Your name is not Marla Martinez. Not originally, anyway. Your given, Abyssal name is Amaakta Telo Maaktol — whoever dropped you off at the children's center wanted to give you three for luck — but you rarely go by it these days. Nicknames are the norm for you and your paranoidly curated circle of peers, and Abyssal is, though unspoken, viewed as a little gauche.
"Why human names? Cause it's funny," your best friend and IACC leader Synde Baker Brown once said. "It mocks the Infernal co-opting of mortal naming conventions— turns it against them by bestowing it upon their greatest enemies. Us." She'd said it with a proud, toothy smile and a puffed up chest. You were pretty sure you'd never heard of a human named "Synde" in your life, but you weren't about to say so.
You, like most of the city youth, were born somewhere on the outskirts of Hell. You weren't hatched with anyone else to your knowledge. You were raised in Children's Center 15 on the northwest crook of the city, next to a screaming intersection of squealing vehicles in perpetual gridlock— there in the plain unpainted walls, as early as you can remember, Synde Baker Brown had been your best friend.
You got to know each other mostly by proximity. Two ankle biters in a gaggle of forty or so abandoned children, pushed together by default — you, a rail-thin scrap afflicted with an overbite and childhood scoliosis, her, a sinewy brick of a girl with the build of a bulldog. You shared everything: the sink where you spit the lather from your teeth in the morning, the rubber bands you used to tie your hair, the packets of primary-colored chewing gum you were awarded on Sundays. Her propensity for nicknames began in her youth.
Call me the terror of men! She used to scream from atop the decaying monkey bars, at her cowering fellow children beneath. (Her preferred tactic was getting vertical, then throwing sand and rocks by handfuls.)
I am the wyvern! During her last scrap with your hall-mate, Claudie Miu-Porusky, who'd made a habit of tugging on your pigtails whenever she passed you by in the cafeteria. Synde had landed three hooks to her jaw and ripped out a chunk of her ponytail, dangling it over her screaming form like a severed trophy. You remember her towering over Claudie despite her short stature. Teeth all red — she was a biter, too — grinning like a chimpanzee.
I am the death of gods! When the adult caretaker had tried to step in and gotten bitten for her trouble, and quit on the spot. It was a shame. You'd liked that caretaker— but you liked Synde more, so it all worked out.
Synde used to solely channel herself through wanton violence, but her personality took a strange turn after meeting Old Man Eiler, the lopsided fisherman from down the road. He had knobby knees and four legs different in length, giving him a distinct gait.
Old Man Eiler had a son who worked in Hell who brought home many human-made trinkets from the mortal plane, among which were many books. She was illiterate, but the old man read them aloud for her. They were sometimes strange, sometimes silly, but all times fascinating, discussing far-oft writings of a world none of you had ever known. Synde asked why the old man even had the books if they concerned a plane no demon would ever step foot in during their lifetime — he simply took a drag off his pipe, then said in his weary, swaying voice that 'they might be closer to home than she might think'.
One day, Old Man Eiler's son got fired and was liquidated of all possessions, including Old Man Eiler.
None of you saw him again after that.
After that, Synde began to conduct herself differently. She sought out books and haltingly taught herself how to read them, pestering others to do so for her when she couldn't. She started to use proper pseudonyms, nom de plumes. She became preoccupied with the ever-present, elusively defined general concept of 'theory' — the exact properties of which always eluded you. This era of behavior alienated the few peers she had left, except for you. You stuck by her side and she stuck by yours.
These days, you find yourself doing more for Synde Baker Brown than you ever thought you would for anything or anyone. You have helped her hand out home-made zines, stood outside in the freezing cold as she spray painted misspelled revolutionary phrases on the walls of insurance buildings, sat next to her on rooftops as she hailed down stones and debris onto particularly bourgeois-looking suits passing underneath. You joined the youth branch of the Inferno-Anarcho-Communist Coalition, which has three members total and no adult has ever taken seriously, because Synde believes in it. So you believe in it. More than going into education to be whipped into enjoying 14 hours of labor a day, then being shipped off to Hell to work for the rest of your life.
No future greets you in the life that was promised you by your caretakers and the white plain walls of the child center. But in Synde's direction, a future of some new, unfathomable shape shines in the distance, just out of reach.
—
The newly formed youth branch of the Inferno-Anarcho-Communist Coalition meets every week in the lot of an abandoned restaurant called Tiny Violets. The owner, a stout demon woman with a thick double chin and age-lined eyes, was nice enough not only to let your motley group stay there, but give you free meals when she had food to spare; mostly spicy tofu soups and delicious scraps of fried bread. It was foreclosed nearly a year ago, harboring too little customers and too much delinquency. The signs sit in disrepair with no one coming to collect them.
Now today. You are huddled with your girls in the abandoned chassis of Tiny Violets. The walls shield you from the wind, and the glare of light off the skyscrapers above you. It's always a little dizzying to look up in Hell no matter how long you've been there. There is no sky, just the white void where the spiral of buildings converges.
Your legs itch under the many purple bandages you've plastered on. You pick at them absentmindedly.
"I got something interesting," Synde says gleefully.
She isn't what you'd call a pretty girl — a wide, piggish face with rose-colored skin to match, a wild frizzy mass of hair pulled haphazardly into a braid. Her teeth are lopsided and so is her nose, from the many tussles where she got them knocked in. Her right ear is ragged from a botched piercing done with a needle.
Right now she's standing at attention, a little general in her oversized triangular coat, something small and hard clenched in her fist.
Grendèl, a spindly dark blue-skinned girl and the only other member of the Inferno-Anarcho-Communist Youth Coalition, pops her gum. She is sprawled on the floor, poring through a pornographic magazine.
"What is it?" You ask, because you know Synde is waiting for someone to say it.
She tosses the object onto a tarp between the two of you, where it bounces. "Wa-ha!"
You look. On the tarp is a tiny green beetle. Iridescent, an oddly flattened shape, but otherwise unremarkable. It skitters around mindlessly.
"A bug," Grendèl says, unimpressed.
"Not just a bug!" Synde flashes the two of you a devious expression. "Wanna see how it works?"
You and Grendèl exchange a glance, then Grendèl (ever the more assertive of you) nods.
Synde, impossibly, grins even wider and stomps up to you. She rifles through her jacket and procures a strange, gun-like device. She puts the bug on the end of it like a bullet.
All of a sudden there's a wriggling feeling on the back of your neck — you shriek as she presses the barrel to your spine and squeezes the trigger.
"What the fuck!!" you hop to your feet and scrabble where the beetle made its entry. "Synde!!"
"Calm down, Mar-Mar!" Synde looks irritatingly glib, calling you the nickname you hate.
"You shot me!!!"
"And you aren't even bleeding, you big baby!!"
You balk to find she's right — you don't feel any wetness at the back of your neck, or even pain at all. It was the initial shock that startled you, really.
"If I didn't tell you it was gonna happen you wouldn'ta felt it," says Synde. "Now — look at the inside of your jacket."
You do. You're a little too stunned to not do it. There's a label on the inside — you've tried to remove it, but it was too integrated into the fabric. Black serif text reads 'this fabric is not—
"—machine washable, do not put in high temp dryers more than fifteen minutes, do not hand wash with cleaner fluid," recites Synde smugly with her eyes closed.
"Whoa," you say, your head flying up to look at her, "what? How'd you—?"
Eyes still closed, she gestures at Grendèl's walkman. "Riya Lecherous, Moguls-38, Red City Killerz. B15, Summer Soul Sounds, Morten Güt and the Abyssal Outlanders—"
"Oy!" Grendèl claps a hand over the screen and scowls at Synde. "How are you doing that?"
"Simple!" Synde beams. "It's a hi-jack bug. You load the gun with the beetle and shoot it into the back of a suit's head. As long as you're touchin' this—" she holds up a small, green dangling earring. Pretty, you think, but once again unremarkable. "—you can see through his eyes. Spy through him. Even control him some..."
"Wait, control?" you yip.
You are met with the distinct feeling of your arm moving of its own accord, straight up, to the top of your head. It feels a bit like a muscle spasm.
"That part don't work too good. So I'm sticking to just the eyes and ears right now."
The bug crawls out your neck with an unnerving pop and goes back to moving in circles on the ground.
"Too good to be true..." Grendèl says skeptically. "Where'd you even get that thing, Syn?"
"Ttlotto down on Fifty-first. Said he pilfered it off sommat suit on a train somewhere. He wanted to see Malmir's titties so I spilled beer on her shirt, fifty sennat discount."
"You can see Malmir's titties through her shirt anyways," mutters Grendèl. "If there's a bug you can put in people's brains to spy on them, wouldn't Hell have done it to all of us already?"
"How'm I supposed to know? Maybe it's too expensive. It overheats if you use it too long," Synde shrugs. "Maybe it ain't worth bugging for that amount of time. Plus if you shake too hard it pops out. Ttlotto said it's probably experimental, so."
You rub the back of your neck uncertainly. "Is it safe to have that thing in your body?"
Synde shrugs cheerfully.
Great.
"Okay. So. What are you gonna do with it?"
"This little man is gonna be our key to infiltrating the shithole of capital. We'll only need to use it for a bit. Bug a devil-swine, let him go about his merry pig day. We'll get to see inside."
You all glance, even Grendèl, through the window at the gleaming white building with blood red windows that towers over the rest.
"And then," Synde says, "we'll have an in. We'll see how their little machine works. All the pass codes and secrets. We'll show all the others we got what it takes. The vanguard is here and we are it." She puffs her chest again. "The CYA bitches are gonna eat their words. 'Too young to contribute to dialectical materialism' my ass. We'll do more for their revolution than those stupid cunts. And then they're all gonna kill themselves."
A beat of silence.
"Syn," Grendèl pops her gum, then takes a long, thoughtful pause, "where are you even going to find a suit for all that?"
"Good question!" Synde replies. "You're gonna help me find him."
—
Screaming cars line in rows as you, Synde, and Grendèl walk down the street. Rain pours at a 45° angle; the asphalt reflects red rainbows of light.
Synde skips through the rain with nary a flinch. Grendèl, hands and chin shoved deep into her holographic hoodie, shields herself from most of the spray behind you. Her chunky headphones are the only thing visible from her silhouette.
You shiver beneath your paltry, meager little umbrella. It was a 5 sen cheapo purchase at a corner store, and upon meeting winds stronger than a mild breeze immediately began to fold on itself. You've spent more time adjusting the thing from getting inverted than holding it over your head. Why do you do this to yourself? Your face is frigid with accumulated water, droplets flecking your eyelashes.
"How much longer, Syn?!" you shout to be heard over the blasting wind.
"Just a bit more!" She says cheerfully. How is she cheerful? Fuck all life.
You open your mouth and it fills with water, forcing you to sputter. "Where are we even going?!"
But she's already marched further into the storm, away from your cries. You claw a mass of sodden hair away from your eyes and trudge after her.
The walk abruptly ends at a lone bus stop on the edge of a sprawling boulevard. Synde directs you both to hide in a clump of bushes behind it, shielding you all from sight and — thankfully — the rain. You struggle to jiggle your umbrella between the brambles.
"Is the suit gonna be here?" you ask under your breath.
"Yeah," Synde whispers back, gleeful at the conspiracy of it all. "I've been tailing him — he takes this route every week. Fucking suit-pigs love their schedules."
It's true. Devils, enforcers of order, are natural creatures of habit.
"He comes round here, takes a bunch of weirdddd stops, zig-zaggy-like. Rides all the way to the end of the line! Luckily he's stoopid, hasn't seen me tail him once.
"So here's the plan— he's gonna come up over here 'round 3:43:20. He'll get a coffee and a goss mag from that kiosk there. Gren — you stand by him and play your musicks loud enough for him to feel the bass. When he's good and distracted— Mar, you'll shoot 'im."
Me?!
"Me?!" you whisper. "Why?!"
Synde blinks and says plainly, "Cause you can see way farther than I can. My aim's shit."
This is also true. Though never officially diagnosed, you're pretty sure Synde is terribly nearsighted — ironic, because you're farsighted in turn. You can't read letters two feet in front of you, but you can see a jackfly's wings buzz from thirty feet away. Neither of you can afford glasses, so you never had it fixed.
"Come on, Marla," Grendèl says, unimpressed. "You thought you were just gonna sit here and do nothing?"
"N—no! I just wasn't expecting to be thrown into it so quickly," you sputter, definitely not in a whiny manner. Grendèl's narrowed eyes indicate she thinks otherwise.
"You nerds shut the fuck up, here he comes." Synde squats down, peeking through the brambles. You and Grendèl follow.
Through the rainfall, an unassuming figure holding an umbrella walks to the bus stop. He stops to check the time. His expensive brass watch glints in the overhead streetlight. You can barely see the shape of his face under the umbrella and the blanket of early morning— he looks indistinct, lacking in any sharp edges. If not for your mission your eyes would have simply glazed over him.
Just like Synde foretold, your mark pivots to the nearby kiosk and orders punches in the code for a coffee. He pores over the magazine selection before choosing one about celebrity gossip. (Pheromone, a column primarily surrounding fashion trends and teen idol suicides.)
Both are duly dispensed. Tucking the magazine beneath his arm, he goes to sit at the bus stop, whistling to himself.
"Now! Go go go." Synde hisses.
Grendèl is up in a flash. She skitters across the way like an alley cat, so fast you nearly lose sight of her completely — intentionally, of course. She circles back around on the other side opposite of you, calmly holding her portable amplifier.
Synde shoots you a look and gestures with her head towards the mark. She shoves the gun and the beetle into your hands. You gulp and attempt to get into an optimal firing position.
Grendèl settles next to the bus stop, staring out at the road casually. The mark doesn't seem to notice. Without looking at him, she brings out her walkman and presses a button on her amplifier.
A thick, noisy bassline begins pulsing the pavement around her and the mark. It sounds like static turned way down low. The mark's coffee starts trembling in its cup. You could swear the very air itself distorts, like asphalt on a hot day.
The mark, amazingly, has nothing to say to this. He turns a page of his magazine. ESSAM TESSEK RELEASES NEW HIT SINGLE, announces the headline.
You aim the gun with marginally shaky hands at the back of the mark's neck. It's a tricky shot from this angle...
You feel Synde's eyes on you. In the dark they glitter like jewels.
Pop! You squeeze the trigger, the gun fires. The noise is swallowed by the sinkhole created by Grendèl's amplifier, and the beetle flies, subsumed into bass. It lands dead on the mark's neck — he doesn't so much as flinch.
Triumph flares in your ribcage. Even without looking at her, in the corner of the eye you see the glint off Synde's grinning teeth.
"Let's go," she whispers, and grabs your clammy hand to tug you away from the bus stop. You leave the oblivious man to his magazine and coffee.
—
"Okay okay," Synde says, rubbing her hands together. "Let's see if this shit works, girls!!"
"You got too much energy right now," Grendèl yawns, "it's six in the morning."
You're back at your usual hideout with all the doors and windows blocked. You are sitting with your girls on the floor. Synde is sitting criss-cross on a yoga mat like some dumbass television guru. Grendèl is on her beanbag, four seconds from nodding off. You are sitting on your knees to prevent the urge to pace around or pick more at your scabs.
"I'm tuning in now," Synde announces, touching the earring dangling from her left lobe. "It's sorta like those human ray-dee-ohs. Bzzt. Bzzt." She punctuates each onomatopoeia with a twist of the earring between two fingers.
"What do you actually see when you look through that thing?" Grendèl asks sleepily.
Synde hums. "S'like... lookin' through my own regular eyes, but someone else's. If they had a camera in their head."
You wonder what the world looked like to her when she bugged you. Did she gain your farsightedness? Keep her nearsightedness? Or did it simply cancel out? "What do you see now?" you ask.
"Mmgh... train car. Metro's busted again."
"Ughh."
"I think it's gonna get up 'n running soon. Some old lady's staring at me."
"Hrm."
"Oh there we go. The train's running."
"..."
"There's a guy playing car crash compilations full volume on the other side of the car with headphones but they're not plugged in. I think there's like 3 stops left."
...
...
...
"Okay... we're stepping off.
"...Bruh this train car smells like ass.
"...We're off! Oh we're at that building off 77th. That ain't too far a jaunt from here. This shit is so tall. How did they build any of it?
"He's punching in the entrance code!! I'm writing it down. Looks like he also got some sort of ID."
"What's the inside of the building look like?"
"Hallways."
...
"He's in... some office now? I guess he's gonna do work?"
"O, we're finally gonna figure out what the hell they do in there."
...
"Eh? He's just playing Minesweeper."
"What? Like the game?"
"Yea, the game Minesweeper."
"He doesn't have like... any important documents or anything open?"
"Na. Minesweeper all the way down."
"Oh..."
...
...
...
"Now he's lookin at a wiki about Minesweeper."
"Fuck's sake."
...
...
...
"He's opened up a document!"
"Oh??"
"It's a spreadsheet! He's putting a number in it, and..."
...
...
"He closed it again. Back to Minesweeper."
...
...
...
"Now he's going on a lunch break? He didn't even do anything!"
"God they don't do anything in there at all."
"And they get paid?"
"I could be paid for doing nothing. I'd be good at it too."
"What's your guy even eating?"
"It's like, a sandwich with just turkey. No sauce or anything. It's dry as a lizard's taint."
"What the fuck."
"How's this guy alive?"
"We got stuck with the most useless cog in the machine."
...
"...oh? He's doing something...
...
Ughh, gross! He took a man-titty porn mag out his desk!"
"Disconnect disconnect disconnect!"
Synde wrenches the earring off and all but throws it to the floor, half-moving to stomp it. It's only you and Grendèl's intervention that stop you from acting on the impulse. Her face is scrunched up in a snarl of disgust which you can't help but find sort of funny more than anything.
"I'm not lookin' at this shit till he's done," she spits, crossing arms.
"Fair's fair," you reply. You wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that, either. "I guess there's nothing left to do but... wait?"
Grendèl hums discontentedly. She's gotten progressively more irritable as the morning crept on. "I dunno man. This feels like a bust."
"It's not a bust yet!" you hurry to interject before Synde can react. "We haven't seen a full day yet. We don't know if this guy does the same thing every day. And — and even if he does. He's gotta be in the proximity of people who are doing more important things. This is — is an insane thing we've pulled off, guys. We can't give up yet."
The others look at you, a little surprised by your zeal, but Synde is the one who grins and claps you on the shoulder. "Attagirl, that's the spirit. Right! We'll check back in on him in 30." She skips off to go refill on her hoard of gas station snacks.
Grendèl gives you a nonplussed look, then clicks a button on her walkman. A song with a gentle, swaying electric rhythm begins to play. You sit and listen with her as you wait for the sun to roll over, and for 30 minutes to pass.
—
When Synde tunes back in, the light of the city has gone from miniscule to blinding. Something like 75% of "natural light" in Hell is actually reflected off buildings, you remember reading once. You have no idea where the rays originate from.
"Alright," says Synde, licking her lips as she places the earring back into her lobe. "Here goes nothing."
"What are the chances he's still going at it in there?" Grendèl asks.
"Eugh," you say, "I fucking hope not." Men are so gross.
"Shhshh," says Synde as she adjusts the earring. When she does it, her eyes glaze over with a thick white tint, faintly speckled with static. It's quite creepy, though she'd probably consider it quite cool. For a long while she's silent, humming under her breath as she fiddles with the waves.
"C'mon," says Grendèl, "tell us what our cog's up to."
"I'm trying, goddammit. Gimme a sec!! There we go."
"Where are you?"
"Uhh, I don't know, I'm at a weird angle. Seems like the same decor as the rest of the building. Boring as ass. He's..." Synde's face makes a strange expression, one you don't see her make often. Confusion, trepidation. "He's... on the floor I think. Not moving."
"Huh. He fell asleep?"
She touches the back of her neck. "Feels wet here. The bug won't come out from there."
"What?" You snap to attention. "What happened?"
"I 'unno. My mouth tastes weird." She makes a face, then suddenly spits a mouthful of dark liquid between her feet. It spatters on the wooden floor. Blood.
You and Grendèl look at each other, wide-eyed.
"I think," Synde says, face blank, "I think somethin' happened to 'im."
"What, did he fucking die in the 30 minutes we took our eyes off him?!"
Synde is silent. You feel your blood pressure immediately surge and your eyelid begin involuntarily twitching.
"Look, it's not that bad," Synde interrupts before you can scream, "listen! No one knows we did that! All we gotta do is get the bug and there'll be no trace we were ever involved!"
"And how are we gonna do that??" you grit through involuntarily gritted teeth.
"Well, we know the entrance code an' I know where the body is in the building. We can just retrace his steps, see where he went."
"Oh yeah?" Grendèl retorts. "They're gonna let us wander free in the building? You and I on their lists 'n shit. Cause you keep tagging their buildings with graffito and I keep blasting out their windows."
"Oh yea." Synde ponders for a moment. Then she turns toward you with a blank, expectant look on your face.
You feel your stomach try to crawl out of your throat. "Oh no."
"...hey Mar."
You squeeze your eyes shut. "No..."
"Mar."
"This is insane."
"I need you to do this for me, Mar."
You peek your eyes open.
Synde looks at you with an unwavering, stony stare. You are transfixed. "The revolution needs you."
In the distance there are alarms and the grinding sounds of industry.
"Fuck," you finally say.
—
You struggle to push your way through the crowded metro, headbutting stray elbows and backpacks every step.
You're anxious out of your mind. More than you're usually anxious, which is really saying something. People's eyes are on you. You can feel it. Every stumble causes another stranger's gaze to flit towards you and your heart rate spikes — at any moment, this could be it. Your palms are sweaty. You can't stop shaking. Everyone's looking at you. A devil in a crisp business suit looks down at you with an impassive stare. A worker? A spy? He'll report you. You and your friends are going to jail or worse. They're gonna kill you. They're gonna line you up with a firing squad and turn you into red mist. In your short, meager 14 years of pathetic life, what have you even done? When they make you face the wall will everything have been worth it?
You tremble for 5 stops before you arrive at your destination, including an excruciating 15-minute delay where the train stops two feet away from the station. When the doors slide open you shove your way out from the mass of citizens and gulp down mouthfuls of new-stagnant air.
The Building imposes itself before you. Atop ten trillion tons of tempered steel shaped into a massive archway, simultaneously the ground, a bridge, and a feat of architecture in of itself. The arch spans 30 yards in width and nearly 600 in length of shining steel. It singes the eye to look at directly— the Building rests atop the arch, like a crown jewel. Plain white walls and rows of identical red windows. A standard rectangular building. One would be remiss to think it strange or off-putting in any way. The city is dotted with hundreds of such Buildings. Their mundane omnipresence belies their ominous, underlying promise. Hell is one closed door away.
You're here during one of the shifting periods, where most of the workers are swapping places or on break. There is, miraculously, no one around...
The front door is as indistinct as anything else, save for a lock and small keypad.
You look around, and enter in the code...
But nothing happens.
Why. Why? The adrenaline coursing through you is making you nauseous. You enter it again, nothing happens again. You could die, right now, on the spot.
Oh yeah — you remember, there isn't just a code to enter for these things, there's a whole ID card they got. They defend those things with their lives. One time you saw a devil catch someone trying to pickpocket one off them; by the time the dust settled, they'd bitten off three fingers. You bet you need one of those and the code to enter the building.
You consider taking a piece of rebar to the lock but you know its unassuming appearance belies a complex hydraulic mechanism. Your arm is more likely to break trying to destroy it than the machine itself.
A janitor wheels a barrowful of trash through the lot without even looking at you. They totter mindlessly to a distant side entrance and the door unlocks for them automatically. They have two cigarettes clenched in their teeth and look a million miles away. The door slides shut behind them like a mouth drifting shut.
There's a dumpster next to you that more than accommodates your size.
You sigh.
—
The inside of the Building smells like stale wallpaper, cigarette smoke, and stagnant water.
You are wheeled in by a comatose janitor deep into the Building's guts. You've taken so many rights and lefts and inbetweens you're barely oriented anymore. You're pretty sure you could find your way out, if you tried... or you might have to go the dumpster route again, which isn't ideal but better than an active firing squad. The dumpster shunts around you as the janitor presumably shoves you into a closet, and you feel the movement stop. The squeak of non-slip shoes gets farther and farther away, followed by the muffled sound of a door closing.
You worm your way out from under the (thankfully empty) trash bags that covered you. You're in a dark janitor's closet with what looks like an unauthorized amount of personal affects and contraband scattered about. Mostly pornography. You do find some gnarly looking handheld knives, though.
After carefully listening through the door to gauge if anyone is in the hall, you creak the door open and step out. The hall is enormous and plastered with sickly beige-yellow wallpaper. It is lined by steel doors each labeled with a number which all look thoroughly unvisited. In the monument to capital that is the city, a thousand abandoned doors dotting every square kilometer like follicles, you've never seen a more neglected row of doors. The sight almost makes you sad.
You know that the mark is in room 532, in the hall opposing yours. It makes sense, sort of. This seems like the primo spot for workers to sneak off and be left completely alone. Is it so remote a man could be murdered here and not be noticed?
You find his body in the saddest of the rooms, a desolate and unfixed storage area on the verge of disintegration, dust coating the shelves, an open broken window on the far wall. It is a pretty bad place to die. You give a brief examination to the wounds on his body and find one nasty one on the back of his skull, just like Synde said. You trace his skin for any sign of the beetle but you see nothing.
All of a sudden there are footsteps down the hall. You jump. How could anyone be down here? Surely they're not going to this room. The footsteps continue closer. Oh god, they're coming to this room.
You hoist the body up with all your strength, only really managing to get the top half off the floor, then push it into the nearest locker and wedge it shut with your back. The footsteps have stopped. You let some of the tension drip out of your body, thinking you were being overly paranoid. But then again they start! Adrenaline floods your veins. You work the broken window open and leap out at a near perfect horizontal angle, dangling from the edge with your fingers.
Someone opens the door. You hear the plastic crinkling of something being unwrapped, some foodstuff being eaten. Your hands scream with the effort of holding yourself up.
Just don't open the locker. Don't open the locker...
Footsteps. The metal squeak of a locker opening.
No!
There is a loud soft thump of a very large, heavy body rolling to the floor. You squeeze your eyes shut.
After a hair-pullingly long pause, footsteps resume, much more soft and cautious. They stop for a while, and you hear some strange ambiguous shuffling — then, the locker door shutting neatly, a lighter clicking. The glowing end of a cigarette pokes its way out the window, a puff of smoke follows. A thin hand with a black wristwatch taps the cig on the windowsill and sends ash raining on your face.
Finally they flick the cigarette butt out the window and step back. Footsteps fade out of your range of hearing and the door shuts.
You scramble to pull yourself back up. The body — the body is gone. It's not in the locker either. You nearly scrabble on all fours running out into the hallway after your perpetrator. You're terrified you'll lose them but then you see them waiting for the elevator. The most unassuming, generic looking devil you've ever seen. If not for the watch on their wrist, your eyes would pass completely over them.
The elevator arrives with a pleasant ding. The devil steps in. No indication on their face that they saw anything strange at all. They check their watch. Before them, the metal doors slowly roll shut.
—
Now. You sit on a mahogany dining chair facing opposite the generic devil, who sits with a pensive, thoughtful expression. In their hand they twirl a ballpoint pen. They have a fixation on handheld things. You've just finished recounting your sordid tale and you've seen very little change in expression; you wonder what sort of sick person you've chosen to break into the apartment of.
"Hm," says the unnamed devil, and you realize you have the power to raise questions and should probably utilize it.
"What's your name?" They blink and focus on you again. You bristle. Were they listening at all? "It's only fair. You know mine."
"I don't know that your name isn't false."
"Then give me a false one. I don't care. I want to call you something."
They let out a quiet, toneless hum. "Qúy."
"Just Qúy?"
"Yes."
"Don't devils have last names?"
"Some of us don't. I am not of a station that particularly requires one." They flip their pen between their fingers again. "And then again, I don't know any other Qúys, so there's no one to confuse it with."
You sigh.
"Can't you just let me go now? I've told you everything I know."
"I could." Qúy paused. "But I shouldn't."
"Why not?"
"You don't know any more about Korandir than I do. I've gained knowledge of some use to me, but the picture of the situation is incomplete."
"Oh come on." Your voice grows hysterical. "You're gonna pin the blame on me? A child?!"
"Well, the situation is in part your fault."
"The fuck it is!"
"But you did not kill my coworker, you merely tampered with his body. So the question of who did so remains up in the air." The pen spins between their index and middle finger, top over bottom over top. "As long as this remains unanswered, the Department will be looking for the next best candidate. Most likely, myself. I will be fired at best. Liquidated at worst. Realistically, both might happen."
"S—so I'm your scapegoat."
"No." A pause. "Well, maybe. I haven't decided yet."
"Ffffffuck... you."
"You'd make a poor suspect, but it'd be better than letting myself be disassembled on a molecular level and restructured into raw material," Qúy says. "I really would rather not resort to that. Finding the real killer, and figuring out what exactly happened would be the best option for both of us."
You sit and ruminate. You aren't fond at all of the idea of helping out an agent of Hell — still, they're not wrong about figuring out what happened. It's an opportunity, too. This whole mission has been a shitshow, and salvaging it with some sort of actual information to present to your peers might be the only way you crawl back to them with any dignity. You couldn't bear to go back with only stories about being kidnapped by the world's most boring salesman, or defeated by a window. You would fail your group; fail their ideology. Fail anarcho-communism itself. Could you bear the guilt?
The chair is digging into your back and your stomach feels like it's filled with lead. You wriggle uncomfortably. "Can I stand now?"
"Not yet."
"My feet hurt."
"I have to make sure you aren't going to run. Or make any other ill-informed decisions." Their eyes glow white and a searing, tiny flame appears in their outstretched palm. "Let's make a deal."
You stare at it. "...you're crazy."
"You're a rogue element." Qúy's are empty, staring into yours unblinkingly. "I can always take my chances with the court, Marla Martinez."
You stare at them for a while, angry tears welling in your eyes, before you mutter, "fine." Whatever. You might as well, at this point.
"The contract will read thusly: as long as the mystery of who killed my coworker remains unsolved, we are not to betray one another knowingly. You will not inform anyone else of this situation. In turn I will do everything in my power to keep you from being taken into Department custody. We will inflict no harm against one another physically, mentally, magically, or otherwise. If we make it out of this situation, I will not turn you over to the authorities nor inform them of your identity. Do these terms sound agreeable to you, Marla Martinez?"
Gritting your teeth, you reluctantly nod and extend your hand. They grasp it, pressing the flame into your palm.
A searing, cold sensation bores into the center — intense, but not painful. The feeling shoots up your wrist and travels up your arm to what feels like directly to your brain stem. And then as quickly as it started, it's gone.
"Good," says Qúy. "We can get somewhere from here."
The body of Korandir sits across from both of you, having surveyed your conversation all the while. His eyes, which have fallen open, are dull and glassy as a bird's.