maybe then they want to ensure they’re not trying to bite off more than they can chew. That was starting to make more sense to her.

The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 5 (Complete)

​CHAPTER FIVE

The next day, Jo got the call she’d been waiting for, and spent the rest of the day celebrating her new-found employment. Celebrating in this case meant doing some proper shopping for real groceries; even the return of the rains couldn’t dampen her spirits.

She was to start work the next week, and she wasted no time making sure she was prepared with all the right wardrobe items for her first day. She spent a lot of time badgering Quinn to make sure he was ready as well; he’d been hired for the original position, apparently along with several other new employees. He didn’t really need to be pestered to get ready, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself; it was good for him, she was sure.

Finally, the big day arrived. The leaky gray skies and relatively drab mail room did nothing to lessen her enthusiasm; real food could do a lot for your mood, she realized.

Dunn was her reporting manager, it turned out. He was much more dour than he had been the previous week, but then, it was Monday. There were three other people in her group, and a half dozen in Quinn’s, plus him and two new additions. Quinn’s group was the more traditional ‘mail room’ type staff; her group, in contrast, were the site inspectors.

She found it strange that there were so many site inspectors, but when she asked Mike, the most senior of them, he explained, “We’re actually a bit understaffed. The trading volume the company does is pretty huge, and with only a small handful of us, it can be hard to keep up with everything. We’re glad to have you on board!”

“Thanks, it’s good to be here. What am I going to be doing first?”

“We’ll want to get you out in the field as soon as possible, but it’s important that you get to know things around here for a while. You’ll spend this first week working in our archives, getting a sense for what holdings we have, the sorts of things we look for in our investments, the types of issues we flag and so on and so forth. Next week we get you out in the field.”

“That fast, huh?” She was startled.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be with one of us at first. We move quickly, but we don’t move that quickly with first-timers.”

Dunn may have turned off the charm, but at least he wasn’t kidding around. The next several days were a blur of archived records in more databases than Jo could count. She lost count of the number of trips she made down to the actual physical archives, where decades of backup media waited for the day they were needed. There were even a few painted metal storage units that she hesitantly identified as physical file cabinets, though she’d never seen one outside of the movies or vids.

She found her attention continually drawn back to them. She’d always had a sort of casual fascination with the past; that was how she’d gotten into climbing, in fact. As a teen she’d been fascinated by the phenomenon of urbex, or urban exploration. There’d been a group of other kids she’d known who’d been into that, always boasting of their exploits in various abandoned, decaying buildings, subway tunnels, storm drains, you name it.

She was sure to this day that they’d been exaggerating, but she’d done a few tentative explorations of her own, including a few close calls that prompted her to learn proper climbing techniques.

She’d been given a list of files she needed to study in particular, so she hadn’t given in to her curiosity about the old file cabinets, at least not yet. She had been told to become familiar with the whole system, and she had to assume they were part of the system, so she fully intended to check them out as soon as she had a little spare time.

The files she was studying were nothing terribly interesting at first glance. Most of them were fairly standard acquisitions of companies, land, buildings, even utilities. Early on the morning of her third day, she came across a collection of files marked “Experimental” that caught her eye.

“What could possibly be experimental at a company like this?” she asked Quinn at lunch that day. They’d gone out to a burger joint a little way down the street to get away from the rush and change their scene.

“Oh all kinds of things. New experimental envelope glue, for instance, or experimental methods for improving the coffee.” That last was a touch wistful; they did get free coffee, but it was the wateriest sludge she’d ever tasted. She wouldn’t drink it, herself; she had taken to having her morning cab stop off at the Capital for her morning cup. That kept her going till she could go somewhere at lunch.

“We can hope, I guess,” she said agreeably.

“Well, you’re the one with access to the files. Why not take a peek? You’re going to be working with that stuff, you might as well know about it, right?”

“I suppose ...” She’d hesitated to open them when she found them, despite her curiosity. They’d looked somehow like they should be secret, which she supposed now was silly. “Okay. I’ll check into them after lunch.”

Jo was as good as her word; she steeled her resolve with her determination to do her job properly. Once she’d squared away what she’d been working on before, she dug into the odd-looking files.

At least, she’d thought they were odd-looking. The reality was just utterly bewildering. “Mike,” she said, after puzzling over the files for a while, “I can see the point to most of the files I’ve been looking over. Businesses, land deals, all the usual. But why do we have experimental files on contracted quantum physics reports? And how are they experimental?” He wasn’t anywhere near her physically, but their phones would allow them to talk as if they were right next to each other automatically.

“Beats me,” he said. “The company was into some weird stuff years ago, maybe it’s from then. There a date on ‘em?”

She frowned and scrolled around. “About 5 years ago.”

“Huh. I was around then, still pretty green, but I don’t remember any quantum physics projects. Someone was probably just working a deal on a lab setup or something, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

“Oooh-kay,” she said slowly. She wasn’t sure she bought that, but she didn’t have any real reason to question it, either. He’d sounded a bit like he was giving her the brush-off. “Thanks, Mike. Sorry to bother you.” He grunted, either in acknowledgment or as a goodbye, she wasn’t sure which.

She was tempted to let Quinn know what she’d found out, but decided it was better to leave it till after work. She went over the rest of the files she found in as much detail as she could stand. It was heavy stuff; there were at least a dozen sizable studies by several different groups and labs that all seemed to center around the ‘quantum entanglement potential of active dilectrite and related materials’ or something worded similarly. The studies were exhaustive, at least to her inexpert eyes.

“I am seriously going to need to climb again after reading all this,” she told herself.

Meet up after work? We need to catch up.

Less than a minute after sending the message, a response appeared on her phone.

Sure thing.

A few seconds later,

Been meaning to invite you anyway.

She blinked and smiled. Odd, she thought; Q-ball never hesitated like that. Something must be up.

She finished up the remainder of the day with regular work to get her head out of the scientific findings she’d been pouring into her brain; it’d come close to giving her a headache. She was as interested in learning as the next girl, more so than most people, she’d bet, but why couldn’t science ever be written plain?

When she got home later that evening, Gran was climbing the walls, almost literally. “Where is it,” he kept mumbling, running shaking hands over the walls of the living room as though feeling for something he couldn’t see. “Where is it, where are they?”

Jo had been feeling pretty good, having caught Quinn up on her bewildering discovery. They’d run down all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories together over cappuccino at the Capital. Her good mood and slight caffeine buzz fled her as concern stole over her. “Gran? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, except I—I can’t find my book,” he groused. His hands did look like they were feeling the spines of books in a bookcase, but Jo had never had a bookcase. She’d never owned physical books. Gran hadn’t either, not since before even the pre-war days.

“Your reader, Gran,” she said gently. “Remember? All your books are in your reader.”

“Yes, I’ll read ‘er when I find it,” he grumbled. “Blast, where did I put it?”

She sighed. “What book are you looking for, Gran?”

“My—my history text. Got a test coming up, haven’t ... haven’t studied yet.”

“Gran ...” She wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. He hadn’t been in school since long before she was alive; before even her parents had been alive. She bit her lip.

For the rest of the week, she was doubly thankful for the prospect of real paycheques. Gran’s memory was worse than it had been in months, and she was worried enough that she had to hire someone to come in and check on him periodically through the day; she’d have preferred a continual presence, but the new job wasn’t paying quite that well.

She wasn’t able to go out for coffee with Quinn after work either, and her lunches were spent cabbing home and back to the office again. She did her best not to let her worry interfere with work, and by Friday her knowledge of the company’s history was pretty advanced for a newbie.

Finally the weekend came around, and Jo got up Saturday to find Gran looking a bit drawn and tired-looking, but he seemed to have his faculties about him. She kept to the house to keep an eye on him, but by evening, he seemed to have regained his strength.

She employed a series of subtle tests that she’d come up with over the last couple of years to determine just how well he’d recovered. She’d bring up events that had never happened in conversation to see if he caught them; he invariably did when he was himself. She found him reading a news post on his reader around mid-day; the headline of the story proclaimed “New Generation Brain-Machine Interface Enables True Telepathy.” She made a mental note and quizzed him later in the day after reading the same piece herself.

He passed each test with flying colors, setting her mind slightly at ease. Usually these episodes would pass and not return for at least a couple of months, at least not as badly. Gran was nearing 85 though, and the incidents were becoming more frequent.

“I’m fine, Jo,” he said in exasperation as she started yet another test while preparing dinner. “Enough with the 20 questions.”

“That’s what you said the last 5 times,” she smirked.

“That’s—wha—I did not!”

She grinned. “Sorry, Gran. I just worry.”

“Worry less, cook more.”

“Spoilsport.”

The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 4 (Complete)

CHAPTER FOUR

A week later she and Quinn arrived a little early for their first day on the job. The Westall Holdings office reception was well appointed, with a large front desk staffed by a professional-looking young man dressed business casual. They’d been given instructions to dress similarly; seemed to be the culture at this place. David usually wore a suit, Jo knew, but he was much farther up the company ladder than they were.

The young man acknowledged them with a nod as they entered, and with another, directed them to a couch that looked like it had been bought for appearance rather than comfort. Sitting in it confirmed that impression; she hoped they wouldn’t have to use it too long.

The rest of the place looked similar; everything seemed designed to look good at a glance, but didn’t invite you to stay for long. She found herself on the edge of her seat, partly out of a subconscious desire to get moving, and partly because it was actually more comfortable than trying to relax in it would be.

A little more than five minutes later, the young man apparently received a signal. “Quintrell Hickson? If you’ll come this way, sir.” Quinn looked at her in surprise; they’d been under the impression they’d been hired to do the same type of work. “Josie Rush? Your contact is on his way down to greet you,” he continued while Quinn got himself up off the chair to go.

“I’ll catch up with you in a bit then, I guess,” Jo said to Quinn when he looked back.

“Sure thing! Try not to climb the walls,” he called back as they vanished out a door to the interior of the building.

Jo waited less than two minutes before her contact arrived to collect her. He was tall and sharp dressed; sharp-featured, too, she noticed, though he seemed pleased to see her and gave off a generally warm and friendly sort of feeling. “You must be David’s friend!” he started off. “I’m Gerrold Dunn. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jo. I’ve been hearing a lot about you,” he said, giving her an appraising look.

“Nothing too terrible, I hope?” she offered. The look wasn’t surprising; she wasn’t unattractive. She got the feeling, though, that he was sizing her up rather than checking her out.

“No, certainly not,” he said with a smile. “In fact, quite the opposite. You’ve had quite a career these last few years, and an impressive suite of hobbies, too. Your reputation as a climber precedes you. We can use someone with your talents, Jo, if you think you’re up for the challenge. I’m here to walk you through our proposal.”

“It’s not the mail room, I take it?” She tried to hide her surprise, probably not well enough. He smiled.

“Actually it is, more or less. ‘Mail room’ is such an antiquated term, don’t you think? Yes, we still do move physical pieces of mail around, though we don’t do that much of it. We use the term loosely here.”

“Okay, I’ll bite—how do you use it?”

“It serves a variety of purposes, from pickups and deliveries, as you’d expect, up to serving as a sort of in-house investigation branch.”

“Like spies?” Her eyebrows rose sharply, but she smiled.

“Nothing so dramatic, I’m afraid,” he grinned. “We deal mostly in property holdings, so our investigations are usually site inspections and trips to the public archives to fact-check and dig into details. We go out, we get information, we deliver it back to home base.”

She nodded. Made sense, sort of. “Okay. Doesn’t sound like something you need to be seriously athletic for, though.”

“True, for the most part. Most of our staff are average in that respect. It can come in handy for the on-site inspections of older buildings though, and we do have some projects coming up that would benefit from a representative who knows the ropes, so to speak.”

“Hadn’t thought about it that way before, but it makes sense,” she said, considering. Dunn stopped by a door stood slightly open, leading to what looked like a small interview room.

“Here we are,” he said, opening the door for her.

The interview was a relatively quick twenty minutes or so, covering all the usual job interview stuff. After the initial interesting and unusual conversation, it was a breeze, and she walked out of the place with a bit of a spring in her step, confident that things had gone well.

She waited around for a few minutes but didn’t see Quinn anywhere. The young man at the reception desk hadn’t seen him either when she asked. She considered sending a message for a second, but dismissed the thought; if he was still talking, it could throw him off. Instead, she signaled for a cab.

She’d been en route for no more than five minutes when her phone buzzed her.

Sorry I missed you, just got out. Went well. How ‘bout yours?

Went great! Glad yours did too.

Capital Cappuccino again?

Sounds good, could use one. Rerouting; see you there in a few.​