I was on the verge of at least pretending to protest an undercover assignment when Merlin went to the intercom on his desk and called for his assistant, Kim, to come in.
Kim had been one of the first people I met at the company. She was also magically immune and had been working in the Verification department when I was hired. She’d resented the fact that I’d very quickly moved up and out, and she’d taken my old job as Merlin’s assistant when I was reassigned. We’d managed to cooperate on some things since then, but I still felt like she saw me as a rival to her ambitions. Now I was afraid I knew what Merlin had in mind, and as much as I knew there were good reasons why I shouldn’t go undercover, it still irked me to think that she was getting the job.
“Ah, there you are,” Merlin said to her. “I have an assignment for you.”
She practically came to attention. “Yes, sir!”
“We need someone to infiltrate a secret magical organization. The only people they hire outside their families are magical immunes, and one who has been ousted from MSI might be considered a valuable find.”
“You want me to go undercover?” Her eyes widened and her face lit up. I could see her mentally preparing new stationery and business cards for the position a successful operation would surely earn her.
“I want you to try. I’m going to dismiss you from your employment here, which will leave you angry at our organization. That should make you a tempting prospect for them. However, there is no guarantee they would take you on.”
“What you’ll need to do is make yourself available,” Philip said. “I know of some places you can go where you might come to their attention.” He smiled slightly. “That is one benefit of an organization as tradition-bound as they are. They haven’t changed their ways in a century. Your first step will be to apply to work at my company. They should notice that. Then there are a few restaurants and bars you could frequent where they might approach you.”
I couldn’t help but start to feel some resentment at not being chosen, even though I knew I’d be a bad choice. It sounded like it would be fun. And it wouldn’t be like going undercover in the real mob, so I wouldn’t have to worry about being shot and having my body dumped in the river. These people turned their enemies into frogs, and that spell wouldn’t work on me.
“You really wanted that undercover assignment, didn’t you?” Owen said to me as we left Merlin’s office after briefing Kim.
“Kinda,” I admitted. “But I get why it wasn’t me. If I suddenly popped up, looking for a job with them, I might as well be wearing a light-up button saying, ‘Hi! I’m here to infiltrate you!’ Still, it would be really cool. And better than working on updating our marketing materials.”
“Maybe while Kim’s on assignment, you could go back to your old job as Merlin’s assistant.”
The idea tempted me for a moment, but then I sighed and said, “It’s probably best if I don’t. I’d have to leave again when Kim came back, and then I’d have to pick up where I left off with the marketing. I really ought to try staying in one job here for more than a few months.”
*
I may not have been going undercover, but I wasn’t off the hook in our efforts to defend the company against the Collegium. I spent enough time in Rod’s office that I was beginning to think maybe I should just resign my marketing job and consider what I was doing security.
At first, we just pored over paperwork. “I don’t know why you need me for this,” I grumbled on Friday afternoon, after several days of reading personnel files. “Company paperwork isn’t going to be magically veiled or altered, is it?”
“It depends on who did it. I haven’t been in this job forever, you know. The person before me may have hidden plants in plain sight. And you never know if a reference letter or transcript might have been altered.”
I stared in dismay at the stacks of files that all looked meaningless to me. “I don’t even know what to look for.”
“If something’s been magically altered or hidden, we’ll consider that a red flag.”
It was tedious work, both of us having to look at the same document together, him reading what he saw and me making sure that’s what I saw. It reminded me of my early days at the company, when that was what I did all day. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was ridiculously easy to recruit MSI immunes, as boring as their jobs could be. In the time we’d been combing through the records of employees who’d begun work before Rod took over in personnel, we’d yet to find anything remotely fishy.
When we finally reached the bottom of the stack, I wanted to throw all the files in the air in celebration, but my joy was tempered by the fact that finding nothing meant we hadn’t gained anything.
Apparently, I wasn’t alone in that dismay. Rod sat there, frowning. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “We should have found at least one.”
“Well, if the personnel director was in on it, he’d hardly have put the real info in the records at all,” I said, grasping at straws. “Maybe they didn’t even bother keeping two sets of books, so to speak.”
“True,” he said, nodding. “I guess we need to check the paperwork of the people who came in under my watch—reference letters should be a good start.”
“Is there a way to find people who might have applied under the former person but were hired under you?”
“That’s a good thought. Maybe the initial applications had some indication that these were people who were vouched for.” He got up from his desk and went to the outer office, calling out, “Isabel, I’m going to need some more files.”
While they were going through whatever filing system they used, I stood and stretched. Rod came in with a reassuringly small stack of files. “That’s it?” I asked.
“It’s enough. Unless you just like reading employment files.”
I forced a grin. “My, what a lovely small stack.”
We returned to our seats at his desk, and he opened the first file. He didn’t even have to start reading before I pointed out, “This is one of them.”
“How do you know?”
“That reference letter is blank. There’s just a symbol on it, something like a starburst with a rune-like letter in the middle. I bet Owen could tell us what it is.”
He leaned over the page. “It looks like a regular reference letter to me.”
I squinted at the symbol. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Then for a split second, I somehow squinted hard enough to make it look small and distant. “Hey, wait,” I said, frantically reaching for the pile of files we’d just gone through. I tossed aside the first three, but then there it was, on the top of the fourth employment file: that same symbol, very tiny. “See, there it is,” I said.
He leaned over to look. “I don’t see anything.”
“Then it must be veiled, and you’d have to be in the know to unlock the spell. Maybe they’ve coded all the Collegium people. That reference letter must have been just in case the new personnel director was also Collegium. If he had been, the symbol would have been enough, but since it was you, you see a normal reference letter.”
He pushed the stack of files toward me. “Well, since you’re the one who can see the symbol, have fun with that. Do you want some coffee?”
“No thanks. I’d probably spill it on your files.”
“Okay, then. I’ll let you work. I’ll be back in a bit.”
At least this work wasn’t nearly as tedious as reading every single part of every file. I just had to open each folder and check for the symbol. Soon, I had a stack on either side of me, those without symbols on the left, those with on my right. I’d barely registered the symbol before, dismissing it as perhaps a part of the form. It was a magical company, so arcane-looking signs on paperwork weren’t anything to get excited about. I supposed I should have found it odd that Rod never mentioned it, but it really hadn’t occurred to me that it might be meaningful.
I’d just tossed the last folder aside when Rod returned. “Find anything?” he asked.
I gestured toward the pile at my right hand. He picked up the top folder and raised an eyebrow at what he saw inside. “Really? Him? Okay, then.”
“What?”
“Oh, just someone I’ve had to counsel several times for not performing up to expectations. I guess he thought his connections got him out of having to work.”
“It’s a wonder you haven’t been turned into a frog.”
“Or he isn’t as important to his masters as he thinks, and they weren’t about to blow their long game over him.”
The next one made him grin. “I bet you got a kick out of this one.”
“Yeah, Gregor. Who’d have guessed it?” Gregor ran the Verification department and had been my first boss at the company. He had a tendency to turn into an ogre when he got angry, and the magically immune verifiers were the only ones who could see it, so they’d literally put him in the worst possible spot—or maybe the best. “You know, if they’re looking for magical immunes, he made an outstanding recruiting tool. He could identify the ones who showed promise, make their lives miserable, and then they’d jump when the Collegium made them a good offer.” I leaned back in my chair, shaking my head. “That explains so much.”
The list of possible Collegium-linked employees included a couple of members of the sales staff, a lot of accountants, and most of the middle management, and they were scattered through just about every department other than Research & Development. “How did they manage not to end up with any?” Rod mused out loud, shaking his head.
“Do these Collegium people sound like innovators to you?” I asked. “They seem more like parasites who feed on other people’s work. I guess there was Idris, but I wonder if he was really Collegium or if he was a convenient patsy.”
“Good point. If they didn’t really have the skills to do R and D work, it would show up pretty quickly, and if you’ve got those skills, you don’t need some secret society pulling strings to get you a job.”
I looked at the pretty substantial pile of folders representing all the employees we suspected might be Collegium-linked. “How many people do you think have come on board since you’ve been here who are with the Collegium?”
He shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing. I guess I could look for any relatives of past Collegium people. I find it hard to believe that it’s that widespread and I’m just now hearing about it. I mean, I heard stories growing up, but it was always something that happened long ago. It was history.”
“Like the way stories about fairies are always said to take place right before they vanished?”
“But they didn’t vanish.”
“Exactly my point.” Well, it wasn’t, because I’d learned not to think about people with wings as anything different from anyone else, and I never really associated our fairies with the creatures from storybooks. “Even the really old stories were set in some mythical lost time before things changed. But most people don’t know that they’re still here.”
“And I suppose it is a secret society. If everyone knew about it, it wouldn’t be so secret. They can’t be that bad, though, if no one’s talking about them.”
“They turned Philip into a frog and stole his business, and there’s no telling what they did to his brother,” I reminded him. “The people who’ve run afoul of them can’t talk, unless you can understand the nuances of ‘ribbit.’ But now that we know, what do we do?”
He looked at the stack of files and grimaced. “I guess we take these to the boss.”
It took both of us to lug all the folders to Merlin’s office. “Can’t you just poof these things up there?” I asked as I nudged a wayward folder back into my stack before it could slip out.
“There’s a slight risk they could be intercepted. I’m not taking any chances,” Rod said.
Merlin raised his eyebrows when he saw how many files there were and heard our explanation. “So, she was telling the truth about how deeply the Collegium has infiltrated our company,” he said.
“Now, what do we do?” Rod asked. “We can’t fire all these people. The company would shut down.”
“We would also be revealing our awareness of them,” Merlin said. “No, I think it best that we merely monitor the questionable personnel and only act if they give us reason to fire or reassign them.”
“We probably should find something to do with Gregor,” I said. “Right now, he’s probably running a recruitment scheme for them.”
“Or we keep him in place and make sure we recruit the next immune who quits,” Rod said. “That would be a good way to get our own double agent.”
“Kim’s still out there,” I said, “and it’s only been a few days. I think we’d be better off counting on her.” And I couldn’t believe I just said that. I did think she was loyal to MSI, or at least thought that was her best chance at advancement. I found it hard to believe that she hadn’t been approached by the Collegium earlier because she had been one of the few really competent verifiers in the company.
“Surveillance may be tricky because they have people in Security,” Rod said.
“We will have to rely upon those we know we can trust.” Merlin leaned over his desk, staring at the folders. “But we don’t know that any of these people mean us harm. It might merely be a case of networking. I know there are a number of employees here who came from the various magical secret societies at universities. Their fellow members recommended them.”
“Yeah, well, there’s secret, and then there’s secret,” Rod said. “All the magical people know about the societies at school because that’s where you get your training. It’s only a secret to the nonmagical world. This stuff takes ‘secret’ to a whole new level.”
“And there’s that threat that they want to take over,” I said. I checked my watch. “Speaking of Kim, I’m supposed to casually run into her today and see if anything has happened.”
I went back to my office to grab my coat and purse before heading out to a bar near the office where MSI people tended to go after work. When I entered, I tried to act surprised to see Kim. “Hey! How’s it going?” I asked. “I was so sorry to hear what happened.”
She gave a dramatic sigh. “It’s okay, I guess. I just didn’t expect it.”
“Let me buy you a drink,” I said. I climbed onto the stool across the table from her and flagged down a passing waitress to order drinks for both of us. “Now, tell me how you’re doing,” I said to Kim. “Any leads on a new job?”
“Nothing yet. Not even a nibble, but I’ve put in some applications.”
“Something’s bound to come along. It’s only been a few days.”
I had what I needed, but for appearance’s sake, I had to sit and make small talk with Kim until we finished our drinks. That was as challenging as any assignment I’d ever taken on. We’d never been all that friendly.
She didn’t have any better news at the meeting after that, or the one after that. Then it was Thanksgiving, which I spent with Owen’s foster parents. The Monday after the holiday weekend, I was thinking about possible alternative plans when my assistant, a young elf woman named Perdita, stood in my office doorway and rapped lightly on the doorframe.
“Mr. Hartwell has called a meeting,” she said, hopping anxiously back and forth from one foot to the other, probably because she knew what I thought about meetings. “You need to get to the conference room right away.”
I couldn’t help but groan out loud. “Really? Did he say what it’s about?”
“Nope. Sorry. Should I have asked?”
“No, it’s okay.” It wasn’t so much the idea of a meeting I hated. Sometimes those were necessary to work with a group. But my marketing role fell under the Sales department, and it was like working in a fraternity house. Everything was an excuse for a party. Owen had joked about the great “We Opened a New Box of Pencils!” festival, complete with commemorative T-shirts, but they had once thrown a party to celebrate new computers in the department. When someone called a meeting, I never knew if we were going to talk business or get our groove on while sipping corrosive drinks out of pineapples. If I showed up with notes and documents, I felt like a square as the conga line went past. If I showed up ready for a drink, I felt unprepared when asked to give a status report.
What I found in the conference room was the unholy spawn of a meeting and a party. There was a bowl of punch and a tray of store-bought cookies on the table in the back of the room, but a slide with a graph on it was projected on the screen at the front of the room. I slid into a seat in the back row and got out my notebook and pen.
It appeared to be the “just because we’re in the holiday season, that doesn’t mean you can slack off, and here are some numbers to motivate you” meeting. Since I wasn’t out making sales, it mostly didn’t apply to me, so I let myself focus instead on the other people in the room.
The sales department had the highest concentration of Collegium-linked employees that we’d found, and I supposed that made sense, since selling was all about networking and connections. I wondered if they cut special deals with Collegium people at other companies. Still, I had a hard time picturing any of these people as sinister. Their organization may have done some awful stuff, but these individuals seemed to be just doing their jobs. Well, when they weren’t partying.
I was so lost in thought that I blinked, startled, when I thought I heard my name. I came out of my daze to find every eye in the room fixed on me. “Oh, sorry, I was thinking about something you said earlier,” I lied to cover up my daydreaming. “What did you ask me?”
“What do you have in the works for a holiday-related campaign?” Mr. Hartwell, the director of Sales, asked.
“The one I came up with three months ago, when we did our planning for the holidays,” I snapped without thinking. Only after I’d spoken did I realize that maybe I could have worded that more diplomatically. “Everything was planned and approved then, and most of it has been implemented. You don’t start working on your holiday campaign after Thanksgiving.”
“Can you remind us what you have going on?”
I forced myself to count to ten and consider my words before responding. “The details are in reports and kits that were sent to each of you, and I don’t have that in front of me, since I wasn’t planning on this meeting. But we do have advertising to our target markets, new packaging that was automatically implemented the day after Thanksgiving, and holiday pricing for consumer spells. We released a new range of decorating spells last month.”
Sam’s standing offer to join the security team was sounding better. It was hard to prioritize selling magical Christmas-tree lights when I had to worry about tracking down a potentially dangerous secret society.
“I assume you’re already planning your spring promotions,” Mr. Hartwell said.
“Yes, that’s in the works. I’m still getting details from R and D about what they’ll have ready for release.”
Fortunately, that seemed to do it for my part of the meeting, but it left me seething. I supposed he was only expecting me to do my job, but considering that my position didn’t even exist a year ago and the company had done without it for centuries prior to that, I found it both amusing and annoying that every so often, when he remembered I existed, Mr. Hartwell suddenly felt the need to publicly make sure I was carrying out my duties.
I was still simmering at the end of the day when I headed to Owen’s lab in R&D. I found him in his office, in his usual position, bent over an old book. “Want to get some dinner?” I asked.
He looked up as though just then noticing me. “Oh, hi, no, sorry, I want to get through this tonight. Tomorrow, maybe?”
I tried not to let my disappointment show. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”
Now in an even worse mood, I decided to head for that bar where I usually met with Kim. I didn’t want to bring my bad mood home, and I figured that if I went there without seeing Kim, it would look less suspicious that I went there so often.
I’d just ordered a glass of wine when a woman about my age took the stool next to me. “Rough day?” she asked.
“Not too bad. It just didn’t end well. Why do people have meetings at the end of the day?”
“Don’t you hate that?” She got a drink for herself, and we sat in companionable silence for a moment before she faced me, smiled, and said, “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in a new job?”