Chương 111: CDM 2, Chapter 47: Potential Client

"The Divas got a weird voicemail," Beth said when I stepped out of my bedroom. She lay on her back on the couch, looking at her phone. I jumped and grabbed my heart.

"I didn't think you'd be awake."

"They said they got the number from a bulletin board and wanted to hire us to take care of a monster problem."

"What?"

"It was on the VOIP number. I emailed you the transcript." I pulled out my phone.

"I have to get to work."

"I didn't say you had to read it now."

"Are we pretending last night didn't happen?" I asked. Beth shrank.

"Is that an option?"

"I'm worried about you."

"I know. How badly did I mess up with Frank?"

"He seemed pretty understanding," I answered.

"I get that you're embarrassed, but can I give you a suggestion?"

"Okay."

"Own it. Go into the shop this morning and apologize. That will suck, but you'll know for sure where he stands after. That's better than trying to guess for the rest of your relationship." She didn't reply. Her eyes drifted down as she thought about what I said. I read the voicemail transcript:"Yeah, uhh… Hi. So you posted an ad about monster hunting at Steve's. Got an issue I'd like you to take a look at. People keep telling me it's bears, but I'm not buying it.

Don't know what you charge, but if I can afford it, I'll pay." Then they left a number. Ad about monster hunting? Who the hell was Steve?

"Sorry, Beth, but I do have to get to work. Think about what I said." She nodded.

"Thank you for getting me last night."

"Don't worry about it." Before I started my car, I forwarded the transcript to Megan. She texted me back before I could shift into drive.

"Who tf is Steve?"

"I don't know the name either. Was hoping you did."

"Have we done advertising?"

"I don't recall that either."

"But they got the number. Weird." When I got to my desk in the RAID room, I had an email from Enforcer Chapman asking me to come see her as soon as I was in. That wasn't my favorite way to start my morning, but I didn't have the option to ignore Chapman. Not finding her in her RAID office, I went down to the enforcer floor.

"Shut the door and sit," she said as I entered.

"I'm making some changes. I know you and Enforcer Osheski are friends, but I ask that you let me discuss this with her before you share with anyone that we had this conversation."

"Okay."

"Enforcer Cortez has accepted another position and will be leaving the CDM. The timing isn't ideal, but I'm trying to make the most of it. Starting today, Cortez is reassigned to another position where he will stay for the remainder of his time with the agency. Enforcer de Saint will be your new partner for the indefinite future. Your responsibilities haven't changed. Only your partner."

"What's happening to Osheski?" I asked.

"It's not appropriate for me to discuss another enforcer with you like that."

"Understood."

"Do you intend to take a Ricky Contract? I would appreciate the courtesy of advanced notice so I can plan accordingly if so."

"No, ma'am."

"Have you applied for one?" I shook my head.

"Tell me if that changes."

"Yes, ma'am." Megan and de Saint waited outside Chapman's door when I exited. Megan's eyes asked me what was going on, and all I could do was shrug.

"Enforcer Osheski, come in, please," Chapman said. De Saint offered me a nervous wave. I returned it and went back upstairs. I suspected de Saint would hear about the partner change as soon as she spoke to Chapman, so I used the time to check in on my EPA project. We had no new monster sightings across the last two weeks. I guessed that was partially because of the winter season, but we also had drastically limited coverage for the duration of the S gate.

Most of our 40 or so deployed drones were tasked with monitoring one large area rather than a couple dozen gates spread across our region.

"I suppose you heard the news?" de Saint asked, appearing behind me with Megan by her side.

"That we're partners now?" Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. She nodded.

"What's that mean for you?" I asked Megan. She shrugged.

"There's a leadership training workshop starting later today. I'm supposed to report there." I tilted my head.

"What?" she asked.

"You don't think I'm leadership material?"

"So it's a good thing?"

"Chapman says she wants to nurture my potential and fast-track me for management. I've 'demonstrated the aptitude,' and the CDM has had a lot of people leave recently."

"Congratulations," I said.

"You're not mad?"

"Why would I be mad?"

"You're the one who has been busting their ass to get noticed."

"No, I'm happy for you. Promise." Megan studied my face for a moment.

"Okay, well, I have a bunch of onboarding work to complete before noon. You two have fun now."

"How's it going, partner?" de Saint asked. Her delivery was that of a friendly joke, but she seemed horribly unsure of whether or not it would land.

"Ready to spend the day writing tickets?"

"You bet." Enforcer de Saint's awkwardness faded within the first 20 minutes of our working together. We had spent some time with each other in both social and professional settings, so I was surprised at first that she was nervous at all. When that turned out to be a simple and understandable discomfort with sudden change, I was relieved. In truth, switching partners like this wasn't the most natural thing for me either. For the rest of the day after that, de Saint rarely stopped speaking.

In some contexts, I would have found that tiresome, but de Saint was a super nerd, so listening to her talk was more like an interactive podcast. Where she found the time to read and watch as much as she did, I didn't know. I was grateful, though. Not that talking with Enforcer Cortez was ever annoying. Given the choice between hearing him speculate about the Dungeon Divas transitioning to adult content and de Saint rattling off summaries for a dozen different articles she read on the S gate, I would pick de Saint.

Every time.

"It looks like the term 'Stage 2' is going to stick. I think that's pretty lame, but I'm seeing it more and more often, especially after the S gate. Even people who don't believe in the idea of Stage 2 admit that it was unprecedented. No other recorded S gate in history has had an instant-death mechanic like that. Push a button and every person in a room dies? If that becomes the norm for S gates, there's talk of not allowing anyone but crawlers inside. No harvesters. No researchers. Too dangerous."

"Where do you land on Stage 2?" I asked.

"Do you mean do I believe in it?" I nodded.

"The science is pretty basic," she answered.

"There is definitely an upward trend, but we have less than 100 years of data. Have you followed the classification debate?"

"What's that?"

"When the gates first opened, we thought of them as invaders from another world. When it was obvious gates were here to stay and that they were perpetual, thinking evolved to treat them like an environmental change. They affected the whole planet equally, and there was no discernible intent or organization in dungeon surges to suggest they were a planned or orchestrated attack. So, we started thinking of gates more like land bridges or stowaways on boats."

"Stowaways?"

"Picture you're a Hawaiian. It's 1778, and a bunch of boats appear to 'discover' the islands. Hawaiians had seafaring roots, and that's how people got to the islands in the first place, but Captain Cook is something alien. The scale and culture around his voyage were drastically different from what Hawaiians had seen before. But the boats don't just bring people. They had pigs, horses, rats, and cats. Before Captain Cook, the islands didn't have these things because only birds could make the journey.

"Then there's the Bering Land Bridge Theory that North America was populated by humans that crossed from Asia into what we call Alaska via a land bridge that no longer exists. A passage was open that allowed creatures to travel great distances, and then it disappeared. That happens all the time in nature. A flood transplants species into a new place. Rivers and lakes freeze over. A drought forces species to range farther for food.

"The point is that these mechanisms aren't structured or orchestrated. Creatures will naturally take advantage of the opportunity to spread, but there isn't a 'motivation' the way an invasion has a motivation. Therefore, the gates are more of an environmental change, and though their appearance feels abrupt to us, they might not be. A sinkhole is abrupt to us because we don't see it until the big collapse, but really they can take years and years of changes before we see them." She barely stopped to breathe.

"If the gates are sinkholes that we don't understand, they're environmental. We might not understand them, but the forces at play are natural. Stage 2 has reignited debate about whether or not the gates are actually an invasion like we thought before because their rate of change doesn't match any of our other long-term environmental data. The Earth has experienced Ice Ages before, but there are tens of thousands of years between them.

Weather can have spikes and troughs of extremes, but for the most part, we can map the way global forces connect and influence each other to the point where we can mostly predict how much rain we'll get, how hot it will be, and so on.

"Organisms need thousands of years to evolve radical differences. Tectonic plates move whole continents, but they're slow and gradual. The Earth's orbit around the sun changes by 2 inches per year. Slow, slow, slow. The Stage 2 idea doesn't fit any of those. Are the gates an organism that is growing? Maybe they're like pupating caterpillars? Maybe they have a definitive cycle of extremes like cicadas? Those cycles are more in line with the speed we're seeing with gates."

"Wow. I didn't realize the debate had gotten that serious."

"I wouldn't say it's mainstream yet, but it will be in a few months if not weeks. There are too many existential implications that normal people can't ignore." I parked us outside of a Homestead Strikers B gate. De Saint hopped out immediately to begin her part of the inspection work. I checked my phone and had a text from a Megan:"Steve is that taxidermist we sold the snakeskin to. We hung our number on his little board, remember? That's where this came from."

The memory was perfectly clear now that she mentioned it. We thought we could find better leads for monster hunting by going directly to locals, and the job for Domonkos seemed to prove that theory, except we hadn't received another personal request since. Until now, rather.

"I called them. He's a dairy farmer and keeps finding cows torn up in his fields. EPA says it's black bears, but he disagrees. Could be fun to check out. He sent us a bunch of pictures to the Diva email. I forwarded them to your personal if you wanted to look." That did sound interesting. When I opened the pictures, I could see why the EPA thought bears were to blame.

The slain cows were very clearly shredded by a predator with teeth and claws, but black bears were known more for knocking over garbage cans than they were for taking down livestock. A cursory internet search confirmed that. A black bear might attack a calf, but a full-grown cow was just too much trouble. Our current focus was the downtown troll, but we didn't have any major leads there yet. We had only managed to convince ourselves that the tunnel troll theory was plausible.

Lending even more plausibility, Nathan had found a video of a Pittsburgh bed and breakfast showing off their prohibition-era basement tunnel. It wasn't near the length of what Krystal described, but it did cross underneath a street and connect to a basement on the other side. The man giving the tour in that video mentioned that tunnels like his were mostly leftover from the coal and steel boom, built for convenient and direct transportation of materials and supplies.

That made underground tunnels more of a possibility, but we still didn't know where to start. Later that evening, Nathan planned to stop in that neighborhood after his shift and stick a flier in every door: Seeking tips on local troll sightings. Cash reward for footage and an additional cash reward for details that lead to the troll's discovery. Reward can also be paid in Nad-Nade if desired. He believed crowdsourcing like this was our best bet for narrowing down the search area, and the rest of us agreed.

Papering a few blocks was more efficient than trying to go door-to-door hoping someone had something to share and happened to be home to do it. Crap. I was supposed to be doing inspections. I hoped I hadn't sat there staring at my phone for very long and got started on my rounds.