Clerks and Ghosts
Kieran woke before the phone rang.
Years of training did that; you learned to surface from sleep just ahead of the noise. It wasn't magic, just dread with a good sense of timing.
The room was dark except for a line of orange light leaking through the crooked blinds, the city's glow smeared by dirty glass. He lay still for a heartbeat, listening: no footsteps on the stairs, no scrape at the door, no car idling too long outside.
Then the phone hummed against the chipped nightstand.
He checked the screen.
NOOR.
He answered.
"Brant took Tran downstairs," Noor said, dispensing with any attempt at greeting. "Ran a high-stress scenario. Psychological, not physical. For now."
"For now," Kieran repeated, pushing himself up until his back hit the wall. His shoulder ached where an old scar pulled; the bed springs complained quietly.
"She's still functional," Noor went on. "Angry, defiant, regulating faster than his scripts like. That'll put her in the 'dangerous asset' column, not the 'discard' bin."
"It'll also make him cling to her," Kieran said. "He doesn't like losing interesting toys."
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, feet finding the cold floor. Holcomb's bar above him was quiet; Lena's footsteps had stopped hours ago.
"There's more," Noor said. The rustle of papers came down the line, though he knew she was looking at screens, not paper. She liked the sound anyway. "HM-033's transfer hit a snag."
He rubbed his eyes.
"Define snag," he said.
"A clerk with a god complex," Noor said. "Holcomb-adjacent case file, multiple jurisdictions. Family Services flagged the transfer request as 'inappropriate disruption of established care environment.' The note is practically a sermon."
"Name?" he asked.
"Clerk?" Noor said. "Nadia Bell. Mid-level. Twenty years in the system. Writes like someone who still believes forms can save children."
"Subject?" he pressed.
"HM-033," she said. "Legal name Haddie Monroe. Thirty. Holcomb-churned from birth. Group homes, kinship placements, a brief stint in juvenile detention. Currently parked in a 'supportive boarding program' that looks clean on paper and rotten in the incident reports. She's on Arden's long-list as 'potential candidate' for next quarter's intake."
Kieran exhaled through his nose.
"So if the transfer stalls," he said, "Arden picks her up later. Brant gets another file to play with."
"Probably," Noor said. "Unless someone intervenes or she disappears on her own."
"Does she run?" he asked.
Noor's fingers tapped keys somewhere far away.
"She's had three documented abscondings," Noor said. "All brief. Back within forty-eight hours. Not because she wanted to be. Because she had nowhere else to sleep."
He stood, the phone cradled between ear and shoulder, and reached for his shirt.
"What do you need?" he asked.
"Leverage," Noor said. "Clerks like Bell respond to two things: fear of being blamed for catastrophe, and the faint hope that they might actually help someone for once. You're good at being both."
"You want me to talk to her," he said.
"I want you to plant a story in her head," Noor said. "Make the transfer look like the safest choice for everyone, including her career. She already doesn't trust the boarding program. She's written two complaints no one read. We can use that."
"How?" he asked.
"Elena can't walk into Social Services without setting off alarms," Noor said. "I can't leave my screens. You, on the other hand, are very good at being nobody special for an hour."
"I'm already overbooked," he said. "Arden. Kovács. Lena."
"You asked for erosion," Noor said. "This is erosion. It looks like conversations with overworked clerks at eight in the morning."
He pulled on his shirt and buttoned it, fingers moving with the mechanical precision of habit.
"How long until Amelia publishes?" he asked.
"Forty hours," Noor said. "Give or take. She agreed to the delay, but she's not sleeping easy."
"Good," he said.
"Good?" Noor repeated.
"Journalists who sleep well shouldn't be trusted," he said.
Noor made a faint sound that might have been a laugh.
"Text incoming," she said. "Bell's building, shift schedule, coffee preference. Do not threaten her. Do not recruit her. Do not confess your sins in a waiting room. Just…adjust the angle of the story for her."
"You make it sound easy," he said.
"It isn't," Noor said. "That's why we pay you."
"You pay me?" he asked.
"In plausible deniability," she said. "Very valuable in some markets."
She hung up.
---
The Social Services building sat on a block of tired brick and fresh glass. New money had wrapped the old offices in steel and mirror, but the ground floor was still the same: scuffed tiles, a flickering light near the elevator, a woman at the security desk whose eyes had seen too many people cry and weren't impressed by it anymore.
Kieran walked in with a paper cup in one hand and a folded file in the other, his tie slightly askew, the knot imperfect in a way that made him look more human.
He waited.
Waiting rooms had a particular smell in every country he'd worked in: coffee, photocopier toner, and the stale sweat of anxious people.
Parents sat in the plastic chairs: a man picking skin from around his thumb until it bled; a woman in a too-thin coat scowling at the far wall; a grandmother with two children asleep against her side, their cheeks pressed to her arm like small, trusting birds.
Names were called. People went through doors and came back out, faces changed in ways that were always the same.
He checked the board.
N. BELL – WINDOW 4.
He joined the line.
Noor's bullet points were a quiet buzz at the back of his mind.
> Bell, Nadia. 48. Former foster parent. Quiet reputation for "caring too much." Three attempts to escalate concerns about the Monroe placement rejected by supervisors as "overreach."
She had tried. That mattered.
When his turn came, he stepped up to the glass.
She was smaller than he'd pictured, with iron-gray hair pulled back into a tight knot and reading glasses perched low on her nose. If she'd ever smiled easily, the habit had been worn away. Lines fanned from the corners of her eyes.
"Case number?" she asked, not looking up yet.
He slid the file under the gap.
"I'm here about Monroe, Haddie," he said, letting a faint note of practiced frustration edge his voice. "Thirty. Currently at BrightSteps Residential. I'm the external risk consultant you people hired and forgot to email."
Her eyes flicked to the file, then to his face.
"We didn't hire any consultant," she said.
"Of course not," he said. "You outsourced it to Aegis through that lovely public-private partnership the council just renewed. Congratulations, by the way. The budget line was very impressive."
Her mouth flattened.
"You have identification?" she asked.
He slid his forged badge out, just far enough for her to see the logo and his name: MARCUS HALE.
Her gaze lingered on it longer than strictly necessary, as if hoping she'd find a misprint that would let her send him away.
"Never heard of an Aegis risk consultant on our caseload," she said.
"That's because I read reports," he said. "Not because anyone remembered to invite me to the staff party."
"You're wasting my window," she said.
"Fair enough," he said quietly. "Then I'll be direct. 'Incident – 17 May.' 'Incident – 02 June.' 'Unaccounted absence – 24 June.' 'Unexplained bruising – 03 July.' All attached to BrightSteps. All in Monroe's file. All noted by you."
He tapped the folder with one finger.
"You've written the same sentence three times, Ms. Bell," he said. "Different dates, different details: 'I have ongoing concerns that this environment is not therapeutically appropriate and may expose the client to additional harm.'"
Color rose above her collar.
"You've been in my system," she said.
"That's my job," he said. "Your system leaks. A lot of systems do. I'm calling it a blessing today."
"What do you want?" she asked. "We're over capacity, understaffed, and whoever you contracted with keeps adding acronyms to my inbox. None of them come with more beds."
"I want you to reconsider your objection to Monroe's transfer," he said. "There's a bed for her elsewhere. A program that is surprisingly well-funded for once. If you sign off, she leaves BrightSteps before that place headlines an inquest."
Her eyes narrowed.
"What program?" she asked.
The answer waiting on his tongue tasted like ash.
Forge facility. Front name. Soft branding. Hard walls.
"Specialized trauma unit," he said instead. "Low staff-to-patient ratio. Structured routines. Oversight. Aegis is doing a risk audit of the place already. My audit."
"You think I haven't heard that pitch before?" she asked. "They slap 'specialized' on the door and tell us it's progress. Six months later, I'm reading about restraints and overmedication."
He let her anger wash over him. It was earned.
"You're not wrong," he said. "Some of those places are bad. Some are worse than BrightSteps, just better at hiding it. I'm not here to sell you a miracle. I'm here to ask you which kind of bad you're willing to live with."
Her gaze sharpened.
"You're not very good at your job," she said. "Consultants don't talk like that."
"Most don't," he said. "Most want you to sign without looking. I want you to look very closely, and then ask yourself one question: if BrightSteps catches fire—metaphorical or literal—and the press goes digging, whose name will be at the bottom of the file that says 'concerns not acted upon'?"
She flinched, very slightly.
He didn't press. Predators pressed. He gave the tension somewhere to go.
"You tried to move her before," he said, softer. "I read your escalation. Your manager kicked it back with a note about 'stability of placement.' I've seen that phrase in a lot of inquests."
"Stability matters," she said stubbornly. "These kids aren't boxes to be shipped every time a number dips the wrong way. Every move is another loss."
"And every ignored pattern is another risk," he said. "I'm not asking you to believe this new unit is good. I'm asking you to decide whether keeping Monroe exactly where she is is better."
Her hand went to the cup by her keyboard. The coffee was cold, but she sipped anyway, as if it gave her time.
"What are the outcomes?" she asked.
He almost asked, For her, or for you?
Noor's bullets whispered again:
> Bell cares about specific faces, not models. Give her one.
"BrightSteps' five-year stats," he said instead. "Graduation to independent living: nine percent. Hospitalization: twenty-two percent. Arrest within three years: thirty-eight. Unaccounted discharge—meaning they left and the system lost track: sixteen."
"Sixteen," she repeated.
"Monroe's cohort," he went on, "leans even worse. Compare that to your 'specialized unit.' Graduation: seventeen percent. Hospitalization: same. Arrest: lower. Missing: almost zero, but only because they don't get to drift. The walls are higher."
Her eyes closed briefly.
"You make cages sound noble," she said.
"Cages are cages," he said. "But some have less rust and fewer rats."
She looked up at him again.
"Do you believe in this place?" she asked. "Honestly."
He thought of Arden's corridors. The cameras. Brant's smile. Mira's face when she realized the screen showed her past.
"No," he said.
She blinked.
"Then why are you here?" she asked.
"Because I believe BrightSteps will break her in one way," he said. "And this other place will break her in a different one. And because someone above both of us has already decided she's going to be broken somewhere. You don't get to stop that. Neither do I. All we get is a vote on which set of hands does it."
"That's monstrous," she whispered.
"That's the system you work in," he said gently. "You know that. You've known that for a long time. This is just a day when the choices are close enough in your face that you can't pretend otherwise."
For a moment, he thought she might throw the coffee in his face.
Instead, she sighed, a long exhale that seemed to deflate her.
"I became a clerk because I thought I'd be able to help more kids on this side of the counter," she said. "When I was a foster parent, I only had room for three at a time. Here, I thought I could fix forms, fix processes. Turn 'concerns' into actual changes."
"Have you?" he asked.
"Some days," she said. "Most days, no. Most days, I just stamp the same pain with a different date."
She opened the file.
Her pen hovered.
"If I sign this," she said, "and something happens to her there…"
"If you don't sign it," he said, "and something happens to her at BrightSteps, you will read your own notes on the evening news. I can't promise you safety. I can only tell you your signature at least shifts the odds."
She stared at him.
"I hate that you're right," she said.
"Occupational hazard," he said.
She didn't smile, but something in her eyes flickered.
She signed.
The pen scratched the paper, a small, irrevocable sound.
"There," she said. "One more soul sent into whatever machine you people have built. I hope you choke on it."
"Me too," he said.
He took the file back, slid it into his bag.
As he turned to go, her voice stopped him.
"Mr. Hale," she said.
He looked back.
"If anything good happens to her there," she said quietly, "I'd like to know."
He thought of what Arden did to people. What Forge did. Of Mira in the basement, heartbeat turned into data.
"I'll do what I can," he said.
"Don't promise," she said. "Just try."
He inclined his head, then walked out.
Outside, the air felt colder, as if the building had kept a portion of his warmth.
"Noor," he said when the line connected.
"Talk to me," she said.
"She signed," he said. "Push the transfer through before someone above her decides they don't like the look of it."
"On it," Noor said. "Haddie Monroe will no longer be HM-033 stuck in limbo. She'll be HM-033 in a different box."
"Progress," he said.
"In our line of work, yes," she said.
"And Tran?" he asked.
"Quiet," Noor said. "For now. Damon's asleep. Brant is reading his own notes and congratulating himself."
"Krell?" he asked.
"In a meeting with three people who bill by the hour to rephrase his decisions as recommendations," Noor said. "Elena is there, trying not to bite anyone."
"And Kovács?" he asked.
"She's writing about Arden's common rooms," Noor said. "And how recovery tastes like stale coffee and plastic forks."
He could almost see it.
"Keep me posted," he said.
"Sleep," Noor said.
"Later," he said.
He hung up.
He didn't sleep.
---
Amelia rewrote the same sentence eight times before admitting she hated all of them.
She leaned back in her chair, spine popping, and glared at the blinking cursor as if the software was to blame.
"Arden Clinical calls itself a place of recovery."
She deleted "recovery."
Wrote "healing."
Deleted that.
Too soft. Too much like their own brochure.
Her phone vibrated beside her keyboard. Raj's name lit the screen.
She answered.
"Tell me you've decided not to blow up my legal budget," he said, without hello.
"I've decided to blow it up very precisely," she said. "You should be proud. I'm learning control."
"We go to print in less than two days," he said. "How's my front page?"
"Sharp," she said. "Bleeds. You'll love it."
"Have you got your second on the record yet?" he asked.
"I have one former staffer, one parent, three internal docs, and an anonymous internal source who thinks metaphors are a substitute for answers," she said.
"You need at least two names on the record," Raj said. "One if it's gold. Two if it's anything less than saintly."
"I know how to do my job," she said.
"I know you do," he said. "I also know Aegis's lawyers have entire folders of case law ready to swing at your head. 'Anonymous sources' might protect you in theory, but judges are human. Humans get tired. They like names."
"I'm working on it," she said.
"On which?" he asked. "Staff or parent?"
"Both," she said.
He sighed.
"Give me something to tell legal," he said. "Even a hint."
"Tell them," she said, "that if they keep stalling, I'll pitch this to someone who cares less about being sued and more about being read."
"Empty threats don't suit you," he said.
"Who says it's empty?" she asked.
He was quiet for a moment.
"You really think this is the one," he said.
"I think it breaks the skin," she said. "Maybe not the bone yet. But skin first."
Silence hummed between them.
"Forty hours," he said finally. "You get forty. After that, I'm sending it to layout with whatever you have."
"Fair," she said.
"And Amelia," he added, "don't fall in love with your source."
She snorted.
"He's married to his secrets," she said. "Not my type."
"They all look the same once the subpoenas start falling," Raj said. "Don't go to prison for someone whose last name you don't even know."
"Relax," she said. "If I get arrested, you'll write a great piece about it. Front page. Very moving. Awards."
He hung up with a mutter.
She stared at the screen.
Hale's voice echoed in her head from the last call.
> You're the storm. I'm asking you to hit a specific coastline first.
She hated that line. She also couldn't stop turning it over. If she went straight at Forge now, she'd lose Arden. If she went at Arden clean, Forge shifted in the shadows, out of reach.
Someone would be left in the building when the first siren sounded. She couldn't change that. She could choose which floor burned cheaper.
Her eyes drifted to the notebook open beside her laptop. The names were there, written in her tight, neat hand.
Mira Tran. Damian Proctor. HM-033. Veteran: L. Ramirez.
She tapped her pen against the margin.
"If something good happens to her there," the clerk had said, speaking of Monroe without knowing Amelia knew the file code attached to the name, "I'd like to know."
Something good. In a system built to sort pain into more efficient shapes.
Amelia closed the notebook.
She opened a new document.
> ARDEN – HUMAN LEADS (DELAYED).
At the top, she wrote:
> STORY 2 – FOUR PEOPLE.
She would not put them in story one. She would not hand Forge a map of exactly which lives some internal conscience had tried to salvage.
But she could build the scaffolding.
When this broke, and the second wave of stories came, she would be ready to make those names more than rows in a spreadsheet.
If they were still alive.
---
Holcomb breathed around Lena as she slept.
The building was old enough that the pipes spoke in the night. The bar above, the storage rooms below, her small apartment wedged between like a tongue between teeth.
She dreamed of stairs.
Stairs up and down. The wooden ones that had led to the staff office in Holcomb. The narrow metal ones behind the bar now. The endless concrete flights children marched down in whispers they weren't supposed to hear.
In the dream, the doors at the bottom were always closed, no matter how many times she went down. The handles were smooth and warm, as if someone had just let go.
She woke with her hand curled around nothing.
For a moment she didn't know which decade she was in. Child or adult. Home or home's echo.
Then the dim outline of the apartment resolved: battered dresser, chair piled with clothes, cracked mirror, the small TV with a crooked antenna that picked up exactly three channels if the wind was in a good mood.
Downstairs, the bar's old refrigerator hummed.
Upstairs, the city yawned.
She swung her legs out of bed and padded to the sink. The tap sputtered to life, coughing brown water before it ran clear. She cupped her hands and drank.
On the counter, her phone flashed.
One new message.
From MARIS.
> you smell the storm yet?
Lena rolled her eyes.
> storms smell like rain, not fake city inspectors.
The response came quickly.
> inspectors today. men with darker coats tomorrow. its moving.
She frowned.
> talk like a human being
Maris replied with a laughing emoji that somehow felt like a sneer.
> boss wants to know if youre staying on the porch or coming inside when the wind hits
Lena stared at that.
Boss. Not hers. Never hers. But Maris had gone further in, and there were rooms Lena had only glimpsed from far away.
> tell your boss the porch is mine, she typed, thumbs jabbing the screen harder than necessary, and anybody comes on it without knocking polite is getting a bottle to the head.
This time, the reply took longer.
When it came, it was just a line:
> you cant keep playing half in half out len. someday theyll decide what you are for you.
She put the phone face down on the counter.
"I already know what I am," she told the empty room. "Tired."
She dressed, knotting her hair back, and went upstairs to open the bar.
The day's first customers would be the same as the last: men who worked nights, women who'd given up pretending drinking before noon meant something was wrong. Regulars. Ghosts with tabs.
She flicked on the neon sign and unlocked the door.
The city's air smelled like it always did: exhaust, old rain, fried food from the place two doors down.
If there was a storm coming, it hid its scent well.
---
Two levels under Arden's administrative floor, in a room with no windows and walls painted an aggressively calming shade of blue, HM-033 sat on a plastic chair with a cup of tea going cold in her hands.
She didn't know yet that a woman who had never met her had just signed away her placement.
She didn't know that somewhere, on a screen, a line next to her file had flicked from PENDING to APPROVED.
What she knew was that the tea tasted like dishwater and the staff member in front of her smiled too much.
"So, Haddie," the woman said, in the tone adults used on children and very skittish dogs, "how are you finding BrightSteps?"
Haddie Monroe shrugged.
"It's a bed," she said. "Roof. Three meals. Could be worse."
She'd had worse.
The woman's smile tightened at the edges.
"Your keyworker says you've been quieter lately," the woman said. "Less… engaged."
Haddie stared at the tea's scummy surface.
"I'm thirty," she said. "I don't think 'engaged' is the word."
"You haven't been attending group," the woman pressed.
"I've heard all the stories," Haddie said. "We did the feelings circle at the last place. And the place before that. Different posters. Same speeches."
"And you don't find it helpful?" the woman asked.
Haddie looked up.
Her eyes were a washed-out gray that still managed to be tired.
"I find it," she said slowly, "like asking the same person who broke your leg to tell you how to walk."
The woman's pen paused on the pad.
"That's a very… interesting way of looking at it," she said.
"Can I go?" Haddie asked. "Laundry pile's not going to fold itself, and you people get mad when the sheets aren't done."
"We're almost finished," the woman said. "There is one more thing. There's been a proposal raised for you to move to a different facility. A more specialized unit."
Haddie's fingers tightened around the cup. Tea slopped over the rim and onto her skin. She barely felt the heat.
"Another move," she said.
"It could be a good opportunity," the woman said. "New environment. New staff. Programs more suited to your needs."
"I thought my 'needs' were being not homeless," Haddie said. "Bed. Roof. Three meals. That's what the last thirty years of paperwork have been about."
The woman's smile flickered, then steadied.
"Change can be frightening," she said. "But sometimes—"
"I'm not frightened," Haddie said.
The woman blinked.
"I'm tired," Haddie said. "There's a difference."
She leaned back in the chair until the plastic creaked.
"What's this new place called?" she asked.
The woman checked the form.
"Arden Clinical Recovery Center," she read. "They have excellent outcomes for complex trauma cases. I'm told their methodology is very… innovative."
"Innovative," Haddie repeated. "That's the word you people use when you're not sure if it works but it looks good in a brochure."
"I understand you've had a lot of transitions," the woman said. "Support can be hard to accept when you—"
"You understand nothing," Haddie said, the words flat. "You read notes. You tick boxes. You'll go home tonight and talk about your day and forget my name by next Tuesday."
The woman's mouth opened. Closed.
"Are you refusing the transfer?" she asked, a hint of relief in her tone, as if that would make the form easier to file.
Haddie thought of the peeling paint in the corridor outside. The way the night staff walked with their phones in their hands, eyes on screens instead of doors. The fights in the kitchen that staff pretended not to hear.
Bed. Roof. Three meals.
"Does it matter?" she asked. "If I say no?"
The woman hesitated a fraction of a second too long.
"That's what I thought," Haddie said.
She stood, setting the tea down carefully so it wouldn't spill on the form.
"At least at the next place," she said, "they'll have to pretend they don't know what to do with me all over again. You lot have run out of ideas."
She walked out without waiting for permission.
In the hallway, the same cold fluorescent light hummed.
Somewhere, in another building, a clerk's pen had already decided where she'd sleep next month.
Somewhere else, in a room with too many monitors, Noor looked at a line of text and said, "HM-033 transfer confirmed."
Elena closed her eyes for a heartbeat.
"One more," Elena murmured. "One less."
In yet another building, a journalist stared at a blank space between paragraphs and thought about how to turn four acronyms into four people on a page.
And under a bar, in a small room where the pipes whispered of old orders and older promises, Kieran Holt set his phone down on the table and listened to the city drawing breath for whatever came next.