Page 20 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
“There are no signs of struggle or violence,” the chief added. “These people are simply gone, like the employees who disappeared from the elevator on Monday.”
“Have our Outreach division in A&L continue to monitor communications within the NYPD,” Ms.Crenshaw instructed after a brief pause. “And task some of our oracles with investigating thesedisappearances. I want a preliminary report by the end of the day. If something is out there, the board needs to know.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The chief strode past my desk while I hastily pretended to be working. More people had disappeared? That was unsettling. Of course, it almost certainly had nothing to do with the Thing in the elevator, the Thing that had probably taken five of my coworkers after promising to devour the entire world. Nope, not related at all. Just a wacky coincidence. And when those oracles went looking, they definitely wouldn’t trace anything back to me. Because I wasn’t involved. Not even a little.
“Colin? A word, please.”
Ms.Crenshaw’s cool voice spiked my heart rate tenfold. Did she suspect I was involved somehow? Taking a deep breath, I hurried into her office.
“Thanks to a missed deadline with one of our investors,” she said without preamble, “we now have several vacancies in middle management. The board believes that some cutthroat competition will boost company morale, so we have decided to open two of those positions to the executive assistants.” She watched me steadily. “Normally, only the most senior of our Class 4-A employees would be tested for ascension. This is your chance to jump to the head of the line.”
I listened with a queasy mix of trepidation and excitement. “How cutthroat is this, exactly?”
“Literally. The rank and file always appreciate a bit of internecine bloodletting.”
I paused to work moisture back into my mouth. “Okay. And how do I prove that I’m deserving of…uh, ascension?”
“Show us you have what it takes to be an acolyte in this company. How you do so is up to you, but we want to see ambition as well asability. You could land a major client, secure a piece of esoteric knowledge from another realm, or complete a project of your own design. Whatever you choose, you have one month.”
“Gotcha.”
Ms.Crenshaw leaned forward, folding her hands together atop her desk. “On a personal note, Colin, I will be extremely disappointed if you do not prevail. More of my assistants have ascended to middle management than anyone else on the board, and I don’t want that track record tarnished. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I assured her hastily.
“Good.”
Scurrying back to my desk, I settled into my chair and stared at the wall across from me while my fingers drummed nervously on either side of my keyboard. On top of everything else, I’d just been dropped into a corporate version ofThe Hunger Games. I hadn’t even finished out my first week as an executive assistant! What could I possibly do to impress the board? Then my stomach lurched at a new realization. Sunil, my nemesis, was an executive assistant as well. We were in direct competition now, and I knew firsthand how vicious he could be.
A sour, metallic taste flooded my mouth. I’d unleashed a world-devouring monster in order to reach the thirteenth floor, but I hadn’t escaped Sunil after all. I proceeded to have a quiet panic attack at my desk, gulping for air while my heart hammered away in my chest, until Ms.Crenshaw stepped out of her office. “I’ll be back after lunch,” she told me on her way past, and then she was gone, followed by the sound of her heels clicking sharply against the obsidian floors.
Struggling to breathe normally, I calmed myself. I could do this.I wasn’t powerless anymore. I’d already made Andrea pay, and Gerald. I would do the same to Sunil if I had to.
Then I had an epiphany.
No one knew why people were disappearing across New York, but I had a pretty good idea. True, I didn’t know exactly what that faceless Thing was, but I knew more than anyone else. If I went to the board and told them what was out there, that would impress them, surely. Then I could sit back and let the company executives clean up my mess. Everybody won. Well, except all the missing people. They were probably dead.
I mulled this over for a couple of minutes. It could work. But what if it wasn’t enough? I had to put myself ahead of Sunil and every other executive assistant in the building. I had to gobig.
That was when I decided to save the world. It was the ultimate power move. Forget handing the board a name—if I stopped the Thing myself, I’d be a company hero with a one-way ticket to middle management.
And then I could send Sunil straight to Hell.
Galvanized, I jumped to my feet. Ms.Crenshaw’s absence gave me a golden opportunity to do some research, and I had that blood-smeared disc in my pocket. Two floors down was the Repository, home to a staggering amount of information about all things arcane. The answers I needed were probably sitting in some dusty book on a long-neglected shelf. All I had to do was find it.
My optimism lasted the fourminutes and thirty-six seconds it took to reach the elevators, descend two floors, and step out into the vastness of the Repository’s atrium. Then it crumbled in the face of literally millions of dusty books.
“Crap,” I muttered.
Our Repository was home to one of the greatest collections of occult knowledge and paraphernalia in North America, rivaled only by collections in New Orleans, San Francisco, and, surprisingly, Saskatoon. As the elevator doors slid shut behind me, I breathed in the mingled scents of old paper, wood polish, and something like metal heated to a white-hot extreme, the unmistakable tang of dark magicks. Galleries rose level upon level around the central atrium, reaching up to an airy, vaulted ceiling of pale stone easily eight stories overhead. Collected here were books, manuscripts, scrolls, incunabula, clay tablets, ragged sheets of papyrus, incised metal discs, and anything else that might have been used to record a scrap of arcane knowledge. Smaller rooms branching off the atrium held artifacts and objects numbering in the thousands, and circulating throughout the Repository were the librarians and curators whose job it was to document and study everything in there.
Overwhelmed, I approached a trio of people standing behind an imposing desk. Before I could ask for help, all three pointed simultaneously to a row of two dozen enormous volumes arrayed on heavy wooden stands on the far side of the atrium. At a loss, I turned and headed in that direction, passing long, polished wooden tables where other employees, many in the dark robes of middle management, leafed through written materials or studied objects taken from the Repository’s collections. I noticed one woman dabbing black liquid from her eyes with a cloth already streaked with the viscous fluid, careful not to let any of it drip onto the piece of crumbling parchment unrolled in front of her, probably trying to finish reading it before permanent blindness set in. Nearby, an older man mumbled to himself as he sketched the same figure over and over again in a notebook, pressing with such force that his pen tore through thepaper with every stroke. In front of him rested a medieval reliquary in the shape of an upright arm and hand, its silver blackened with tarnish, the bones within exuding a malevolent force I could feel as I hurried past.
Examining the huge books, I realized they were the Repository’s catalog, tens of thousands of entries written in a hundred different hands. After some thought, I began turning the five-foot-tall pages, only to discover that there wasn’t an entry forfaceless shadow monsters. Well, that sucked. I also found nothing onhungry monstersorthree-piece-suit monsters.Research is hard, I reflected bitterly as I sagged against the enormous tome in front of me. Checking my phone, I realized that I’d been doing this for almost eight minutes. No wonder I was exhausted. Why couldn’t the answers just pop out of some algorithm? Why did I have to do this the old-fashioned way? It was so unfair.
A piercing shriek abruptly shattered the stillness of my surroundings. Wheeling around, I watched as a figure engulfed in flames came running into view from one of the artifact collections, waving its arms wildly. Everyone turned to look while a librarian unhurriedly retrieved a fire extinguisher and sprayed down the burning person with a cloud of hissing foam. The screams gradually faded, replaced by high-pitched whimpering as the severely burned individual collapsed to the black-and-green checkerboard floor tiles.
“Another day, another immolation,” someone observed wryly, and I turned to see a person about my age watching the scene unfold with a look of faint disgust.
