A/N: If anyone's out there: hail and well met! I know we're a bit off the beaten track with this one, both content- and category-wise. Thanks for reading! And, as always, don't be afraid to give a shout-out. Comments are always appreciated!
#####
#####
Budget cuts. The flight from Van Nuys, carrying twelve Timekeepers bound for exchange-training in Zone Eight, had but one pilot. But that wasn't where the problem lay: had Temporal Control budgeted fully for software updates in the transportation division, the jump-ship's co-pilot program would have been up-to-date and functioning. But TD had channeled most of its limited funds into maintenance, armor, and armament for its ground vehicles. As a result, the pilot on the flight out of Van Nuys was alone in the cockpit.
Which wouldn't have been a problem if, eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds after takeoff, his flesh hadn't started to melt.
#####
#####
Seven minutes after takeoff, Timekeeper Arlen Holmes nudged Timekeeper Caroline Rawlins and asked, a wry smile on his broad face: "Want the window seat, Caroline?"
Rawlins loosened her grip on the armrests. "Can I vomit out of that window, Len? If not: no."
Holmes chuckled, relaxing his big frame into his seat. Rawlins tried to smile, too, to share in his humor if not his sense of ease. She hated jump-ship take-offs, that was all. The steep vertical angle, the acceleration that seemed to leave her stomach thousands of feet below. In less than a minute, she told herself, they'd be leveling out. Forty-five seconds from now, she, like Holmes and the others, would be treating the flight like the micro-vacation it was. She'd settle herself against the hard cushions of her seat, slip into the sleep she'd missed last night (a sweet missing, though, she had to admit, when said missing involved Raymond Leon). Mere seconds from now.
On cue, as she'd mentally timed it, the jump-plane began to level out.
And just as Rawlins closed her eyes and allowed herself to share Holmes' smile, an awful scream, its intensity unblunted by the roar of the engines, erupted from the cockpit.
#####
#####
Nine minutes and forty-seven seconds after takeoff, the jump-ship out of Van Nuys plummeted like a meteorite into a ridging of dunes and hills in the desert to the east of Los Angeles.
#####
#####
She shouldn't have been alive. She should have died.
She survived because she was forward, not aft, when the crash occurred. The jump-planes available to Temporal Control were refitted military craft. Reinforced in certain areas against such extreme stressors as heavy strafing. One such area was the cockpit.
All of which she would think through later. Presently, she couldn't move. Something heavy was pinning her torso. Nor could she see: either she was in total darkness or she'd been blinded in the crash. She was disoriented, and she was in pain, from her legs, ribs, and right arm. A cacophony of discomforts ranging in intensity from whisper to just short of scream.
Something thick and warm was dripping onto her face.
#####
#####
Raymond Leon was not a trained rescue worker. He was not a wreck reconstructionist. He'd been, for more than most of his life, a city-dweller; his ideas regarding survival in a desert environment, while pragmatic, were at best rudimentary. In short, his presence was not required at the crash site east of L.A.
So, while he awaited updates or department-issued requests for donations of blood or time for survivors who were very likely nothing but meat-paste at the bottom of a fresh crater (and, just for a moment, he felt resentment on top of his standard shock at the news of the crash: why did it have to be her? Not, of course, that he could blame Rawlins for being on a doomed flight, not that he could fault his feelings for her— and there stood a simple fact: you had feelings for someone with whom you engaged in sexual intercourse, ate, and slept on a regular basis, even if you rarely spent more than six hours at a time in each other's company and typically called each other by your respective surnames— but concern and worry blunted efficiency, and they certainly had no place on the street), Leon did his job. Alone, without Jaeger, who'd gone home for a few hours' re-charge in anticipation of a hellish day to come, he revisited the switchyard, to see the crime scene in the light of another smog-bleared L.A. day. By that gritty light, he saw nothing he hadn't seen earlier. It was overcast, the clouds like rolls of dross off a metal casting; as he walked back to his cruiser, across the oily packed dirt of the switchyard front lot, it started to rain, big, tepid, chemical-laden drops that tamped the dust and the day's rising heat while simultaneously boosting the lot's gritty petroleum stink— and washing away the tread marks Leon had asked Technician Lancaster to screen. Not that it mattered: she'd gotten back to him before he left the rail-car housing. Nothing on the tire marks. No customs, no exotic makes, no abnormal weights on any of the axles, no obvious tell-tale anomalies, mineral or vegetable. He'd thanked her for her efficiency, hung up, re-pocketed his phone.
When he was halfway back to Control, the L.E.D. on his cruiser's dash-mounted comms unit flashed. Leon kept his eyes on the street, on the churn of traffic, as he tapped the intercom button. "Leon."
Barnes here, Raymond. I have something you should see. Come to the lab; I'll be waiting.
On line four, Leon noticed, glancing at the comms unit's digital display. For a moment, he thought it odd that Barnes was using a non-public channel, not the department's general-calls line one. But Barnes was Barnes, and like many of the men and women who shared his profession, he tended to be insular both in terms of data and of trust.
"I'll be there in ten, Barnes. Leon out."
What he didn't ask Barnes with regard to what the something might be, he confirmed for himself when he returned to Control. Thirty seconds to stop at his desk and request of his computer the latest update from the crash site. Four names. Four of twelve. Four survivors (condition and status prone to change):
Delano, Terrence
Gibson, Mariel
Marisol, Ramon
Rawlins, Caroline
Leon straightened away from his desk, drawing and releasing, as he did, in counter-measure to a relief so unexpected and intense as to momentarily dizzying, a breath long, slow, and deep, and went to take the lift down to the science level.
#####
Some might have said that those who worked in the science division of Temporal Control were consigned to the depths, denizens of an intellectual but stifling upper level of Hell. Leon tended to find calmness, if not comfort, in the earthquake-proof labs five floors below street level. An order to the activity, in contrast to the swarming above, a cave-like dry coolness that seemed easily preferable to the laboring of the air-conditioning inside the Main Hall and the ward room, the ozone-depleted glare out on the streets. He walked the main hall off the elevator bank, the round overheads reflecting like headlamps in the liquid-black gleam of the flooring underfoot, back to Barnes' open office, just off the main bio-pathology lab.
He found Barnes hunched within a ring of computer monitors, looking intently at the centermost screen; Barnes, seeing Leon approach, smiled slightly and straightened up, a movement that, for him, amounted to a locked shrugging of his right shoulder. "Leon."
"What do have for me, Examiner Barnes?"
Barnes nodded toward the center screen. "Come here and have a look." He added, softly, as Leon joined him in the semi-circle of monitors: "You seem relieved, Raymond. You must have seen the survivors list."
His tone carried a hint of yearning, of sadness, not sarcasm. Barnes had lost his wife in the crash that crippled him; he could well understand the importance of the occasional miracle.
"I have," Leon replied, mildly. "What was it you wanted me to see, Carl?"
Barnes trailed and splayed the fingers of his left hand across the virtual touch-pad hovering above the keyboard of the center monitor, scattering windows, de-sizing some, up-sizing one in particular. He stopped at a freeze-frame of a man in flight-suit and black helmet, his face at roughly a two-thirds angle to the camera, controls in gloved hands, seated amid the toggles, lights, and gauges of what had to be the instrument banks of a jump-plane.
"What we have here, Timekeeper Leon, is a copy of the audio-visual component of the black-box recording from the cockpit of today's unfortunate flight," said Barnes. "Internal Affairs is, of course, poring over the original with the priceless assistance of the Event Reconstruction team."
Leon didn't fault the man his droll phrasing: Barnes was brilliant, and he'd been in chronic pain for years. His acidic attitude was, no doubt, one of his few honest pleasures.
"What am I looking for?"
"A most disturbing case of pilot distress."
"Be more specific, Carl."
"Brace yourself, Raymond. I hope you've not had anything of value for breakfast."
With that, Barnes flicked his right index finger at the virtual touch-pad; onscreen, the image unpaused.
The pilot was fine. For eight seconds, according to the time-stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the frame, he went about the business of guiding the plane through its final moments of ascent.
Then he screamed.
The sound froze Leon, locked his eyes on the screen. His every animal instinct told him simultaneously to look and to look away.
"And: here—" Barnes said, calmly. He made a cupping gesture toward the screen, in the region of the pilot's exposed lower face. "He begins to hemorrhage. Skin losing elasticity, becoming sponge-like. The pores breaking down—"
Translation: the pilot was literally melting before their eyes. Against the pull of his shoulder harness, he flailed and thrashed in his seat.
"The muscle goes next," Barnes intoned. "Followed shortly by the tendons. Watch the left hand."
With said hand, the pilot struck— at this point, he could not have been consciously reaching for anything— the left-side upright of the joystick. On impact, the skin-tight glove on said hand flew off. Impossible, Leon thought, half-subconsciously.
Until he realized that the glove still contained most of the pilot's left hand.
Alarms went off as the plane lost orientation. By then, a handful of Timekeepers were forcing their way into the cockpit. Rawlins was among them. The audio portion of the playback was harder to take, oddly enough, than the visual feed, which cut out, anyway, about seven seconds later. Leaving only—
What's wrong with— the fuck, the fuck— what's happening to him—
Override— Rawlins' voice. Leon's stomach tightened. Find the overrides— find the goddamn— Oh, God—
Chaos. A screech of static, a screaming from the engines. Easy, and horrifying, enough to understand what was happening: by the time the Timekeepers in the cockpit found the auto-pilot, the jump-plane was in a flat spin. Grunts and shouts, a rough thumping, as the Timekeepers in the cockpit lost their balance, were slammed into each other, into the ceiling, into the windscreen.
A man's voice, eerily calm: Sweet Jesus.
And: nothing.
Leon found himself shaking. When Barnes spoke again, he started.
"Similar to the body in the switchyard." Barnes' eyes on him were calm but sympathetic. "That's why I called you in, Leon."
Only this was worse than what they found in the switchyard. Of the four Timekeepers who broke into the cockpit, two died. Two survived. Rawlins and Delano. They spent the better part of two hours trapped in the wreckage while the rescue team located them and cut their way in. Nearly two hours pinned in the wreckage, in shock and pain, and covered by the pilot's exploded remains.
Until the pilot's cause of death was known, they were presently quarantined in the infirmary.
#####
#####
Time, thought Leon, to shake down his contact's contacts. Only that could take place in a few hours. Vermin tended to be most active at night. Leon left the science division intending to find himself something to eat, to shower and shave and perhaps re-charge for an hour or so. He'd need to be sharp.
Anton Hurst caught him at the elevator banks in the Main Hall.
#####
Hurst was the triage clinic's primary pharmacologist. Tall, reed-like and gangly, fair-haired, possessed of a face that seemed to be both scowling and smiling at the same time. Perpetual apology in his pale gray eyes. He stopped just short of touching Leon's arm.
"A moment, Timekeeper?"
Leon was feeling hungry, troubled, worn out; even at his best, he had little patience for temerity. "What is it, Doctor?"
"It's... Timekeeper Rawlins."
"Has her condition worsened?"
"No. Merely a request, on behalf of the chief supervisor of surgery—"
"Yes—?" Leon prompted.
Hurst hesitated, while a twitching worked its way around the muscles of his face. He seemed to be chewing out how best, tactfully, to proceed. Finally, he said: "Will you speak to her, Timekeeper? She's unconscious, but she needs to hear a familiar voice."
Rawlins' family lived in Zone One. The opposite coast. Even if they'd been informed of the accident, which was unlikely, they wouldn't be able to afford the flight to Los Angeles. The brother she'd had living in L.A. had died in a construction accident three years ago.
"Of course," Leon said.
#####
Because of the treatment afforded Timekeepers who entered State-run hospitals (said treatment ranging in description from "cavalier" to "mysteriously fatal"), Temporal Control had its own medical facilities, a clinic, surgery, and hospital block. Rawlins and the other survivors of the Van Nuys crash were in quarantine rooms a floor above the surgery, a long walk back from the Main Hall through a skyway of steel and dirty bulletproof glass, a bio-scan checkpoint at either end.
#####
The surgery's auto-docs worked quickly and efficiently. If a living body could be salvaged, it was, with a minimum of error. Still, repair was not a synonym for recovery. Seeing Rawlins was a shock. Pale, her face bruised, stitches closing cuts on her forehead, her left cheek. Her body too still in a blue hospital gown, her form too small on the bed. The nurse on duty in the quarantine area, a female Timekeeper-slant-RN by the name of Tolliver, with pale amber eyes and fawn-brown hair tied neatly back, who wore a medical-white uniform jacket in place of a Timekeeper's standard black, offered Leon a steel-frame vinyl-padded chair. He pulled it close to the thick glass of Rawlins' quarantine cell; near the cell's intercom, he seated himself on the chair's worn black cushions. He looked at Rawlins, lying, eyes closed, no more than two meters away, amid what was practically a cityscape of blinking monitors, and he wondered—
What do I talk about?
All the stereotyped things, the ridiculous things: weather, or the half-boiled, glaring perpetual poison that passed for weather in Los Angeles; news from within the department or without, or things she already knew or already was; or his investigation— and, now, there was something positive to relay to one in a coma: I don't have a single solid lead, Caroline. Literally, as the victims are melting. Oh, and by the way, just to cheer you up: whatever killed my contact is likely to have killed your pilot, too.
It didn't help, either, that the ward was under camera surveillance. Shiny black eyes in all the corners. Which, for a Timekeeper, was life as usual: said to live— expected to live— above reproach, they gave up their personal privacy to the cameras Control installed and maintained in their flats. Those very cameras had watched Leon sleep, eat, laugh at the occasional guilty pleasure on vid; they'd watched as Leon and Rawlins had sex, for God's sake.
But this was different. This— his being here, trying to find things to say to her while she was helpless and unconscious— was being done without her consent. Still:
He thought, he considered; finally, he knew what to say. "Caroline, it's Timekeeper Leon. Raymond. You threatened, once, to teach me how to ski." He could hear his voice, with the whisper of ventilation, through the speaker on the other side of the glass, near Rawlins' bed. He spoke to her, to her still, stitched, bruised face, not to the intercom. "If the offer still stands, I would like very much to take you up on that threat..."
#####
But, still: he was almost relieved when Jaeger paged to call him away to another nightmare.
#####
#####
The fifth floor of an eight-story housing flat in the eastern quadrant of the ghetto. Corner flat. Three bodies, adult, two male, one female. Or so it seemed, according to the indefatigable Barnes, whose people, among them Technician Lancaster, obviously bucking for early advancement, were already on the scene. No reliable occupancy record for the flat, however. Of course. Timekeepers and regular police were already canvassing the building for suspects or witnesses.
While Barnes and his people inventoried the scene, Leon went with the officers working the corridor to the left of the flat; Jaeger went right. Two doorframes full of sullen, fearful denial in the form of three women, two men, and a handful of dirty urchins who saw nothing, heard nothing; one door kicked in to darkness and must, a scattering of roaches, the drip of water from a broken pipe.
Jaeger blipped in on Leon's collar receiver. Raymond, I think we have a witness. Apartment five-eleven.
"Good." Leon broke away from the police officers, turned back toward the corner flat. He made no effort to keep the impatience from his voice. "We'll take him out to the edge of the zone, time him down—"
At a trot, he passed the forensics crew at the crime scene. A sound of arguing came from ahead. A woman's voice: "You have no right to be in here. Don't you dare touch her—"
Jaeger was standing outside the open door of apartment 511. Leon, joining him, looked inside.
In a semi-circle of police officers, a dark-haired woman stood fiercely guarding a girl possibly seven or eight years old. The woman wore a stained gray t-shirt and weathered dungarees; the girl was in green pajamas. Both of them were spattered and smeared with blood.
"Our witness," said Jaeger, nodding toward the little girl.
#####
#####
Back at Control, someone better versed in procedure than in practicality called Social Services before Leon or any of the other investigating officers had a chance to speak to the girl; consequently, as was her legal right, she was not to undergo any form of interview ("interrogation" being a term those of "social" sensibilities were loath to use with regard to children) until she had proper guardianship in the form of a DSS worker. Who would have to be contacted and assigned and who would then have to make the commute to Control, all of which would take an hour or better. Leon decided to start the interrogations— the interviews— with the girl's protector, the fierce dark-haired woman from the flat down the hall.
#####
#####
She reminded him, uncomfortably, of Rawlins. A fallen-Rawlins. Or a projection of Rawlins he could somehow resent, as this version, the ghetto-dweller, was sitting, healthy and functioning, in an interrogation room while the real Rawlins, the duty-bound, honorable Rawlins, lay damaged in a hospital bed.
Her name was Laura Vedder. Leon noted, glancing further down her intake sheet: "You're a climatologist."
"Yes." Not Yes, Timekeeper. Not Yes, sir. From across the steel top of the room's table, she was watching Leon directly, not at all apprehensively, with hard, dark eyes.
"How necessary is climatology in a zone like this?"
"Not as necessary as I'd been led to believe, obviously."
"Obviously. Still, you're a scientist: what is a scientist doing, living in the ghetto?"
"I lost my housing rating when my husband died."
"Died—?"
"He timed out."
"Intentionally," Leon suggested, with possibly a bit more cruelty than was absolutely necessary.
Nonetheless, she didn't flinch. "Yes."
"That shouldn't have been enough to invalidate your housing rating."
"I have a record."
"Really."
"If you must pretend you don't know: on a field expedition ten years ago, I questioned the authority of the scientist in charge."
"Questioning got you arrested?"
"No. Breaking the bastard's nose did."
Leon suppressed a cold smile. "What does a climatologist with a temper do for a living, Miss Vedder?"
"I analyze meteorological data for an agricultural firm. And I work four to six shifts a week down in the factory zone."
"Two jobs. How do you manage it?"
A sardonic smile, utterly unhidden. "Clean living."
"As part of this investigation, Miss Vedder," Leon said, "Temporal Control requests that you provide certain biological samples—"
"Blood, you mean."
"Do you agree?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Not particularly." Leon stood up, looked down at her. "Then again, you knew that."
"If I call you a bastard to your face, Timekeeper, will you arrest me?"
At the door of the interrogation room, Leon paused. "That, Miss Vedder, would be a waste of my time."
He walked out.
#####
#####
He left Laura Vedder in the capable hands of the tissue-collection team. By then, given his plans, now hours old, to head out after dark in search of secondary sources and contacts to shake down, it was too late to go home. What he told himself, anyway. He got a protein-paste sandwich wrap and a cup of coffee from the commissary, requested a time-boost from the dispensary. Then he drifted back, down the long, dirty-windowed skyway, to the surgery.
Much to his surprise, Rawlins was awake.
More than that, within the confines of her quarantine cell, she was up. Standing. Quietly examining the banks of blinking monitors beside her bed.
Almost cautiously, as if Rawlins were animated by a force if not supernatural then certainly not within the realm of regular medical possibility, Leon approached the thick glass. "Caroline."
She turned his way. Found him through the glass with, it seemed, some effort. "Raymond."
"How are you?"
"My left arm is broken." She kept her eyes shy of his as she spoke, as if she were speaking of something shameful. In her mind, thought Leon, she might well have been. Survivor's guilt. What the hell is she doing up? Where is the nurse? "I have three broken ribs. Bruises, contusions—"
"Caroline—" He moved closer. Kept his eyes on her as he repeated: "— how are you?"
She considered. Her voice when she spoke next was quieter, less assured: "Shaken."
"Are you in pain?"
Rawlins nodded.
"Have they given you anything for it?"
"Neuroquel."
Neuroquel was a general analgesic just a click or two above aspirin. Leon frowned. "That's all?"
"I can't afford anything stronger."
"Is that what they told you?"
"They let me do the math," she said. "Doctor Hurst: do you know him?"
"I know him."
"Part of the department's budget cuts. We have eight Timekeepers more in need of the stronger stuff than I am. If I request it, they'll dock it from my pay. Six hours per cc. I can't afford it."
"I can."
She looked him in the eyes. "No."
"The more comfortable you are, the easier it will be for you to rest. You'll heal that much more quickly."
"Raymond: no."
"Caroline, it's not... personal." Leon halted at the word. No other way of putting it, even though he knew he was lying. "For the good of the division: you'd be back in the field that much more—"
"No." They both started at the force in her voice. She looked at him across the space of four breaths and added, with soft wonderment: "I think this is our first fight."
"I think you're right."
He gave her time to untense. This was, of course, by no means an interrogation; he had no desire to upset her further, to cause her any type of pain.
"It got in my eyes." Rawlins said, quietly. "I couldn't see. I had— His blood was in my eyes." Alone on the other side of the glass, she paused. "I don't think the doctors are telling me everything. Will I end up like him, Raymond?"
Opposite her, Leon stood silent.
Rawlins continued, her voice as flat as her expression: "They— of course they won't allow me access to my sidearm."
Normally, Leon thought of the idea of suicide either with contempt or as an everyday component of a society in which, for many, semi-immortality meant nothing more than extended existence, not actual living. He chose his words carefully. "You shoot yourself, Caroline. You scatter brain, bone, and blood around your quarantine area. This entails clean-up. Time and limited departmental resources spent on further containment."
Rawlins nodded; she bowed her head. "I just want to be in control when it happens."
"It won't happen. Your biometrics are looking good."
"I know." She swallowed, pressed her hand palm-out to the glass.
Leon hesitated. Then he placed his placed his hand over hers. The glass was cool and dry against his fingers and palm.
"Thank you for visiting me, Timekeeper Leon," Rawlins said quietly.
"You're welcome, Timekeeper Rawlins." Leon tipped his forehead to the glass and added, softly: "Rest, Caroline. Sleep. Will you do that for me?"
"I will, Raymond."
He smiled for her a gentle smile the cameras couldn't see, not at their proximity, the respective angles of their faces, and left the surgery.
#####
#####
When he returned to the main hall, and to Interrogation, his true witness had received her guardian from Social Services. More importantly, she was calm enough to talk about what had happened in that corner flat on the ghetto's east side.
The girl— Rebecca Jackson, her name was (not that it mattered all that much: she, of course, had no record)— was eight years old. Blonde, gray-eyed, as dirty and skinny as any other urchin from the ghetto. As dirty and skinny, Leon had to admit, as he had been at that age. She was in one of the main-floor interrogation rooms in the company of her assigned social services worker, a tall, solid, chestnut-haired woman whose expression was simultaneously impassive and nearly palpably contemptuous. The contempt, said her stone-green eyes, tracking Leon as he entered, was solely for him. As for Rebecca Jackson, she took one look at Leon, scowled and teared up, and pressed her face into the social worker's side.
He could get nothing out of her. Not a word. Leon wasn't a big man, and he didn't think of himself as particularly imposing, but the girl was obviously frightened of him. He chalked it up to shock. As he left the room, frustrated but not wanting to show it in front of Rebecca's impassive protector, Jaeger touched his arm.
"Let me try, Raymond."
"What makes you think she'll talk to you?"
"It's your eyes."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You have scary fucking eyes." As he spoke, Jaeger shrugged out of his great coat. "That ice-blue thing? Frightening."
Leon frowned. "Frightening?"
"Can be." Jaeger folded his coat over a chair, unzipped his stab-vest.
"No one's ever told me that before."
"That's because they're scared of you, Ray." Jaeger placed his stab-vest on the chair-back over his coat. He turned, met Leon's eyes with the wry sobriety of someone who'd just imparted a truth long apparent to all but the present recipient, and, in his pale-iris uniform shirt, entered the interrogation room.
#####
#####
All told, Jaeger, for all his gentleness, patience, and lack of fright-value, had little more luck than Leon. All he could get out of the girl called Rebecca Jackson (before the woman from Social Services shut down the questioning, per Miss Jackson's rights as a minor under the age of eleven), was "Uncle Lem gave Daddy and Mommy time, and he took time for himself, and they all died." Said statement, and a half dozen variations thereof, all digitally recorded and preserved.
Gave time, Leon thought. Shared time wrist-to-wrist, most likely. Wrists that, for lack of better phrasing, were no longer there.
From his desk in the ward room, he checked in with Barnes on Forensics' progress with the remains from the switchyard and the crash, and learned that neither Barnes nor any of his people had found traces of any but the normal panoply of street drugs in either the body from the switchyard or the pilot, who had in his system a semi-licit stimulant when he died. Not were they likely to find anything other than standard-issue illicits in the bodies from the ghetto. Which seemed to place their deaths in the realm of pathogen or disease, not chemicals. But if this were a disease, why wasn't it spreading more quickly?
And then Leon realized: "Uncle Lem" gave Rebecca's parents time.
Gave, and then sampled some for himself. From his own stash, so to say.
The "illegal time" Leon's first contact, the dead man in the switchyard, was talking about: Lem had been dealing it. He'd sold it to Rebecca's parents; he might well have dealt it to others.
A phrase came to Leon's mind. More than that, the expression, the sarcastic smile, with which it had been uttered: Clean living.
Laura Vedder.
He sat forward, snatched up the receiver of his desk phone, tapped in the extension for Intake.
Barring, said a man's voice, a pick-up on the third ring. Intake. How may I help—
"Timekeeper Raymond Leon. I'm looking for a temporary inductee named Laura Vedder. Is she still in the building?"
Hold, please, Timekeeper— Followed by thirty seconds of silence. Thirty seconds of Leon, knowing what Barring was about to tell him, muttering damn it, damn it, damn it beneath his breath—
— She's just left. Afraid we took our time processing her. Citizen groups and their bloody complaints about illegal arrests, the length of warrantless detention: Barring's tone was rife with apology. If there's a problem—
"Thank you, Barring."
Leon hung up. He got up, grabbed his great coat from the wall hook behind his desk, and ran for the doors leading out to the street. Almost certainly, Laura Vedder hadn't time enough for a taxi back to the ghetto. With luck, he'd catch her before she could board a bus or a train.
Before she could disappear.
#####
#####
#####