I met Alice Pilcher, CEO at PaperChase Process Servers And Bail Bondsmen, four years ago. She was at her desk, dressed in the same style of bland pantsuit she always wore. It made her look like she’d researched the most popular suit that female executives were wearing ten years ago and bought the one suit in ten different colors so she wouldn’t have to think about it.

Peeling an orange, she talked on the phone as I wheeled a large garbage container next to her office door. “What you need to understand,” she said, “I don’t want to know how you-,” she paused again, almost rubbing her eyes with her hands before remembering they were covered in orange pulp. “I know what’s in the ad, it’s on my desk right now.”

I reached for the wastebasket by her desk and she waved for me to wait for a moment, an apologetic look on her face. “Fair? Look, this isn’t a lottery or a guessing game. What do I look like? A door to door salesperson? I don’t have to be fair. You don't put out ads so you can cater to every person who answers it. I took out the ad so that the right person can find me. Either you meet the qualifications or you don’t.” She shrugged her shoulders, even though the person on the phone couldn’t see it. “Don’t call here again.”

She finished peeling the orange, cleaned her hands with a wet wipe tissue from the box on her desk and carefully swept the orange peels into the garbage can. She nodded. “Thank you.”

I looked up from the newspaper on her desk. “You’re offering a thousand dollars to anyone who can tell you what page the book in the office next door is turned to?” I walked her wastebasket towards the garbage barrel outside.

“Yes.” She started breaking the orange into individual slices and placed them on a piece of paper on her desk.

“Plenty of people would offer to split it with one of the janitors if they took a peek in there for them.”

Alice smirked. “I put in the lock for that door myself. I’m the only one who has the key.”

“Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Why is that?”

“Because there is no book on the desk of the office next door.”

Alice’s hands stopped breaking the orange. “Yeah?”

“There are two apples sitting on a piece of paper on a desk. One of the apples has a bite on it. The bite turned brown.” I emptied the wastebasket and placed it back on the side of her desk.

She turned to look at me, taking in my janitor’s overalls. “Anything else?”

“The paper has something written on it. ‘The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. You suffer because you want to know what’s going on.’”

Alice smiled. “Frank Zappa.”

“Who?”

“They don’t pay me to teach music education, but I got a job for you if you’re interested.”

Smiling, I pulled the bandanna off my head and ran my fingers through my fauxhawk fade. “How about that money first?”

Alice’s eyes widened at the sight of the clashing colors in my hair. “You look like you skinned a parrot and stapled it to your head. You should stab whoever did that to you.”

“I’d be committing suicide.”

“You did that to yourself?”

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“Does the fashion critique come with the job? Because I have a mirror at home.”

Alice didn’t apologize, but the spread of hundred dollar bills on her desk put me in a forgiving mood. After four years the money stayed interesting enough that when she asked me to meet her in person on the roof of her building, I showed up.

When my pager buzzed on my belt the next day, I still didn’t have an answer for her. I reached under my jacket, glanced at the number, then looked around the busy Second St train station for a pay phone.

Ever since I left the monastery, I didn’t need much sleep and I didn’t need much comfort to get the small amount of it I needed. I was a nomad of the Goldtown Transportation System. I rode the trains in the morning and picked one of the bigger stations or bus terminals at random. After I made sure there was a pay phone around, I’d sit in the most out of the way corner with the widest view I could find. I’d usually zone out for, at most, four hours. It was more like sleep’s distant, meaner cousin. I hadn’t had a dream in years.

I walked over to the pay phone and dialed Alice’s number. While listening to the phone ring, I glanced at the flat screen television hanging on the station’s tunnel wall just as the publicity photo of a clean-cut muscular man in silver spandex with the outline of a black spear on his chest came on. The Lance.

The television on the tunnel wall was muted, but since the picture next to The Lance’s publicity photo was that of his third wife, whose name I couldn’t remember, I didn’t need to hear it. Everyone knew what the story was about. The Lance’s wife had been complaining bitterly for a week to any news outlet that would listen about the difficulties involved in serving divorce papers to a man who could fly and occupied a base that was located in a desert where the temperatures got so high, tires melted.

Alice would have loved to deliver The Lance’s papers. The only problem was that the position for the sentinel PaperChase had remained unfilled in the company for the last couple years after Michael Chase, the great-grandson of the original PaperChase, sold her the company, building and all. After staying the minimum number of years required by the contract they signed, he’d abandoned the company for greener pastures.

I had zero interest in mask management or sentinel insurance, but Alice ranted about it over the phone often enough back when I was emptying her trash that I had a small understanding. Being a super-powered process server should have been the best of both worlds. Because what they were doing was considered a necessary public service, they got a reduced insurance rate and they only had to serve a few subpoenas a month in order to stay eligible. The problem was that the niche that the PaperChase company specialized in, serving papers to masks, was quite possibly the worst way to get known in the sentinel community.

It made an oh-I-forgot-how-terrible-humans-are-thanks-for-reminding-me sort of sense. If you, say, delivered divorce papers to the Lance, what was the likelihood that he’d request your help for a high profile team-up or vouch for you the next time there was an opening for a spot at the Crusader’s League? PaperChase made okay money, but Michael Chase, the son of the original PaperChase, never got tired of mentioning how much more money he’d be making if he quit wearing the white mask and changed his name. Once he sold the company to Alice he bailed out as soon as the contract allowed.

Alice finally picked up the phone. “Glad you decided to take the assignment.”

“What makes you think I have?”

“Because if you weren’t going to do it you wouldn’t have bothered calling me back.”

True.

Alice rattled off everything I needed to know, including when and where I’d be picked up. Then she was silent for so long that for a second I thought she’d walked away and forgotten to hang up. “Hello?”

“I know you have a thing about masks,” she said. “I hoped you wouldn’t have a problem with this since, from the little that I could gather, these guys seem more like opportunists with money to burn and some expensive toys rather than the real deal. If I’m wrong, any time you think it might put you in danger, don’t tough it out. Drop it. I can get through this some other way.”

I had two hours before I was scheduled to meet my mysterious employers in front of Alice’s building, so I took the train two stops down into New Brixton to run an errand.

I smiled at how Alice’s sudden attack of decency had quickly turned into her hanging up on me as soon as possible before I could change my mind. Alice thought that the reason why I avoided any work with masks was that I had some kind of phobia. I never gave her any details. I just turned down the work, even if it did pay three times as much. I wasn’t paid to correct her assumptions. I avoided sentinels for the same reason that I avoided any of the esoterics I might stumble into in Goldtown. Besides the monastery keeping track of them, it was uncomfortable being around people you’d grown up thinking you might have to kill.