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After the hospital visit he made every morning, Roman took the trolley to the Centralian Immigration Offices.
He had a lot on his mind as he stared outside the window, watching the city blaze by, the morning sun reflecting off the smooth glass surfaces of tall buildings.
One of the things on his mind was the fact that his day had just gotten a lot busier. Instead of sitting at his desk and looking busy or going to the break room hoping to see Nadine, as he normally would have on a Tuesday, he now had to take all of Kevin’s appointments.
And judging by the piece of paper he’d received from Selena, their bitchy department manager, Kevin had a full caseload.
Kevin always had a full caseload; the middle-aged immigration advisor was still under the impression that if he worked harder, he would get noticed and be able to advance in the agency.
Truth be told, the only way to advance was to know someone, and if you didn’t know someone, you could be good looking and fuck your way to the top.
At least that was what Roman had seen, which explained how someone like Nadine, who had come in just recently, was already at a higher salary rank than Kevin.
Not to say that Nadine had fucked her way to the top, but she was definitely hot, young, and had a way with words—all things chubby Kevin did not have. So maybe she had seduced her way to the top.
Roman had seen opportunities to do this, a couple times actually, but he’d never really taken them. He liked his current position as an immigration advisor because he had some power, yet not enough to let it go to his head. Plus, he never had to work overtime.
This fact didn’t stop Kevin from working overtime, which was why he had so many appointments today. And tomorrow.
Appointments that now belonged to Roman. There were exemplars from the Northern and Southern Alliance, as well as the Eastern and Western Province. A worldly caseload if there ever was one.
“Dammit, Kevin,” Roman whispered as his thoughts jumped from the stack of work that lay ahead to late last night, when he’d nearly been strangled by the powerful tongue of a Western Province spy.
Now Roman was supposed to be some type of informant, but the information Paris had asked for wasn’t that classified.
She simply wanted numbers, and possibly favors, which made no sense to him as he had absolutely no authority here.
What Paris had done seemed like a lot of trouble to go through just to get some numbers, especially attending Heroes Anonymous, which must have been boring and pathetic as hell for an exemplar.
Once Roman arrived at work, he took his sweet time walking from the train station to the entrance, something he did every morning, and made it to his desk ten minutes after he was supposed to be there.
Selena had caught him doing this before, but every time she did, he told her he had a stomach sickness that was triggered by coffee, which he had to drink to stay awake, so he’d spent a little more time in the bathroom than he’d hoped to spend.
His manager grumbled every time he used this excuse, but Selena had bigger fish to fry, those fish being upper management and their constant need for metrics.
“Hey Nadine,” he said as the slender woman passed by his cubicle.
As always, the hotbody from the Immigration Inspection for Fast Travel Powers Department wore her dirty-blond hair in a bun, and this time, she had a hair clip in it that matched the green of her eyes. Her dress seemed tighter than yesterday too, something he noticed quickly and then tried to unnotice as she approached him.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Why? Does something look wrong?” Roman smiled at her.
“I mean about Kevin. Did you hear?”
“No, what happened to Kevin? I mean, aside from the fact that he tried to commit suicide yesterday and just so happened to be saved by the same goddamn flying exemplar that was boning his wife.”
Her eyes went wide. “That’s who saved him?”
“I’m sorry, I thought everyone here knew. Call it the ultimate irony. He jumps, and that asshole just happens to be flying by. It’s too bad, too. He used to sit right there.” Roman nodded toward Kevin’s cubicle. “I talked to him a bunch about it yesterday morning, before he jumped. I wish I’d been able to say more.”
“That’s so sweet of you,” she said as she took the seat in front of him.
“It was the least I could do.”
“Well, I guess it’s my turn, then, to tell you something you don’t know.”
Roman raised an eyebrow at the pretty blond sitting before him. “Go on,” he said, leaning back in his chair to seem relaxed.
“Kevin died last night.”
He gasped. “You’re serious?”
“Yes, he died.”
“How?”
Selena, the chunky middle manager, came around the cubicle and stopped in front of Roman’s workspace.
“You’re late, and you still have time to chat?” Selena rolled her eyes at Roman. “I don’t know what’s happened to this place, I really don’t, but it’s employees like you that make it hard for me to do my job. Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought about how hard it is to manage all these people like you?”
“Not really,” Roman admitted.
“You know what? Never mind. You’re not going to change your ways, and you aren’t the worst employee we’ve ever had, so there’s no reason for me to discipline you because then I’d eventually have to hire someone else that knows all the things you know, and that would require training, and training would require more unpaid overtime for me.”
“Sorry to, um, hear that.”
Selena threw her hands in the air and stormed away, only to return five seconds later. “By the way, Kevin died, and his first appointment should be here soon. Good luck.”
“Thanks?”
Nadine waited for Selena to leave before she continued. “Kevin was in the hospital when he disappeared.”
“He disappeared? I thought you said he died.”
“No, he’s definitely dead. They had some Type III Class Es scope out the area and, yeah, whoever took him killed him first.”
Roman’s eyes darted to the handy chart pinned to his cubicle.
“Class Es make great detectives.”
“So I’ve heard.”
He paused briefly to admire Nadine.
It wouldn’t be easy, but if he put just a little more work in, he’d probably be able to hook up with her. There was a spark between them, but he could tell she was modest. Call it intuition, or call it two years in the game since the incident that had changed his life for the worse.
Point was, Roman could sense it.
“It’s been rough,” he lied. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Kevin and how I wish we’d connected better. It would be nice to connect with more of my coworkers, actually. I mean, we all work together forty hours a week, yet I hardly know some people, especially the new ones.”
“I’m new,” she volunteered. If she got the hint that Roman was asking her out, she didn’t let on. This led him to believe that Nadine, like Roman, knew what she was doing. It made sense, too, as Nadine had worked her way up the ranks pretty quickly.
“I should be going.” Nadine stood. “We have a meeting this morning.”
“Not another one,” Roman joked, and sure enough, Nadine laughed.
“How did you know we have so many meetings?”
“A hunch.”
He dropped both elbows onto his desk and clasped his fingers together. If Nadine could have seen the hamster wheel turning in Roman’s mind at that very moment, she would have seen it working overtime as he tried to think of another angle.
“How about coffee today?” she asked, throwing him a bone. “After work. I know a spot on 19th Street. It’s quiet, low key. Called the Proxima Cafe.”
Roman casually leaned back in his chair, made an effort to check the calendar posted on his cubicle wall, and turned back to Nadine. “Yeah, today, I’ll meet you after work. 19th Street, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said as she left his cubicle. “See you tonight.”
