Pann Grackenheit had been in Room 2-13, his office at the Global Company’s headquarters, for two hours when he opened the door. It was eight in the morning and fifteen of his subordinates had already lined up like supplicant pilgrims to give status updates. Only fifteen? It was barely May; how the fuck were they taking “summer Sundays” so early in the year? Hampus Bell had been too lenient, and the office was becoming an outright madhouse.
A fresh-faced boy—the conveyor of Pann’s second breakfast, the only one allowed to skip the queue—arrived with Pann’s usual morning sandwich, made the same way every day: deep-fried shark meat on rye with peanut butter, pickled grapes, salted pork, and vanilla ice cream. The contents had been expertly arranged from warmest to coolest, so the ice cream had not yet melted. This was, after all, supposed to be a sandwich, not a drink.
“You’re still here,” Pann said.
“The chef wants me to ask if you would like to try this on a bagel.”
“No,” Pann sneered. “I do not want a bagel. Only Vehu and seagulls eat bagels. I ought to have you fired for the suggestion.”
Receiving status updates was Pann’s favorite part of the day. The content was meaningless, of course, because information furnished by subordinates about their own performance was, by definition, self-serving and unreliable. Still, he relished the power implicit in his receiving them. Status meetings were about his status, no less and no more. Even random bodily motions of his—the rolling of a shoulder, a grimace when his intestines did something he disliked, the lowering of his voice toward the end of a sentence—could ruin someone else’s day, and that was a power he found almost as delicious as the pork-and-shark-and-ice-cream sandwich he now held in his hand. Every word he said had a hundred meanings, ninety-nine of which required no effort of intention, simply because he could turn off his subordinates’ incomes for any reason or none. The thought gave him a blinding hard-on, every time.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he called out to his supplicants—there were now eighteen—knowing that “a minute” meant thirty. Visibly through the open door, he looked over papers, making facial expressions he knew would be read for more than they meant.
A young man, ignoring the queue, came to his desk.
Pann looked up. “For fuck’s sake, boy. One does not simply walk into a Z-3’s office.”
“I didn’t want to be late.”
“You can’t be late if you weren’t invited.” Pann rapped a knuckle on his desk. “I don’t even know who you are.”
The boy stepped back.
“No, stay. You’re here now. Tell me your name.”
“My name’s Jay.”
“Your rank?”
“I’m a Z-7. Are you Hiero Gra—?”
“You’re a Z-7?” Pann narrowed his eyes. He would never get tired of that facial expression, the executive death glare. The only reason he didn’t practice and perfect it was that he hated mirrors. They had always conspired to make him look fat and ugly, and they were now starting to make him look old, too. “A Z-7?”
“That’s right.”
“Z-7 named Jay....” He slapped his hands on his large upper thighs. “Nothing’s coming to me.”
“I think I’m your mentee.”
“Oh. That’s today, isn’t it?” Pann stood up, snapped his gray suspenders, and put papers in a drawer. “Just let me get some things in order.”
This visit had come about because, at last month’s office snail race, a crafty Z-2 named Michael Poor, the only person of that rank Z-3 Pann felt deserved it, had replaced Pann’s salt with a harmless, useless sugar. Pann had been outcheated, counter-cheated—as a result, he inherited all of Hiero Poor’s administrative tasks for three months. Pann disliked training the young as much as anyone else—he agreed, like all of his generation, that the young ought to distinguish themselves through their work, rather than seek mentors—but he had lost the bet, fair as tits, and so he now had this job to do, and he would do it well, because he did every job well.
“You can sit down, Jay. I’ll have you raised to Z-5. I can’t be seen with a Z-7.”
Jay beamed. “So I’m a Z-5?”
“I’ll send it off before lunch. You’ll be a Z-5 by end of day.” Pann picked up a pen. “Let’s get started.”
“There’s a line outside your office.”
“I know. Ignore it. I can close the door if their presence annoys you.”
The boy looked around the office, failing to hide his being impressed by its size and views. “So, what’s my first assignment?”
“Wrong question, young Jake.”
“My name is Jay.”
“The first thing you need to know about office work is that you do not want to be assigned anything. Certainly do not volunteer, ever, unless you’ve done enough research to two things about the task: that it is easy to complete, and that it will improve your reputation to do it. There are plenty of unloved tasks that will not endear you to your superiors by completing them—rather than be grateful, they will view you with contempt for having landed in such a position in the first place. Good jobs will usually go to people who have more inside knowledge and access than you do. Bad jobs, the leftovers, are what gets assigned. Ergo, if you’re being assigned work, you’re losing. Instead, become one who assigns.”
“So, are you saying I should...?”
“I’m not saying to avoid work. Be busy. If you have nothing important to do, make the nothing you are doing look so important that no one dares interrupt it. Be selective in what you take on. Very little of what you will do here actually matters. Your boss, if he’s good at his job, understands that most people are mediocre—that’s not an insult, it’s the definition—and knows better than to rely on individual excellence, so if you perform at top levels, it either does not matter, or it matters because your boss made a mistake. In the first case, you have wasted effort that could have been invested in social polish; in the second, you have damaged rather than improved your career. That said, there is one category of task you should always take on.”
“What is that?”
Pann dug a pencil tip into a wad of spruce gum on his desk. “When can you be sure that a task will succeed?”
Jay touched his neck. “When you’ve done it before?”
“Yes, that is one case. But those are the repetitive, menial tasks that, while you will have to do them sometimes, you never want to let stick to your image. Instead, you want to be seen as adventurous, creative—someone who takes big, noble risks but always, always, always succeeds, as if you had a talent for predicting the weather four months out, something we all know to be...?”
Jay shrugged, then said, “Impossible?”
“Correct. So, how do you do this impossible thing? How do you choose ‘risky’ projects that, in fact, cannot fail? Well, Jay, the answer is that you look for jobs that have already been done, then verify the quality of the work, and finally claim after the fact to have been the idea’s originator all along. You will find it surprisingly easy to do this. People who are good at doing things are, as a general rule, terrible at capturing a fair share of the rewards. They view the dividing of spoils as some sort of filthy, mercantile after-task they ought to be above. So ‘help’ them with it.”
“Are you arguing that—?”
“Do you know the difference between an intelligent person and a smart one, Jay?”
“You’re going to tell me they’re not the same.”
“They’re not. An intelligent person knows things—words, facts, history, geography. A smart person knows what to do at the given moment. It is best to be both, of course. I am one intelligent motherfucker, but there are people in this building forty times more so—people who have spent decades studying foreign languages or mathematical equations, who are my age and still at Z-6. Why so? It is not because I am intelligent, but because I am smart, that I am in this chair, in this beautiful office, while they are where they are. Intelligent, honest men do intelligent, honest work—grunt work—that goes forgotten twelve minutes after it is complete. Dumb scoundrels find glory easily, but never know how to keep it. A smart scoundrel, though? If you become one of those, you’ll have power unmatched.”
“I think I understand,” Jay said.
“The higher your rank—this is one of the reasons I raised you to Z-5—the more power you will have to remodel narratives in your favor. I have sixty direct reports. I have no idea what fifty-seven of them are doing. The appearance of contribution is what makes a career, Jay. Let us say that two people claim sole contribution to a piece of finished work. Which one will the bosses believe? They will defer to rank, of course. A group of humans—the more of them there are, the more this is true—would prefer to be consistently wrong over even appearing inconsistent. If you hold higher rank than someone else, your superiority has been formally asserted by the Company, and it will not backtrack in its reasoning, because it never does. Therefore, you can force it to accept as truth your claim that you were the main contributor. The narrative becomes, so to speak, the place you make it.”
“So, you are advising me to take credit for other people’s work?”
Pann leaned back. “Correct.”
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“Don’t be a schoolboy. What, is this your first day?”
“Yeah—sorry, I mean, yes.”
“Another lesson: never apologize.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Pann shot a glare at the boy.
“I mean, not sorry. Fuck you.”
“That’s better, but watch your language. You’re a lucky cunt to be mentored by a Z-3 on the first day of your career. Don’t press.” Pann looked across the office before ringing his desk bell. “Now, sit back and watch as I work.”
Z-5 Elle, the first in the queue, stepped into the office.
Pann’s feelings about her were mixed. She did excellent work, but women simply didn’t belong in the office. It was fine to have women in mines and in factories—in fact, little girls were quite valuable, as they fit in small places—because poor people, being barely human, were essentially genderless. Office work, on the other hand, was sacred. It required stringent rules and protocols. The knowledge had to be bred into someone of how to behave inside this beautiful Global Company, this celestial garden of private prosperity, as it could not be learned by most people except over generations. Mixing the sexes coarsened women—it taught them to swear, to drink, to wear long pants—but its effects on men were even more pernicious, because the mere presence of women made men act differently. It forced the dominant to hold back—one could not fully enjoy authority, could not fully enjoy executing the will of the Global Company, while also in fear of upsetting women ill-equipped to see the true nature of the masculine workplace. As well, when it did become necessary to humiliate a subordinate man, it tripled the thing of it—even Pann was not this cruel—for the event to occur in front of women. Could a man who had been screamed at by his boss, in front of a secretary, go home and perform adequately for his wife?
Pann could not answer this, having never had a wife.
The Z-3 understood that Work—not the tasks, which usually didn’t even matter, but the institution—had always been and would always be a male dominance hierarchy. Nature had set clear rules to make it so. A woman’s value was determined at birth—she was either beautiful or ugly, a fact no boss could change. A man’s value, on the other hand, derived exclusively from his access to resources—inherently contingent, being forever subject to manipulations by higher-ranking men, and this vulnerability made them, in general, better employees. They worked because they had no alternative.
That all said, Pann respected Elle on a personal level. She was an enigma, being not at all ugly and therefore having no incentive to do her best work, and yet she inexplicably always did. Why had she taken on the man’s curse, with no need? Pann had not solved this riddle yet.
Patting his belly, he asked, “What’ve you got for me?”
She handed over an envelope. “Prints on the fire.”
“Thanks. Just what the doctor ordered.”
“You’re happy this morning.”
“I am, baby doll. This young man’s going to take half my workload.”
Jay, with a diffident smile, raised a hand. “Hi.”
“Oh!” Elle smiled at Jay. “Aren’t you cute? Learn everything you can from this man. He’s high up.”
“If that needs to be stated, then I need a new office.”
In fact, Pann did need a new office. Next door, Hampus Bell was getting another one of those naked-boy-pissing fountains installed, and it had required marvels of modern engineering to sustain the building’s rated water pressure with all of these adjustments. If the third best Patriarch, out of three, could get headquarters gutted for the sake of a wet statue, surely Pann was entitled to more than his measly 552 square feet.
“Not as much as this office needs you,” Elle said before she left.
Pann removed a glossy sheet from the envelope. “Look at this photograph.”
Jay oriented it toward him for a better look.
“I didn’t say touch it.” Pann laid out three more. “These were all taken a few days ago.”
“Up north? In the mountains?”
“No. That’s ash, not snow.”
Jay squinted. “Really?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you. I don’t like you enough.”
Jay pointed at the corpse. “Awful.”
“There is, when it comes to taking pictures, one good thing about the dead. To be still for ten minutes comes easily to them.”
Jay’s lips moved as if he were starting to say something, but he did not speak.
Pann gathered the prints and put them inside a desk drawer. “These are from Cait Forest, but we won’t need the pictures today. We’re de-naming someone.”
“De-what-ing?”
“De-naming,” Pann said. “Sometimes an individual chooses a course of action that requires us to re-truth the entire matter of the individual’s existence.”
A blank look crossed Jay’s face.
“Have you ever been to Cait Forest?”
Jay looked down. Pann knew this gesture well: the I-didn’t-get-in tell. The Z-3 would not hold it against the boy, because Pann had also missed Cait Forest’s cutoff by two points. He had applied, as he would insist any time the matter came up, during an unusually competitive year.
“I chose City Private,” Pann said, followed by what every Private grad said. “Trees make me sick.”
Jay nodded. “Class of ’94.”
“Good.” Pann massaged the base of his thumb. “Half the people who work for me are Cait Forest, and they’re no better at their jobs than anyone else. So, I’m sure you know by now about the fire.”
“Someone named Farisa, right?”
“Indeed, we call it Farisa’s Fire. We had a spy—Z-5 Barris Sotheby—whom we managed to make their headmaster. That was my idea, but don’t tell Hiero Bell.” Pann lowered his voice to a whisper. “If you’re good at your job around here, your boss’ll think your ideas are his.”
“Hampus Bell is your boss?”
“You seem surprised by this.”
Jay said, “You’re a Z-3, so I assumed your boss would be one of the Z-2s.”
“Do me a favor, Jim.”
“What do you need?”
“Go to the third floor. Get someone to show you how to make coffee.”
“Do you take it with—?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just… be away for a while.”
“Will do,” said Jay.
Pann opened his desk drawer and pulled out a stopwatch. This would be Jay’s first test. Did the boy have sufficient social acumen to know the correct duration of his sentence? Forty minutes, plus or minus ten percent, was the correct answer. To return in thirty-six minutes or less would show inadequate remorse, given the severity of his error. On the other hand, to wait forty-four minutes or longer would show a willingness to avoid work by prolonging a punitive delay, and laziness was almost as bad as obliviousness. The most important skill a person could have at Work was to know, immediately and exactly, how punished one must be.
While Jay was out, Z-3 Pann looked through Elle’s photographs. Music was now coming from the common area because one of the Z-5s, for shits and more shits, had installed a player piano. Pann could not see why such a stupid, pointless machine had ever been invented. One turned a crank for six minutes to hear four minutes of music—how inefficient. More importantly, Company life had no need of music—the work was itself a primal joy. Only in soft minds could booze, pussy, and song compare to the sense of satisfaction one got by completing the Global Company’s divine duty—running the world.
Jay returned with a mug after forty-three minutes and twelve seconds. Pann didn't check whether there was coffee in it. His bowels wouldn’t stand for another cup.
“You’re back,” he said to the college boy, who had passed his first test. The second was: Could Jay resume the conversation as if it had never been interrupted? “Because the old coot—”
“Your spy?”
“Barris Sotheby, the one we made headmaster—”
“Isn’t Cait Forest neutral?”
“Hilarious,” said Pann as he shifted his weight. “It is often declared to be so, yes, but if you understand our business, you will find that nothing is neutral. If a resource does not feed us, it feeds our enemies.”
“I was told in orientation that—”
“Let me guess,” said Pann. “The Company Never Competes, right? Yes, that’s a great line, because competition is best when the other side is unaware that it is taking place. You don’t want anyone to know they are losing until their loss, and thus your victory, has been completed, leaving nothing they can do about it.”
Another supplicant joined the queue outside Pann’s office.
“Close that,” said Pann, pointing to the door, before continuing. “As for Sotheby, or ‘Elior VI’, he’s a shitty Z-5, always has been, but he is one of us, nevertheless, and we are treating the fire as an attempt on his life. In the wake of this failed assassination, Cait Forest’s neutrality can no longer be afforded.”
“I understand.”
“You think you do, John.”
“Right. I think I do. So, why would we be de-naming him?”
“Not him. I just told you that for background. We did a field review a few days after the fire, and a submarshal tried to rob us.”
“What did he take?”
“Nothing important. Girl stuff, if you can believe that.” Pann chuckled. “Half of a diary, a few glass beads, and a hair ribbon found at the site. We’re not talking about some hardened criminal, just an old man facing retirement, so he wasn’t hard to catch. So, what do you think we did?”
“I would imagine you fired him.”
“We hung him, on the principle of the matter.”
“You killed him?”
Pann scoffed. “I did the paperwork. I’m a Z-3, not a savage.”
“Of course, but wasn’t he also one of our own people?”
“Where do you come from, Jed?”
“Hammington.”
“Never heard of it.” Pann knew the location, but this feigned ignorance reminded the boy of his hometown’s unimportance. “Where is it?”
“First Industry.”
“The Shithills,” Pann insisted. “‘First Industry,’ my munt. Are you a share seller? If you’re not, you should call it what it is.”
“Okay. I’m from Hammington, in the Shithills.”
“In your two-ass town, John, excluding the mom-and-pop taverns we keep around for their—what is the word, ‘authenticity’—how many employers are there?”
“Just one. Just the Global Company.”
“Right.” Pann tapped his desk with the butt end of a pen. “Just the Global Company. You work for us, or you don’t work. So, what happens when we fire someone?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
“Well, he’s got to eat somehow, and poor people don’t eat if they don’t work, so he’s got to work, but to get hired, he has to change his name. Maybe he moves to another country—”
“What’s a country?”
Pann laughed. “You’re too young. National governments were a problem we fixed a long time ago. The point is, he moves. We terminate his employment, but then he changes his name and ends up in a new city, two or three or five hundred miles away. What happens then? He gets right back in the system and might even attain rank.”
“Can’t have that,” said Jay, a little too fervently.
“No, of course we can’t. At our size, we can’t be sure we’ve gotten rid of someone unless we actually, you know, get rid.”
“I follow.”
“We also needed to send a message.”
“Message heard.” Jay chuckled. “I certainly won’t steal from you.”
“No, it’s not about theft. The Global Company isn’t against stealing. I mean, it’s what we do. We rob people and cheat them and convince them it’s ‘freedom’ to have it done to them because we give them the choice of which hole gets fucked first. If I may say so, we’re tit-sauce brilliant at it. The issue is disloyalty. Do you know what happens if a submarshal nicks us for twenty grot and we ignore the offense? Next year, a thousand sergeants take us for five each. We could dismiss all of them—at least, the ones we catch—but then we’re losing a thousand men, not one, and it’s not worth the loss of force to do so. So, we end up ignoring that, and then next year a million soldats see that small theft is ignored and take two grot—just two grot, hardly worth an arrest—per head for themselves. The losses add up. We can lose two million grot and the world won’t be any different, whereas we can’t lose a tenth of our army, so we’re stuck. At that point, we have to let them do it. But soldats are not, for the most part, known for discretion. Word will then get out to the public that we’re letting small things slide. We have a billion subjects. What happens if each of them takes us for fifty cents? What does it cost us?”
“Five hundred million.”
“Right. Five hundred million grot. There was a time one could buy a small country with that. On that topic, remind me tomorrow to introduce you to Bill in Politics. He decides who people vote for.”
“Whom,” Jay said.
Pann raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“I was fighting a yawn.”
Pann shuffled some papers. “So, we executed this submarshal last week. At the lowest levels, nonexisting someone is a quick process, because there’s only the physical part, which I’m glad isn’t my job, because I can’t stand the sight of blood. People like me—usually they don’t need someone as high as my level, but this is Cait Forest—are brought in afterward. We declare it legally true that the person’s life never happened. Re-truthing the matter of his existence pays off doubly, because we can now deem the family guilty of accepting wages for a nonexistent person—a clear case of fraud—and assign an interest-bearing debt for the offense.”
“It’s like magic,” Jay said.
“No, James. It is magic. What we do is the only magic that matters.” Pann coughed, and looked out the window pensively for a split second, then straightened his face because he disliked that visage. If he were saying this ten years ago, he would have believed it full barrel, but his doubts were growing. He was ten days away from his forty-seventh birthday, and he was starting to look and feel old, and there was nothing the Global Company could do about it.
“This submarshal,” Jay said. “What’s his name?”
“‘Some traitor or traitors who may or may not be in my attention.’”
“Some traitor... did what?”
“That’s his name. ‘Some traitor or traitors who may or may not be in my attention.’”
“I get it.” Jay smiled. “Of course, that is rightfully and correctly his name. But what was his name?”
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
“‘Some traitor or traitors who may or may not be in my attention.’ That was always his name.”
“His mother named him that?”
“He had no mother.” Pann crossed his arms. “He never existed. As you can see, our work can be very detailed. There’s a lot to learn. What did you say your name was? Joe?”
“Jay.”
“You’ll get a hang of it, Josh.”
Someone knocked on the door.
“What is it?” Pann asked as he opened the waist-high letter window, which he bent over to look through.
“Farisa’s d—”
“Dead. That’s yesterday’s news.” Pann had his doubts, but the Company had truthed on the matter twelve hours ago, and he gained nothing by voicing his true beliefs in front of two young men who might be spies for Z-2s or even Hampus Bell himself.
“No,” said the Z-6. “Farisa’s done.”
“I bet she’s well done,” Pann said. “So much for her run. The fire consumed her; now, wasn’t that fun?”
“Hiero, I mean that her diary is done.”
“Oh. Right.” Pann closed the letter window. “Very good.”
Jay asked, “Farisa as in Farisa’s Fire?”
“Who else?”
“So...”
“Go on.”
“Who is she? Why is she important to us?”
Pann groaned. What was being taught in school, if Jay did not know this? “She’s an old—well, she’s a young witch, but from an old time. You’ve heard about the Battle of Loran, right?”
“The third of August, seventy-six.”
“She was one of the assets we were hoping to secure. We thought we had killed her, but there were rumors—correct ones, it turns out—that she escaped.”
Jay said, “And does that make her important to us now?”
“No. She isn’t important, or she wouldn’t be, had events not conspired to make her, among a small number of people who know very specific things, a symbol of sorts. Loran is—well, this I do not fault your school for having omitted, as we rarely speak of it ourselves, but Loran is...”
“What?”
Pann lowered his voice and leaned in. “Loran is where we almost lost the fucking war.”
Jay looked like he had heard the last six words in a foreign language.
“I’m sure you were taught in your high school Company history class that we were destined to win, that the Global Company never makes mistakes, and that God would be on our side if one existed, but the truth is that we are all just people, every single one of us, with no special destiny but to take twenty thousand shits and then die. Every single event in history could have gone some other way. Life is patternless, Joe. We are not here because some natural or religious force demands there must be a Global Company, and this thing of ours is not guaranteed to exist five centuries from now. The two of us are here, eating well while millions starve, because we and our fathers were stronger and angrier, but also luckier, than other men. That is it.”
The boy started to say something, then stopped himself.
“This is a lot to learn, but you have time. You’ve had a very productive day, Jacob. One thing that would make it absolutely perfect is if you could chase down this diary for me before someone else finds it.”
“Where should I look?”
“Well, Jeb, it’s not in my office. I would know if it was.”
“Were.”
“That cold again?”
The Z-7 nodded, then got up and walked to the door. The line of people waiting to give status updates had gained length. Jay said, “There are at least thirty people out there.”
“I’m aware. They’ll wait. It’s what they do.”
#
The rest of the morning, Pann pretended to listen to his subordinates’ status updates, while in truth he was thinking about Farisa, whom he decided was almost certainly alive, and most likely to be in Exmore. To be inattentive was doubly beneficial—it gave his mind time to work on things he actually cared about, and it made his subordinates nervous about where they stood with him.
First lunch came at twelve fifteen, an hour late. His office door was closed now and he was whistling to himself, bobbing his head, as he completed tasks. Work was love, work was life; work was fuel and power and energy. One of the lies of modern physics, a discipline that had been infested over the past fifty years by shifty Vehu sciencemongers and their “electromagnetic wave” equations, was that work was somehow a transfer or expense of energy. The opposite was in fact, and had always had to be, true. Work awakened spirits. Energy was not spent during work; Work was where true energy came from. The sun did not shine properly but through the glass of a Company window.
“Farisa, I’m coming,” he said to himself.
He knew she was alive; he had always felt it to be true. In the past hour, he had drawn a set of markings on a map of Exmore, three hundred miles to the west. The town itself was eighty years older than its best days, so not the sort of place he liked to think often about, but a fortunate consequence of the March food riots—started by Snake Bay pessimou; who else?—was that six hundred ground troops were still there. If Pann was correct on the matter of Farisa being in that city, to close in and capture her would be facile. Streets and houses would fall off, one by one like the flanks of a butchered cow.
The Z-3 used pens to represent the city’s natural barriers and fortifications. He used coins to represent Company forces, each corresponding to approximately ten men. He considered sending reinforcements up the Bubo River to block the waterway.
“Farisa, I’m coming.”
Around one thirty, his second lunch arrived. The lard grits were good, but the chocolate ice cream had been placed next to the mashed potatoes and gravy, and the duck liver had been improperly cut. The afternoon chef was only one fuckup away, Pann decided, from a formal reprimand.
Someone knocked on the door.
“What?”
A Z-6 said, “Your new suspenders are here.”
Pann groaned before setting his meal down and getting up to receive them. In truth, he loathed wearing suspenders, but belts were no option given his weight and shape. It was not the concept of suspenders that bothered him, but the paucity of allowable colors—black, gray, and navy blue. Gray was timeless, but it softened his already formless shoulders. Black had been reputable until recently, when it had become a fashion of the young, leading him to associate it with fresh-faced Z-6s trying way too hard to impress their bosses. Navy blue, on the other hand, had the opposite problem—only the old-timers, the elder dragon legends who had lived beyond their rightful retirements and were now paid way too much to cough on each other in meetings, used it. Pann felt that, as the Z-3 in charge of the G-Fund, the Company’s most important budgetary division, his rank and importance entitled him to wear red, but he had already made this argument twice with Hampus Bell and been overruled both times.
Once he had set his new blue suspenders aside, he continued moving his pieces on the map of Exmore. The city had been established on six hills; Pann wished it had, like Moyenne, been set on flatter ground. None of these prominences were more than two hundred feet high, so moving men to wherever Farisa was hiding wouldn’t be difficult, but if the battle became the sort to require specialized artillery, the topography could add a day or two to the timeline.
“Farisa, I’m coming.”
Pann heard a commotion, a raucous sound that did not belong in this office. It was unprofessional. He opened his door and walked out into the common area where about ten men had gathered around a wheeled bulletin board, laughing at whatever had been posted on it.
“It really does!” said the high-pitched voice of a Z-6.
“I don’t see it,” the other man replied.
“Step back. You’re too close.”
“Oh, there it is.” More laughter followed. “It was right in front of me the whole time.”
Pann stormed over to the gathering. “What the hell is going on?”
A Z-6 pointed. “It looks like a butt!”
Pann did not like butts. At least in the corporate context, it would not have been inaccurate to say he hated them, given the long, expensive history he and butts had had. It had begun one summer evening when he noticed that an employee had left the office at half past seven—it was still light outside, for fuck’s sake—and, afraid of such time theft turning contagious, hired a professional speaker to motivate the charges. Other Z-3s and Z-2s, who had similar complaints about their young workers, invited themselves to the speech, to the point the affair merited use of the building’s main auditorium.
“This is the left circle,” the presenter said as he drew an oval on a chalkboard. He looked around the audience, so it would seem he had traded glances with each person individually, then drew a second one, intersecting the first at two places. “And this is the right circle,” he added with a prophet’s authority and solemnity, causing the crowd to coo in admiration. “In business, you need to be in both circles. At the same time, you must always be outside the circles.”
Pann, realizing his mistake, wanted to leave this inane presentation, but Hampus Bell had joined the audience, so he could not just go. Instead, he had to listen to the presenter’s unfocused rambling about his own poorly-drawn egg-like shapes for three hours, culminating in record-setting applause. Hampus Bell himself stood up at the end, giving profuse thanks for a speech he deemed “generationally brilliant,” and joking for months about hiring him into Pann’s job.
Since then, Pann and butts had never gotten along.
Eight pages had been taken from Farisa’s diary and put together on this corkboard not in their correct chronological order, but clearly for the shape the scorch marks made.
“Leave!” Pann wheeze-shouted at the young men. “This is sensitive information!”
At first, they did not part. They did not stop pointing and laughing at the pattern one of them had made. Had they no sense of decorum? Of professionalism? Did they not realize they were in the presence of Panniculus F. Grackenheit?
When the opportunity came for him to step forward and grab the corkboard, he did so, jerking it out of position before hauling it to his office and slamming the door behind him. He cursed the lout who had arranged the pages in such an order that made the charring line up so as to look—very convincingly, he had to admit—like a pair of human buttocks. Such a matter as this, the hunt for the world’s most symbolically important mage, was not admissive of humor. Butts were supposed to be hilarious; that was the entire point of them.
But Pann wasn’t laughing.
#
“Farisa, I’m coming,” said Pann to himself the next morning as he woke up in the four o’clock blackness. He knew he would not be returning to sleep. Yesterday had been another day of inadequate progress toward possessing his prize mage. Today was a new one—the sun would rise in an hour. He got out of the sleeping bag on the tiled floor. His apartment entailed the top three floors of its building, along with a private elevator, but this time of year he slept in a spare water closet, because he hated birds and their stupid fucking singing.
He possessed no alarm clock. As soon as his eyes opened, whether to take a piss or because of morning light, the horses of mind raced off to work. Such devices as alarms were for men who enjoyed the perversion of sleep because they had failed at life. They had ignored the glory of Work; it had, in its perfect justice, returned their negligence, leaving with meager meals, rented hovels, and a life in which they would taste less than one-hundredth of what was on offer—a life in which the borderline nonexistence of slumber was the best part. This problem was not Pann’s. If he had, as some Dyuri mystics held to be true, a shadow self who woke while he slept and slept while he was awake, he hoped that person also gave the Global Company his undivided and consummate love.
Pann’s daily doings were important. He had an office next to Hampus Bell’s. To more than a thousand men, he was not Pann Grackenheit or Mr. Grackenheit but Hiero Grackenheit—the boss, the sun, the source of meaning and money and society’s love.
“Farisa, I’m coming,” he said as he flushed the toilet, opened the door, and stepped into the dawn light.
Pacing around what could have been called a living room, had he ever used it, he caught sight of himself in a looking-glass installed by the penthouse’s previous owner that he had been unable to remove. His twelve-gallon gut and discolored forehead could not be ignored. He had always been ugly. At seventeen, he was doughy and pimple-faced but had scrawny limbs. At twenty-one, his face had begun to scar from his habit of picking at blemishes and scabs while concentrating on work. Twenty-five was the age at which he turned properly fat, with a flabby chest and extra mass for his neck and limbs. He had, for most of his life, enjoyed his shocking ugliness. It made his sexual victories real achievements, testament to the charisma of his wallet; it also made them more degrading to the other person, which he enjoyed mightily. There was a strength in ugliness that pretty people never had. Still, as the years passed, he found he no longer had the stark hideousness of a malformed and angry young man, so much as the forgettable sagginess of an ordinary midlife disappointment. Only his apparel, which he was not wearing, on account of being in front of his own private mirror at four fifteen in the morning, conveyed his status of being useful or important.
He had always told himself that it had been great fortune to be born ugly, because the degradations upon the other person—and also on himself—brought by his hideousness were just so delicious he could not help but explode in a cloud of cum and butter, but the truth was that beauty had never been made an option. If he got his hands on Farisa, though, who knew what might be possible? Could she fix the flaws in his skin, remove the hundred-pound cloak of blubber that betrayed him as a glutton, and possibly even make him young again? Could she return his plumbing to a state in which a five-woman night was not merely fantasy? Once he owned the young mage, he would see what he could make her do for him.
The Company had given up on magic long ago. There had been an era in which it would have spent twenty million grot and sent half a thousand men into a Teroshi village on word of a child mage, but the results of these jungle incursions had always been, like all the efforts involving mages, disappointing. Company work sent mages into madness—one only got a dozen good kills out of one, at the absolute most, before the asset turned so unpredictable and dangerous, even to skilled handlers, as to require euthanasia. War, in truth, demanded standardization and regularity, not the irregularly expressed talents of a few odd people who were often born in inconvenient places. Pann, however, did not need a killer. He did not need a battle mage. He needed a healer, someone to make him pleasing to look upon and maybe a decade or two younger, before discarding her to... once used, her fate didn’t matter much. The prestige of capturing a mage whose name still meant something to the older crowd was an added bonus.
As he left his building, he noticed that rain overnight had wetted the street. This was that blue hour in which one had to do many things for oneself, because the cab horses were still sleeping, so he walked the quarter mile to the office by enough light to avoid puddles. The front door of Headquarters was locked, as always at this hour, so he reached into his pants pocket, finding a hole. He checked the other pocket, then his jacket, finding nothing.
“Shit in my cunt,” he said, on realizing the key had fallen out.
The lighted dial said it was four forty. The night cafeteria would be accessible and unlocked, so he went there instead. The single worker, an olive-skinned cook who handled everything from the griddle to the cash register, was one of the good ones; he could scramble eggs better than any housewife.
“You’re early,” said the man as Pann walked in.
“In fact, I’m twenty-three hours late. More, in fact, but I’d be later if I told you the whole story.”
“Will you be having what I usually send up?”
“Yes, but I could have the shark meat fried in truffle oil? It’s going to be a big day. I have a lot of important work.”
“I am sure everything you do here is important, Hiero Grackenheit.”
“My friend, it’s not even five in the morning. You can turn the flattery off until at least six.”
The cook, clerk, cashier—as said, he did it all, with admirable efficiency—made the sandwich while Pann reached into a snack bowl of deep-fried crayfish heads and ate a few. They’d been sitting there for too long to taste good, and these were technically food for people five social classes below him, but he was furiously hungry.
“Thank you.” Pann handed him a one-grot coin once the sandwich was made. “Keep the change.”
The doors of Headquarters were opened a few minutes ahead of schedule. In this flagrantly honest hour of the morning, the lobby didn’t look its best. At six, the man whose job was to cover the front desk’s scuff marks with his white-gloved hands would arrive, and he would remain there all day, but one who arrived at this hour had to look at damaged wood. Pann’s gratitude toward the Employer was unwavering—how could it not be?—but sometimes, even he could not deny that the Company was just stingy. This aging office in an unfashionable corner of Moyenne, a century-old hand-me-down from Alcazar, was but one sign of this stingy character. The building’s exterior, mostly concrete with a top-heavy design, made even sunny days gloomy, but the inside was not always better. The stairwells were unadorned and smelled bad. Elevator banks had been installed, given this building’s nine-story height, but were never used and Cyril Bell, finally, had filled the shafts in, citing security concerns. As a result of this anachronistic, inexcusable dependence on stairs, the world’s most important people used the second floor, while the best views were wasted on peasants.
Coming up a flight of stairs, Pann passed a young man walking listlessly.
“I’m twice your age and fatter than a walrus, and even still I’m moving faster than you are. That’s not a good thing.”
He thought the kid might be a janitor, or a low-ranking engineer forced to use the laboratories during hours no one else wanted, or one of those supernumerary Z-6s the Company had minted to make room for an Executive’s son—whatever the case, it sickened him to see the young take the Global Company for granted. They complained about too much work or too little “important” work, as if they had any idea what was important. They complained about low wages and high prices. They complained about their bosses and their apartments and the disparity between the life they had expected and what they got. They failed to understand that other structures had been tried for human civilization, but none had worked. The Global Company was the best it could ever get—if ten people lived on an island, and nine were generous but one was greedy, the one to take everything valuable would naturally become the leader—it went no other way among humans. A world without winners and losers, without owners and paupers, would leave everyone equally impoverished, because no joy could exist unless someone else, ideally at a precise distance—far enough away to make it safe, close enough to still be visible—was miserable. This was the iron truth that gave the Global Company its right to exist. It, for the good of human culture, impoverished the many, so a few could truly live. And yes, this did sometimes involve paperwork that was no one’s preferred use of time.
On the second floor landing, he opened the door and walked across an empty open bay to his office. The rising red sun had lit a few of the buildings visible through his window. A perfect and productive day had begun—he could feel it. There would be few distractions; there would be only good news on the wires, he decided. There was no chance of anything going wrong...
He felt a wetness in his hand.
That stupid fucking clerk, in making Pann’s sandwich, had put the shark meat, freshly hot from the deep fryer, next to the ice cream. The bread was soggy and his hands were sticky and he was furious.
“Farisa, I’m coming.”
#
“It is now ten o’clock,” said Hampus Bell as he leaned back in the Mahogany Chair. “Shall we begin the meeting?”
Pann looked under the table to make sure no plebeians were listening in. “We are clear.”
A dozen Z-2s and Z-3s were in the room, as well as the Patriarch and a painting of Mount Grog that hung over his shoulder. One could have seen the real thing from here, had Hiero Bell not boarded the office window up because natural light made his hands look old.
“I smell change in the air,” said Hampus Bell.
Rarely did a meeting pass without the man’s issue of this mixed metaphor, this proclamation of olfactory confidence that was also an aphorism of imminent transformation. Pann supposed it was necessary to say such things in the presence of young workers—although the Company’s real purpose was total social and political stagnation, since those at society’s pinnacle had nothing to gain from movement. The promise of progress and upheaval might have been pleasing to the ears of some, but Pann could have done without it. It made no sense—change from what to what, and why did it always have to have a smell?
The Patriarch steepled his hands and leaned forward. “What news do we have today?”
One of the Z-3s began. “Cassi Stone, the girl who woke up her fellow students and helped them get underground—”
“A local frappin’ hero,” jeered one of the Z-2s.
“—testified that she saw Farisa running due east. If we can corroborate this, we can rule out her survival. No one can outrun a grass fire.”
One of the ancient Z-2s cough-cheered.
“Don’t,” said the Patriarch.
“She’s the enemy, Hiero.”
“A funny notion, that of enemy. When you are taking a city, you assign that name to its inhabitants in order to justify what must be done to acquire power, but once you have done so, they are your subjects and you must love them as such.” He spun a dried-out fountain pen on his desk. “I met Farisa once, when she was a little girl.”
A thin, balding Z-3 asked, “Didn’t she—?”
“No,” Hampus said. “She didn’t do that. Some other time, we’ll talk about what really happened.”
Silence fell. Pann could hear one of the Z-2s scratch himself.
Hampus continued. “Had we caught her, we would’ve had to kill her, but I would not have enjoyed the deed.”
“She might be alive,” Pann said.
The Patriarch’s eyebrows moved. “Alive?”
“Yesterday, I was sure as a horse’s dick—”
“Panniculus Grackenheit, language!”
“Sor—It won’t happen again.” Pann touched his neck, where a tiny spit of hair stood. While shaving, he’d missed a spot between his chins.
His boss said, “Please continue. Yesterday, you were sure...”
“Yesterday, I was sure as sure can be that the fire had killed her, for all the reasons that have been discussed over the past few days. However, having read her diary, I think she’s alive. She knew in advance that something terrible was about to happen.”
The Patriarch leaned into one side of the Mahogany Chair, testing its armrest. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“She had been fired—bad choice of words—”
“Terminated.”
“—from her job at Cait Forest. She was going mad. She had grudges. She had motives, and she knew how much death and destruction a fire would cause.”
“The official story, yes.” Hampus adjusted his glasses. “Internally, though, we think it was natural.”
“Really?”
“The worst kind of calamity—the kind we don’t cause.”
The men around the table laughed.
“Still, it is said that Cait Forest has not burned for thousands of years. If so, it was about time.”
Pann leaned forward. “I believe I can prove that she set the fire. In the diary, she says that—”
“Off with this silliness. I need your attention on the G-Fund. Not this Farisa nonsense.”
“I have the diary with me. I’ll only need two minutes.”
“I’ll give you one.”
“Thank you,” Pann said.
He walked to his office next door and retrieved the corkboard. He had rearranged the scraps of paper, previously set to make a gluteal pattern for a jejune comedic effect, in their correct order. If the scorch marks made a shape of any kind, it was one he had not seen for a long while. Pann set the board on a chair he had placed earlier so all the others in the room could see it, and produced a magnifying glass so he could show important details.
“I present to you, the Witch’s Tale.”
One of the Z-2s started cough-cackling until he wheezed and pounded his chest. Another Z-2 slapped his prehistoric thigh in hilarity. A third, who had previously fallen into a doze while picking his teeth, erupted in bellowing laughter.
Pann crossed his arms. “What’s so funny?”
“The burn marks look like a lady’s twat.”
“Language,” said Pann, glaring at the Z-2, hoping to win the favor of his profanity-averse boss.
“I don’t like that word at all,” Hampus said as he stood up from the chair. “On the other hand, you’re right.” The Patriarch let out a permissive chuckle, and then he as well could not stop laughing. “It’s funny. You don’t see it, and then you do, and then you can’t not. It’s frapping hilarious. Thank you, Pann.”
“Hiero Bell,” Pann said. “I’m glad you enjoy the… visual aspect… of this presentation, but don’t you want to discuss what she wrote? There might be clues about what happ—”
“It’s only for the archive,” Hampus said. “Do you really think we’d spend Company time on what a woman has to say? How long have you been working here?”
#
In the basement archive, Pann prepared the diary pages, setting each one between two sheets of cellulose that would adhere together and preserve it. He triple-checked his layout to be sure that the charring of the paper made no suggestive patterns; this was serious work.
He now knew for sure Farisa wasn’t dead, because his boss had made her demise the official position, but the Company never truthed a matter so aggressively unless it was truthing something that was not true. Why did Hampus Bell want the world to think Farisa had died? What was he hiding? Why did this girl’s fate matter so much to him, and why did it almost seem like he was protecting her?
More evidence was coming in every day to confirm his suspicion that she had deliberately started the fire. One couldn’t find five hundred square miles in southern Ettaso without a military base, and those kept immaculate weather records, and that night the skies everywhere had been as clear as a virgin’s piss, ruling out thunderstorms. Chemists had also proven, working with ash samples, that an explosion had occurred at the Witch’s Cabin, and that dangerous compounds had been kept there for a long time, so this had been a planned event. The method and the motive had been established, and the public had already decided on Farisa’s guilt, so why was Hampus Bell so reluctant to accept the obvious conclusion?
As he demolished a deep-fried pancake, folded and stuffed with sour cream, corned ham, and candied grapes, Pann gave the diary one final read before putting it into storage. Almost all of it was boring girl stuff. Farisa felt ugly one day, pretty the next. Why did women’s appraisals of their own appearance vacillate? Pann took pride in his acceptance of being stone fucking ugly, a fact that made all he had achieved more impressive. Farisa also had a habit of drawing herself in pencil, and she was not going to win awards for this artwork, but she was not bad at all for an amateur. In one portrait, she wore a sleeveless blouse and denim skirt, her hair wavy and free.
“Role conflict,” he said to himself, as no Cait Forest teacher would have been allowed to dress like that. “Could that explain the trouble you got yourself into, Miss La’ewind?”
In another portrait, she wore a Lorani saria, midriff exposed, with a tattoo of a stormcat above her hipbone.
“Oh, you’re so fascinating,” he said as he rolled his eyes. “You better hope these pages give me something more interesting than that, or I’ll spank you when you get here.”
He tore a gristly piece of meat from his stuffed pancake. The sour cream had been applied unevenly and he was not happy at all about the way his second lunch had been prepared. The kitchen staff had forgotten to add maple syrup.
There had to be something in the diary pages he was not seeing. He had been over them several times, but something eluded him, some clue that a sharper version of him would have picked up. He started reading the witch’s words aloud, yet again, this time in the most mocking voice he could.
“April second, ninety-four. The weather this morning was better than yesterday, with... oh, blah fucking blah. I still miss her so much, but I... Oh! Here’s something! Dearest students, I can never show it to you, but I am thankful to you all. You show up. You care. You’re mine, mine, mine. I haven’t made it clear enough, but I love you. This woman, for the least of you, would go to the edge of the world with the stars and galaxies at her back.”
With a fingernail, Pann dislodged a gnarl of processed connective tissue from his teeth. “Aren’t you a poet, Farisa? The stars, the galaxies!” Pann belched as digestive juices crawled up his throat. “This woman! This woman would go!” He scoffed. “The stars and galaxies at her back—refers to herself in third person, as if it weren’t pretentious enough.” He sucked his teeth. “Stars, galaxies.” Stars, galaxies. Stars, stars, galaxies. Stars and.... Spiral. Spiral and star. Vehu, the Vehu. Of course, the Vehu. Who but they would protect a fugitive witch?
“Vehu District.”
He ran upstairs to his office. His map of Exmore was still there. He drew a box on it, no larger than a fist. He clapped his hands together and laughed with glee. He had feared his grid search of Exmore would take weeks—he was now confident he would have his prize witch in a matter of days.
#
“You deserve a break,” Pann said to himself.
He had been working overnight; the sun had left the sky to turn blue and black and blue. The buildings behind were pink and red again. He had taken less than two hours of sleep; he had consumed more coffee than his intestines could handle, but he felt jubilant as he huffed his way up the stairs to the fifth floor, where a window looked out over World Street.
This vantage point brought into sight Moyenne’s notorious “viewing wheel,” a monstrosity built last century when steam technology had been novel. At one time, forty cents bought an eight-minute journey into the sky, where one could see, from the top, a much greener and prettier city than what existed here today. The company that had built the structure had gone out of business decades ago, leaving the wheel to sit there, rim broken and gondolas rotting, glaring upon the city like a diseased eye. He could also see, more importantly, the two-horse black carriage, indistinct except for its uncanny cleanliness, approaching Headquarters. Traffic was thick, so he judged that Hiero Bell’s vehicle would take seven minutes to arrive.
Pann divided the phases of the prank thusly: ninety seconds to get back down to the second floor, two minutes in Bell’s office for the deed itself, one minute more to return to his own desk and pretend it was an ordinary morning, and then two-and-a-half minutes to get himself into character, so to speak, and “just happen to walk by” his boss’s office to observe the man’s reaction. On such a schedule, he could afford no mistakes.
He walked giddily down the stairs. He’d left his shoes in his office, and an obese big toe stuck out of a hole in his sock, so he was glad no one else was around. When he opened the second-floor door, his stomach gurgled. The sound was loud; there was much gurgle and much stomach. For this occasion, he had added three helpings of pinto beans to his first-breakfast sandwich, and now the glorious bubble he had prepared was as sharp as a dagger inside him. This, he reminded himself, was the sort of pain all heroes had to take in stride—at least, in waddle—while on important journeys, but it did hurt like hell, so he would glad to let the parcel of gas go.
The doorknob of his boss’s office did not open as jiggled it. “Dammit, Hampus.”
The Patriarch rarely locked this door, but he had done so last night, so Pann was glad to have gone the night before to the safe—the combination was Tenessa Bell’s birthday—to get a spare copy of the key. It cost Pann ten seconds—he was starting to cut it close—to fiddle around in his pocket, but he did find it. In a desperate fluid motion, he thrust the metal wand into the door slot and turned it. Click! He was in.
Pann hovered over the Mahogany Chair. This would be no ordinary passing of gas. No, it would be a forceful eviction, a pneumatic injection of flatus, so penetrating of the wood’s grain that the glorious stench would linger for days. The highest office in the Known World would become, in literal terms, a gas chamber.
The five-second release sent waves of pleasure through his body—the sharp cloud made a pleasing sound on the way out; the fruity odor of relief would not become the miasma of death until he was gone; he pictured the smile on his boss’s dumb face as he settled into a warm seat.
A door hinge whined.
Pann’s chest hurt and his hands were starting to shake. He had made sure to give himself time, but someone had caught him here. The backs of his legs felt that phantom wetness he sometimes got in the summer, but he hadn’t felt hot until a moment ago, so he worried that he had let the worst happen.
A woman’s voice said, “Hi.”
“I…” Pann shook and his voice quavered. “I’m not here. I mean, I am here, but I’m looking for a... it doesn’t matter. I found it.”
He could tell by the woman’s face that she was a Hampus hire. Every executive had a physical type. Michael Poor hired dark-haired women, and Evan Bone’s hires, though he always insisted they were Grunwind girls, looked dangerously close to being half-breeds of a skin color that didn’t belong here. Hampus Bell, however, liked his women pale, blond, and tall with tiny earlobes and no moles.
“Are you Hiero Bell?” she asked.
The girl, for a moment, seemed to be elsewhere, deep in concentration. Pann felt a shimmer of warm light, like he’d taken a dip in a clear tropical ocean.
“No, of course not,” she added. “I know who you are. Pann. We’ll be working closely together. I look forward to it.”
“M-m-me too,” he said. He felt woozy and happy and could not explain why. “W-what’s your name?”
“I’m Kayla.”
“I’m g-glad to meet you, Kayla.”
“H’vast Hampus,” she said, with her arm up and out at a forty-five-degree angle.
“We don’t really say ‘H’vast’ around here. Not since the Smitz days.” Pann’s knuckles tightened around a fountain pen he’d unconsciously snatched from his boss’s desk. “This. This is what I was in his office for. I meant to return it, but...”
Kayla smiled and left.
The Z-3 ran to his office and shut the door.
“Dammit, Hampus,” he muttered under his breath. “Hiring another money-faced blonde cunt. We have enough of those. I’ll make sure she doesn’t last a month here.”
Pann removed his pants and underwear, wiped himself clean with a cover letter sent by an inexpensively educated job applicant, then put on the set of spare clothes he’d kept in his office for cases like this. He put his old garments in a burn bag, but knew that the document destruction office wouldn’t be open till nine o’clock, so he added orange peels and coffee grounds to mask any odors.
His neck quivered and when he touched it, he could feel his rushing heart. The way Kayla had scared him had nearly put him in an early grave, but she would pay for this. He would end her career before it began, and he would do it well, because he did every job well.
The prank would not be complete until he could see his boss’s reaction. He checked his pants, because that phantom wetness was still bothering him, three times and they were dry and clean, dry and clean, dry and clean. The world did not change each time he touched it—that was good; this was real. He waited until he heard Hiero Bell open the stairwell door, counted to thirty, then began his own saunter to 2-13, where he stopped to stretch a leg to give the appearance that he had been in his seat for a while. He watched as the stupid Patriarch sat in the stupid Mahogany Chair with a stupid smile on his face.
“Good morning, Hiero Bell.”
“Good morning, Pann!” the Patriarch said. “I smell change in the air.”