The Previous Custodian

I gave it four days. I had been given a week, and I have always believed in spending the first part of any deadline doing the thing the person across the desk least expects, which in Director Ha's case was nothing.

I mopped.

Not the Association lobby. I was not stupid. But the corner shop under my building had a sticky floor and a tired owner, and I'd swept it most mornings for two years for the price of a coffee, and I did it again, and I let the skill stay quiet in the back of my head like a tool put back in its drawer. I needed to think, and I think best with a mop, the way some men think best running.

Here was what I had. The system did not measure threat. It measured belonging. A Mire Hound out of a Gate was a foreign contaminant. A patch of Gate-native glassroot was not. The skill knew where a thing was supposed to be, and it removed the things that were in the wrong place, and the only definition of wrong place it seemed to use was: came through from somewhere else.

By that logic the monsters did not belong on Earth. Fine. Everyone agreed on that.

By that same logic, I kept arriving at a sentence I did not like.

By that same logic, the cleanest place in any Gate I had ever scrubbed was the patch of ground where a monster had just stood. Cleaner than the day it was poured. As if the skill, removing the thing that did not belong, also removed something older. As if dirt and belonging were, to the system, the same word, and the world itself was, very faintly, the wrong place to be.

I did not finish that thought. The phone rang first.

It was Haru.

"They audited us," she said, without hello. Her voice had the flat steadiness people get when they have already been frightened and have decided to be useful instead. "Greylight. The Hollow Stag report. Bureau came this morning, took our footage, took our statements, took the kid's recorder he forgot to mention he had. They know the story doesn't fit. They know a C-rank party didn't kill a B-rank core with a fist in it." A pause. "They didn't ask about you. Which is how I know they already have you. Nobody forgets to ask the obvious question unless they're saving it."

"Where are you now."

"Association HQ. Sub-three. They put us in a waiting room and forgot us, which is the part that scares me." Another pause, and under it, very faint, a sound I knew, because I had spent two years listening to that building breathe. A low harmonic. The hum the marble made when a Gate was forming somewhere it should not. "Yun. The lights just changed colour."

I was already moving.

HQ was eleven minutes by tram and I did it in nine on foot, which tells you something about the tram. By the time I came up the service stairs I had used a thousand times with a bucket in each hand, the lobby I had mopped for two years was full of the wrong light.

It was coming up through the floor.

Not against a wall, the way Gates open. Through the floor. Through the marble I had waxed on my knees, a breach the colour of a bruise spreading out from the centre of the seal inlaid in the stone, the Association crest, the one every new hunter photographed themselves standing on. The crest was the mouth of it. The breach was eating the building's own proud floor from the inside, and the response teams were screaming at civilians to clear, and nobody was going down, because going down meant going into the thing under your own headquarters.

The system pinged. Soft. Polite. Disappointed.

[Notice.]

[A Gate has opened in a place that does not contain Gate-native terrain.]

[Custodian, this is the wrong place for a Gate.]

[This is the wrong place for a great many things.]

Haru found me at the edge of the spreading dark. The braid had come loose again. She had her sword out and nowhere to point it.

"My party's still down there," she said. "Sub-three. The waiting room's gone. The floor took it." She looked at me, and I watched her decide not to say please, because she had said it once already today and a person only has so many. "They put us under your problem, Yun. Whatever you are. They sat us right on top of it and walked away."

Fishing, Director Ha had said. Somebody is fishing.

They had not baited a warehouse this time. They had baited the one Gate I would not be able to walk away from, in the one building I had cleaned for two years, with the one party that had agreed to keep my name off a report.

"Stay up here," I told Haru.

"Like hell."

"Stay up here and pull people out when they come up. Someone has to be at the top who knows what clean looks like." I rolled my sleeves. The dark was at my boots now, cool, almost soft, the way bad water is soft. "I'm going down to find your kid."

I stepped onto the breach where the crest had been, and the floor I had waxed a thousand times let me through like it had been waiting.

Down was wrong in the way the Bureau had warned me about, the resonance of the deepest rooms, the ones they lose teams in. It was not a forest this time. It was a corridor. My corridor. The Association service corridor, sub-three, exactly as I knew it, the same scuffed grey, the same dead fluorescent that had flickered for two years and that nobody had ever let me change, and it ran further than it should, the way a corridor runs in the kind of dream you have about a job you hated.

At the end of it was a janitor's closet.

I knew the closet. I had owned the closet, in the small way you own the things nobody else wants. Mop. Bucket on wheels. The shelf of grey supplies. The smell of floor polish and other people's futures.

The closet door was open, and the light was on, and there was a man inside, with his back to me, wringing out a mop into a bucket with the slow, practised, unhurried motion of someone who has done it ten thousand times.

He was wearing my uniform. The grey coveralls. The Association contractor patch. The name strip over the pocket that mine had never had, because they had never bothered to print me one.

His said a name. I could not read it from the doorway. I did not, suddenly, want to.

[Notice.]

[Custodian located.]

The system had never said that. It had only ever said I had been observed.

[Previous Custodian located.]

The man at the bucket spoke without turning round. His voice was tired and kind and faintly disappointed in me, and it was, exactly, note for note, the voice the system used in the back of my own head, the polite elevator, the one I had assumed was nobody's, the one I had assumed was just the way the system sounded.

"You took your time," he said. "I left the place in a state. Sorry about that. They never let us finish."

He turned around, and I read the name on his chest, and I understood at last what Rank Z had been a placeholder for, and why the crystal had not recognised me, and what, precisely, had been fishing.

The fluorescent flickered, once, the way it had flickered for two years while I mopped beneath it and never once looked up to wonder who had left it broken, or why, or for whom.