I got it, although I disapproved: regs meet reality. Andy needed to perform some sort of procedure that the Book said needed two bodies present, but he couldn’t be bothered waiting for a qualified pair of hands. Instead he ticked the checkbox by ordering up a receptionist, then did it solo. Once upon a time that kind of sloppiness had been my forté—I’d gotten over it, but Andy had always been a little too casual to leave in a hands-on role. (That, I theorized, was why he’d ended up dangling from the bottom rung of the management ladder—too high to do any damage, too low to make anyone else do any damage.) “I’ll go see if he needs a hand,” I promised her. “If you’d rather go home I’ll sort it out.” I walked over to Andy’s office door—diagonally across the open plan/cubicle area from my own—and knocked twice.

There was an unhuman presence on the other side of the door: it made the skin on my wrists tingle and brought an electric taste to my tongue. I listened with my ears and an inner sense I’d been uneasily practicing for the past year. Tuning in on the uncanny channel brought me a faint sizzling, chittering echo of chaotic un-minds jostling for proximity to the warm, pulsing, squishy meatsacks. The lightning-blue taste of a warded summoning grid—not a large one, just an electrified pentacle unrolled on a desk—was like fingernails on a blackboard: Andy was conducting midnight invocations by the light of a backlit monitor. Okay, so he wasn’t being totally stupid about this. But it still set my teeth on edge.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s Bob. Am I safe to enter?”

“I’m running a level one. Make sure you don’t violate the containment and you should be fine.”

“Not good enough, Andy. Is it safe for me to enter?”

Andy sighed heavily. “Yes, Mother, I’m deactivating it now.”

“Good.” A muffled click came from the other side of the door, and I felt the inchoate gibbering subside. I put my hand on the doorknob and pushed.

“Come on in, Bob.”

I squeezed inside his office. Andy hovered over a home-brew lab, pale-faced and skinny, staring at me with bleary eyes. He was older than me, a member of a generation that had grown up wearing a shirt and tie to the office and who still tried to keep up appearances; he was the junior ops manager who approved my application and gave me my first ever field test. It was odd to see him in a polo shirt and chinos. “What’s the project? Couldn’t you wait for a health and safety check?”

He managed a self-deprecating shrug. “You know how it is; it’s my weekly ten-percenter.”