Between Watches: The Parcel

The parcel had no return address.

It arrived at the operations floor on a Tuesday, addressed in a careful hand to no person at all: FOR THE INCIDENT DESK, DOWNTOWN. Inside was a tin of shortbread, homemade, and a note in the same careful hand, and the note said: For the desk. You found us. R. & J. Calder.

You were still holding it when Vaughn came through on one of her unannounced walks, clipboard first. She read the note without asking, the way she read everything, and set it back down precisely where it had been.

"People don't write to programs," she said. "They write to people. That is the problem with you, for my purposes." She looked at the tin the way she had looked at the scope on the first night. "A program I can evaluate. A person, the region starts to depend on, and dependence is harder to audit and worse to lose. You are becoming a person down here. I'd stop you if I knew how."

She took one shortbread, ate it standing up, with no visible change of expression.

"Noted," she said, to the tin, and went back upstairs.

Sam and Wren came by that same week, between alerts, because Wren had apparently been agitating to see the desk since the lake. You heard them before you saw them, which was fitting; you had only ever heard them.

"So this is the desk!" Wren arrived the way they went into water, completely, all at once, already touching things. They took in the console, the phones, the hook with the spare headset, the light. "It's uglier than I pictured. I mean that nicely." Then they found the tin, read the note without a shred of Vaughn's restraint, and beamed. "The raft couple. Sam, the raft couple sent shortbread." Two pieces disappeared. A third was considered and, visibly, banked for later.

It was strange and fine, matching the faces to the voices. Wren in person was exactly Wren on the wire, which told you something true about them that you filed permanently: there was no radio version. What went down the cable was the whole person.

Sam stayed by the door, the way pilots stand when the rotors are only mostly stopped. On his way out, last, he paused.

"Wren trusts easy," he said, quietly, not quite looking at you. "I don't. Between the two of us we're usually right." He settled his cap. "We're both right about you. That's rarer than you'd think. Don't spend it cheap."

You put the note in the notebook nobody had issued. It was the first page of a file of your own, though you did not think of it that way yet: the things the sheet upstairs would never print. A tin with no return address. A swimmer's voice saying deal. The specific sound of Sam saying good shift, which he spent the way Mac spent you'll do.

The second parcel would come a year later, and the third a year after that, and by then the careful hand would be writing FOR OUR DESK, which is a promotion no directorate can issue.