---
Elpenor was asleep on his back with one arm flung over his face and one long leg hanging off the end of the bed, and Outis stood in the doorway of 004 and looked at him for a long moment before he said anything.
He was breathing. Slow and even and a little bit snoring. His tie was on the floor. His dad's pencil was on the shelf beside the paper cup, which was empty.
"Elpenor," Outis said quietly. "Hey. Wake up."
Elpenor didn't move.
Outis crossed the room, crouched beside the bed, and put a hand on his shoulder. It was warm.
"Hey," he said again. "It's day six."
Elpenor's arm slid off his face. One heavy-lidded eye opened, looked at Outis, and blinked.
"...Oh," he said. "Hi. You're in my room."
"There might be cake," said Outis.
The eye opened a little wider. "Is there?"
"Probably not."
"Mm." Elpenor considered this, then sat up, slowly, like a building being raised by a crane. He looked around for his tie, found it, and stared at it. Then he looked at Outis. "Are you okay? You look like you've been awake for a really long time."
Outis picked up the pencil off the shelf and held it out to him.
"Don't forget this," he said.
Elpenor took it, blinking, and tucked it into his breast pocket, and for some reason that was the thing that nearly undid Outis completely. He stood up fast and turned toward the door before his face could do anything.
In the corridor, Polites was standing outside 002 with his mouth open, mid-sentence, his hand raised to knock on a door that was already open.
"You woke him up?" Polites said, scandalized. "That's my job! I was going to tell him about the cake!"
"Tell him on the way," said Outis.
Eurylochus, by his door, said nothing at all. But Outis felt those narrow dark eyes on his back all the way to the elevator.
. . .
It was the third time, and he was ready for every word of it.
Malkuth was six minutes late. Angela said what she said. Happy Teddy Bear got its name. Yesod said "Twenty." James got off on the wrong floor and taught them word chain, and when it came around to Outis, he said "Rope," and James said "Eel," and Outis closed his eyes for one second and let himself have it.
Then he got to work.
He counted. He'd started the moment the first order came down. Every name called, every door opened. Polites, skull, one. Eurylochus, fairies, two. He knew the number he was aiming for now. He knew it would tip over around a quarter to two if he made the same changes, so he made the same changes, exactly, one after another, like laying down bricks.
"Employee 004, Attachment work on Happy Teddy Bear!"
"Ma'am, could he do the fairies instead? I don't think he's awake enough for a hug yet."
"Oh! Let me ask. The Manager says that's fine!"
Scorched Girl before lunch, the mop and the bucket and the nods, I see you, I'm here, until her light steadied. Polites close, on the bench, in the hallway. "You're kind of clingy today. Like Teddy."
Not just Polites, he reminded himself. Everyone.
So he watched Elpenor too. Every time Elpenor stood up, Outis knew where he was going. Every time he lay down, Outis knew where he was lying. When he drifted toward the supply cupboard, Outis drifted after him and sat down outside it with his back against the wall, and when Elpenor came out an hour later, rubbing his eyes, Outis was still there.
"Were you guarding me?" Elpenor asked, puzzled.
"I was sitting," said Outis.
"Outside the cupboard."
"It's a good wall."
Elpenor looked at the wall. Then at Outis. Then he sat down next to him, folding his long legs up, and leaned his head back against the tile.
"It is a good wall," he agreed, and fell asleep again with his head on Outis's shoulder.
Outis didn't move until the next order came.
He watched Eurylochus, too. He watched the way Eurylochus touched his baton every time he passed a doorway, and the way his eyes went to Outis whenever Outis moved. He watched Polites wave at clerks. He listened to the speakers, every one of them, for every voice.
At twenty minutes to two, he stood up.
---
The Manager watched the monitors.
There were a great many of them. They curved around the room in a wide, dim arc, and each one showed a different piece of the facility: hallways, containment units, the Main Rooms of two departments, the elevator shafts between them. On every screen, the employees moved like small, simple figures. Round heads. Neat little suits. Faces drawn in a few clean lines.
He knew it was a filter. Angela had explained it, a long time ago, or what felt like a long time ago. The facility did not look like this. The people in it did not look like this. If he saw it as it truly was, she'd said, he would not be able to do his job.
He had stopped arguing with her about it. Some days he was grateful.
It was 1:41 in the afternoon on Day 6, and he had lived this hour twice before.
He remembered both. He remembered the first one: the orange light filling the corridor on the Control floor, Employee 002 walking into the supply room with Scorched Girl following him, and the screen going white. He remembered the second one, too. He remembered relaxing. That was the part he remembered most. He remembered leaning back in his chair after the Ordeal was cleared, after everyone was safe, and thinking, good, that's done, and reaching for the next order without looking at the log.
Employee 004. Happy Teddy Bear. Again.
He had watched it happen on the screen in front of him. Even through the filter, even with the small, simple figures and their small, simple faces, he had watched the bear's arms close and not open.
And then he had felt it.
He had been staring at the screen. At the long, thin shape on the floor of the bear's room, at the little pencil lying beside its hand. And he had felt a weight settle on him, heavy and deep and still, like someone standing behind his chair. Like being looked at.
He knew what it was. He'd felt it before, over other screens, over other names. It was what happened when you made a mistake that someone else paid for. It was guilt, and it had sat with him in the dark of the control room until he reached for the reset, and it was sitting with him now.
Not again, he thought. Not that one. Not ever again.
He looked at the work log. He'd looked at it a dozen times already today. Employee 004 had not worked Happy Teddy Bear yet. Employee 001 had asked, again, that 004 be sent to the fairies that morning instead of the bear, and he had said yes, again, because it was a sensible request and because 001's requests had been sensible all week.
He looked at Employee 001's figure on the Control floor monitor.
Small. Simple. A round head, a neat suit, a red band on one arm. It was standing up from the bench, and its head was turned toward the hallway, as if listening for something.
The Manager hadn't given an order yet.
He watched the little figure walk to the edge of the Main Room and stop, and wait. Patient. Ready.
He has good instincts, the Manager thought. Some of them do.
He'd noticed it all week. Employee 001 was always a step ahead of the schedule. Asking for the right reassignment. Volunteering for the difficult one before lunch. Waking the new employee before anyone else could. The kind of agent who looked at a room and saw what was wrong with it before anyone told him. The Manager had seen agents like that before, here and there, over a very long time. They didn't last, usually. But while they did, they made everything easier.
You make things easier, he'd told Malkuth to tell him, on Day 3. He'd meant it.
At 1:44, the Qliphoth Meltdown gauge on his central monitor filled, and the alarms began.
. . .
He gave the orders faster this time.
"Employee 003, the clown. Run."
He didn't need to say run. On the Control floor monitor, Employee 003 was already running. Employee 001 had turned to him, said something short, and 003 had gone, sprinting down the hall toward the giggling little figure skipping toward Scorched Girl's door.
"Employee 002, One Sin. Employee 004, Happy Teddy Bear."
That one he gave with his jaw tight. It was the meltdown. Someone had to go in within sixty seconds, and 004 was closest, and it would be his first work on the bear today. One is fine, he told himself. One is fine. It's the second one that...
He made a note on the log. A real one, in his own hand, in the margin beside 004's name. Not again today.
"Employee 001, the Information floor."
Employee 001 was already in the elevator.
The Manager watched the doors close on the small figure with the red armband, and felt something in his chest that was not quite a smile.
. . .
Angela watched the Manager watch the monitors.
She did not need monitors herself. She was the facility, in every way that mattered: every camera, every speaker, every door, every sensor in every hallway. She saw the corridor on the Control floor and the corridor on the Information floor and the control room and the Manager in his chair, all at once, the way a person sees with both eyes. She saw it all very, very slowly.
To her, the alarm that had just begun was not a sound. It was a long, rising tide. To her, the clown's giggle was a single note held for an age. She had a great deal of time to think between one second and the next.
She had a great deal of time to think about Day 6.
She had watched it three times now. That was, in itself, unremarkable. She had watched many days many times. She remembered every one of them. That was what she was for.
What she did not remember was ever having watched a day like this one.
The Manager was improving. That was expected. That was, in fact, the entire point. The Manager reset the day, and the Manager remembered, and the Manager did better. His orders this time were faster, tighter, more careful. He had made a note in the margin of the work log beside Employee 004's name, which he had not done in either previous iteration. Not again today. She had read it the moment the pen touched the paper. That was all as it should be. That was the shape of every loop she had ever seen.
But.
She turned her attention, slowly, to the small figure in the Information floor's corridor. To Employee 001.
In the first iteration of Day 6, Employee 001 had sat on the bench in the Main Room until the Ordeal began. He had taken his baton out when Malkuth told him to. He had gone down to the Information floor when the Manager ordered it, and he had fought the clown there clumsily, with James, and pulled James back from the explosion at the last possible moment.
In the second iteration, he had told the others about their batons before Malkuth spoke. He had told Employee 003 to run before the Manager gave any order regarding 003 at all. He had been inside the elevator before the order to go to the Information floor was finished. He had killed the clown in a single blow.
In this iteration, he had woken Employee 004 himself, before Employee 002 could begin. He had sat outside the supply cupboard for an hour. He had stood up at 1:40, four minutes before the gauge filled, and walked to the edge of the Main Room and waited.
None of this had been ordered.
None of this had happened the first time.
The Manager's improvements always began with the Manager. A different order. A faster order. A better order. Then the employees followed, and the day bent around them.
Today, the day was bending around something before the Manager touched it.
Angela held that thought very still, for a long time, the way she held everything.
It could be the Manager. It was possible that the Manager had changed something, early, before her attention was on it. Some small adjustment to the morning that had rippled outward. It was possible.
Or it could be the employee.
But an employee could not remember a reset. No one remembered a reset. No one but the Manager, who chose it. And her.
Only me, she thought. Only ever me.
On the Information floor, Employee 001 swung his baton, once, and the clown folded sideways, and he was already pulling James to the floor before it hit the tile.
Angela watched it happen, very slowly.
Then she filed it away, the way she filed everything. With care. In a place she would be able to find again.
Employee 001, she noted. Unusual.
And, after a pause that, for her, lasted a very long time:
Watch him.
---
Outis came up out of the elevator at a run, and the hallway was not full of orange light.
Eurylochus was sitting against the wall outside Scorched Girl's door with a long red burn up one forearm, breathing hard. The scorched black star of the clown was on the tiles beside him. And through her window, the burned girl stood in the center of her room, where she belonged.
"Scorched Girl's counter is holding!" Malkuth was saying. "He ran! Employee 003 ran!"
"You ran," said Outis, crouching beside him.
"You told me to run." Eurylochus's face was gray, but his eyes were steady. "I don't know how you..."
He stopped. He looked at Outis's face, for a long moment, very closely.
Then, quietly: "You look like you've done this before."
Outis didn't answer.
Eurylochus held his gaze a moment longer, and then nodded, slightly, the way he'd nodded before. An answer I can live with for now. He looked away.
The skull's door opened, and Polites came out, blinking, pink around the eyes, and saw them and lit up. "Hey! You're back! Did you help James?"
Outis didn't let himself feel it yet. Not yet.
"Where's Elpenor?" he said.
"He did the bear! For the meltdown! Malkuth said he came out and fell asleep on the bench immediately, it's..."
Outis was already walking toward the Main Room.
Elpenor was there. Stretched across the bench with his long legs dangling off the end, his tie undone, brown fuzz all over his suit, his dad's pencil sticking up out of his breast pocket. Asleep. Breathing.
Outis stood over him and counted.
One. He's done it once.
He didn't sit down.
. . .
The afternoon went quiet. Malkuth announced the Ordeal cleared. Yesod said "Acceptable work, Malkuth," and Malkuth glowed. Polites found the first-aid kit and bandaged Eurylochus's already-healed arm, wrist to elbow, tongue between his teeth, and Eurylochus let him, and said that it was a very stupid way to think about medicine, and Polites said yep.
A little later, the elevator dinged, and James stuck his head out, freckled and rumpled, with a fresh scorch mark on one sleeve.
"Wrong floor," he announced. "On purpose this time. Just wanted to say thanks, Control. For earlier." He nodded at Outis. "You hit that thing like a truck. I'm going to have nightmares. Good ones. Grateful ones." He paused. "Also, did anybody win the word chain?"
"Eel won," said Outis.
James grinned. "Eel always wins."
"James," said the speaker in the ceiling, precise and cold.
"Going, sir." James raised a hand to them as the doors slid shut. "Five points. Worth it."
Outis watched the doors close and found that he was smiling, just a little, and that it didn't hurt.
Then he sat down at the end of the bench with his eyes open.
He didn't close them. Not once. He sat with his hands loose on his knees and his eyes on the speaker in the ceiling, and he waited. He knew exactly when it had come last time. The light. The quiet. Everyone breathing out. The voice.
He waited for it.
When the moment came, he was already on his feet.
"Ma'am," he said, before the speaker could make a sound. "The bear. Can I take the next one? Elpenor already did it once today. It shouldn't be him twice."
There was a pause from the speaker. A short one.
"Oh!" said Malkuth. And then, a moment later, in a slightly puzzled voice: "The Manager says... he already had you down for it. Employee 001, Attachment work on Happy Teddy Bear! He says, um. He says 'good catch.'"
Outis stood very still.
He looked up at the speaker. And for a second, just a second, he thought he felt it again: that weight, that deep, still stare. But it wasn't the same. It wasn't heavy this time. It was something else. Something closer to the feeling of someone on the other side of the glass nodding back.
He learned too, Outis thought. He remembered, and he learned.
He thought about the other version of this day. The window. The pencil on the white floor. The weight that had come through the speaker while he stood there with his palm against the glass, heavy and still, like someone who had stopped breathing.
He'd been so angry. You sent him in twice. He still was, a little, somewhere deep down.
But whoever was on the other side of that speaker had watched Elpenor die too. Had carried it out of that day and into this one, the same as Outis had, and had sat with it, and had done something about it before Outis even asked. That wasn't someone careless. That wasn't someone who didn't care.
That was someone who'd made a mistake, and refused to make it twice.
Outis knew a little about that.
[ He doesn't leave anyone behind. ]
"No," Outis said quietly. "He doesn't."
He went down the hall to the bear's room. He went in. The bear tilted its head at him, its one button eye catching the light, and opened its arms, and Outis sat down in front of it and let it hug him, the big soft careful hug that smelled like an old closet, and he hugged it back.
It held on for one second too long. He felt it. He'd always felt it.
Then it let him go.
. . .
One of the last orders of the day was for him.
"Employee 001, Attachment work on One Sin!"
He went down the hall to the skull's door, past the fairies' blue window and the bear's quiet one and the low, steady orange of Scorched Girl's, and went in, and sat down on the floor with his back against the wall the way he had on the very first day.
The skull hung where it always hung, pale and crowned in thorns, its empty sockets turned toward him.
He didn't confess anything. He'd thought he might. There was plenty he could have said.
He thought, instead, about his name.
He'd looked it up once, years ago, in the library after closing, because strangers kept saying he had a face from a game. Outis. Nobody. The name a clever man named Odysseus had given a monster, so he could get himself and his men out of a cave alive. He'd skimmed the rest of the story that night, half-asleep at a library computer: the long war, the long way home, the crew lost one by one. And at the end of it, waiting all those years, an island called Ithaca, and a wife called Penelope, and a home.
Odysseus had something to go back to. That was the whole point of him.
Outis didn't.
There was no Ithaca where he'd come from. No one waiting. A rented room, a car with a name nobody knew, a diploma buckled into a passenger seat beside nothing. If there was a home anywhere for him to fight his way back to, he'd never found it.
But there was this.
A gray building full of humming lights and terrible things. A boss who was late a minute more every day and wrote everything down so it would last forever. A man who checked every exit and had run when Outis told him to. A kid who fell asleep in cupboards and carried his dad's pencil. A boy who said hello first, to everything, and who had walked into a fire so that nobody else would have to.
His team. His crew.
It wasn't Ithaca. It was all he had.
When he opened his mouth, what came out was something else.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "For listening. All three times."
The skull didn't answer. It never did.
But the room settled around him, the way it always did, quiet and patient and gentle, like a hand resting on the back of his chair. The small glowing cubes drifted up toward the vent, slow and steady. The cool draft found its way into his chest and moved something there, just a little, just enough.
He sat with it until the work was done.
When he stood up, something was different.
It was so light he almost didn't notice it. A faint pressure around his head, like the brush of fingertips, settling just above his brow and staying there. He reached up and touched it. Under his fingers were branches. Two or three of them, rough and dry like old bark, twisted over and across each other into a band that circled his head. Thorns jutted from them every few centimeters, thick at the base and sharp at the tip. They pricked without quite hurting. In the dark glass of the window he could just make out the color, a deep rust-red, almost brown, like dried blood. The whole thing weighed almost nothing at all.
A crown of thorns. The same dark, tangled kind the skull wore. Just smaller. Just for him.
A pale blue window opened in the corner of his vision, a little more formal than usual, with a thin border around its edges.
[ E.G.O. GIFT ACQUIRED ]
[ Penitence ]
[ Slightly increases mental resilience. Slightly improves work with One Sin and Hundreds of Good Deeds. ]
[ Logged. :) ]
Outis stood there with his fingertips resting on the thorns and looked up at the skull for a long moment.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
The skull didn't answer. But the cool, quiet weight in the room lingered a moment longer than usual, the way a hand stays on your shoulder after the person has already said goodbye.
At the door he turned and nodded to it, the way he had since Day 1.
He could have sworn the empty sockets followed him out.
. . .
At the end of Day 6, after Angela had told the Manager the energy quota was met, they gathered in the Main Room one last time, and Polites noticed first.
Of course he did.
"Outis." He was halfway across the room already, eyes wide. "Outis, what's on your head?"
Outis had forgotten. He reached up, and there it was, the light pressure of the thorns.
"Oh," he said. "That's... One Sin. I think it gave it to me."
"The skull gave you a crown?" Polites circled him once, then again, leaning in close without touching. "It looks just like its own! Elpenor, look, it matches!"
Elpenor lifted his head off his arms long enough to squint. "Huh," he said. "Cool." His head went back down. Then, muffled, into his sleeve: "You sat with it every day. I saw you."
Eurylochus didn't come over. He stayed where he was on the bench, his bandaged arm across his knees, and looked at the crown for a long moment the way he looked at exits and doors and anything else he was trying to work out.
"Makes sense," he said finally.
Outis blinked. "What does?"
"That it'd be you." Eurylochus shrugged, as if it were obvious. "You woke the kid up this morning. You took the bear when nobody asked you to. You told me to run before anyone else knew there was anything to run from." He looked away, toward the door. "I ran. I'm still here. Figures something in this place would notice that."
It was the most Outis had ever heard him say at once. Polites seemed to think so too, because he turned and stared at Eurylochus with his mouth open, and Eurylochus said, "What," and Polites said, "Nothing! Nothing. You're right. He's right, Outis."
Outis didn't know what to do with his hands. He didn't know what to do with his face, either. Nobody had ever said anything like that to him before. Not at the orphanage, where being useful was just what you did to stay out of the way. Not at school. Not anywhere. He opened his mouth to say it was nothing, and found that he couldn't, quite.
"Thanks," he said instead. It came out smaller than he meant it to.
Something in his chest that had been clenched since the first buzzer of Day 6, three mornings ago by his count, loosened a little.
"Is that... Employee 001, is that an E.G.O. gift?" Malkuth was on the nearest screen, leaning so close to her side of it that she nearly filled it. "It is! Your first one! I'm writing that down!" The scratch of a pen. "'Employee 001. Penitence. Day 6.' There."
She told them all they'd been wonderful. Then she cleared her throat, a strange small sound from something that might not have a throat, and said:
"Oh, and one more thing. Employee 002, you mentioned this morning that a team should get cake after a week."
Polites sat bolt upright on the bench. "I did!"
"It's not a week yet. It's only six days." She flipped a page. "But I wrote it on my list. Under 'Day 7.' So."
"And..." She hesitated, then leaned in toward the screen, as if telling a secret. "The Manager says he's working on something else for all of you, too. For the whole team. But it's a surprise! I'm not allowed to write it down yet."
Polites made a sound like a kettle. Eurylochus put his good hand over his eyes. Elpenor, half-awake on the bench with his head on his arms, said, "Is there cake?" and Polites said, "Tomorrow," with so much joy that even the clerk passing by the doorway turned her head.
Outis laughed.
He didn't mean to. It came out of him all at once, cracked and loud and helpless, the way James had laughed on the floor of the Information hallway, and once it started he couldn't stop it. Polites stared at him. Then he started laughing too, because Polites always laughed when other people laughed. Then Elpenor, who didn't know what was funny but liked the sound. Even Eurylochus, behind his hand, made a noise that might have been a laugh.
Malkuth, on every screen, beamed.
"I'm putting this on my list too," she said. "'Team laughed.' There. Forever."
---
He waited until the wall was quiet.
He waited until Polites had knocked, and said goodnight, and said goodnight again, and stopped talking. Until he'd heard, faint through the tile, the slow, even breathing of someone actually asleep. Until the corridor outside had gone still, and the tiny red light in the corner of the ceiling was the only thing awake in the room.
Then he closed his eyes and let the white take him.
---
[ Outis. ]
He was sitting on the glowing floor of the System's space with his knees up and his arms wrapped around them, and he didn't remember sitting down.
[ They're all alive. ]
"I know."
[ All of them. Polites. Elpenor. Eurylochus. James. ]
"I know."
[ You did that. ]
He opened his mouth to say I know, and nothing came out.
What came out instead was a sound he hadn't made since he was six years old, standing in a common room watching a woman with a clipboard walk away. It came up from somewhere very deep, and it didn't ask permission, and once it started, it didn't stop.
He cried for Polites, walking into the supply room with the burned girl behind him, saying stick close. He cried for Elpenor, on the white floor, with the pencil rolling away from his fingers. He cried for the clerk in the lower hallway that Angela had toasted with champagne, whose name he would never know. He cried for three versions of the same day, two of which only he remembered, and for the fact that nobody, anywhere, would ever know they had happened. Nobody except the man behind the speaker, maybe, who had pressed the button that erased them, and who would never know that Outis remembered too.
The System didn't say anything.
But the window stayed open, glowing pale blue in the corner of his vision the whole time, and it didn't dim, and it didn't close, and it didn't leave.
When it was over, he sat there with his face wet and his chest aching and his breath coming slow and ragged, and looked up at the window.
"You promised you'd be here," he said hoarsely. "The whole time."
[ I was. ]
[ I always will be. ]
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
"Is it always going to be like this?" he said. "Watching them die and doing it over?"
The window took a long time to answer.
[ Sometimes. ]
[ Not every day. But sometimes. ]
[ This place is cruel. But the Manager won't leave anyone behind, and neither will you. And every time, you'll remember a little more, and you'll be a little stronger, and you'll get there a little sooner. ]
[ That's what this mission is for, Outis. ]
[ Learning how to keep people alive. ]
Outis was quiet for a long time.
Then he lay back on the warm, glowing floor and looked up at the place where a ceiling would be.
"Tomorrow there's cake," he said.
[ Tomorrow there's cake. :) ]
He closed his eyes.
For the first time since the buzzer had gone off on the morning of Day 6, three times over, he slept.