I had been home for an hour when my phone rang again.

  “Sorry to do this to you on a Sunday,” McDouglas said. “We got bumped up a day for gate crasher surveillance. Need you in here at noon today.”

  “Today?”

  “Yep. Bring a book and a power bank. Can’t have your phone going dead in the middle of a shift. See you soon.”

  Not more than thirty seconds ago I was crossing the apartment, thrilled by the wonderful sleep I was about to enjoy. I still had enough time for two hours, but this wrecked my plans I had with Beth that day. I had to take care of that first.

  I walked out to the living room to speak with her.

  “I heard the call, and it’s okay,” she said the moment I rounded the corner. “I understand.”

  “I’m still sorry.”

  “I know, and it’s fine.”

  “Nathan will be out most of the day. These one-day weekend jobs always turn into three days and a few evenings, so he probably won’t be home for a while.”

  “I won’t chew on the furniture.”

  I laughed. “I feel bad leaving you alone when you just got here, that’s all. There’s money on my desk. If you want to go explore, take that and get yourself lunch. If you feel like staying in, that’s fine too. If you do go out, don’t sign or agree to anything.”

  “Huh?”

  “I was a target for all sorts of scams and sales pitches because I didn’t know any better. They all tried to make me feel like the smart one for going for it, and I fell for a few of them. So don’t sign anything, and don’t agree to anything.”

  Beth nodded.

  “I’m on surveillance. Text me if you get bored. I definitely will be.”

  She gave me a hug. “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  My gate assignment was D-ranked and in Coraopolis, a town to the west of the city. The gate appeared in a tiny backyard next to a doghouse made from scrap particle board. The grade was steep, and the dog–who was thankfully relocated–had worn dirt ruts in the small radius his chain allowed. A steady drizzle turned all that into mud.

  I was given two addresses: one for the gate and one for where they wanted me to park during my stakeout. The drone training they made us take allowed us to be well-removed from the gate itself while we surveilled, so I sat in an alley watching a tablet. A bank of batteries sat on the passenger-side floor so I could quickly redeploy the drone when the power ran out.

  If I spotted gate crashers, my job was to call it in and then use the drone to capture license plate numbers.

  Beth texted me for my entire shift, and I was grateful. I knew that working for the CDM would have dull moments, but sitting in a car for eight hours was a level of boredom I had not anticipated. Her sending me pictures of her walk down Carson Street in real time passed the time, and it made me feel a little less guilty about abandoning her for the day.

  She had also never owned a phone with a camera before. Like every other person with a smartphone, she loved taking pictures. Her technique was terrible, which was sweet in its own way. Half the photos were blurry and had at least one fingertip in the frame.

  The nonstop slideshow wasn’t serious, nor was our conversation. The majority of it was questions about the city. What was this weird store with voodoo dolls in the window? Was the sign for the tiki-themed bar serious? Did my landlord have a cat or dog policy (no reason, just curious)?

  Other than a ten-minute stretch where the wind and rain knocked the drone around, nothing happened on the stakeout.

  At 7:30 p.m., Grensmith and McDouglas pulled up next to me. They told me to head down the street to a diner for a thirty-minute break. When I returned for my overnight shift, McDouglas would be my partner.

  McDouglas kicked me out of the driver’s seat and started working his way through a bag of sunflower seeds the moment he confirmed the drone was up. His polo shirt was seafoam green today.

  “Glamorous work, huh?” he said, spitting a shell into an empty styrofoam cup.

  “Do we do a lot of stakeouts?”

  McDouglas wobbled his head back and forth. “Couple times a year. This is the first time it’s been for gate crashers, though. Last one was crawlers running gates under other people’s licenses, but that was only a few targeted groups. Before that, crawlers were underreporting what they harvested from gates–a tax thing.”

  “I see. How long have you been with the CDM?”

  “Thirteen years this October.”

  “Wow.”

  He shrugged. “Getting through your training okay?”

  “I’ve only gotten to do three crawls.”

  “No, I meant your CDM training.”

  “Oh,” I replied. “Seems fine so far. It’s not as dynamic as I thought it would be. Fewer interactions with crawlers than I expected too.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Investigators do a bit more crawler interfacing, but yeah, I was surprised by those things too. The job is more spreadsheets than anything else.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah. We do a lot of data entry.”

  “I saw you took a few culls. Are you doing that to be well-rounded, or are you one of those who wants to go independent?”

  “I’m one of those who thought I could break into a guild or a team.”

  McDouglas winced. “Ouch. You’re not the first and won’t be the last. If it makes you feel any better, I was one of those too.”

  “Can I ask why you stayed at the CDM instead of going independent?”

  “Health insurance, 401k. You know, the sexy stuff. I wasn’t worried about any of that at first, and then I had a kid. That girl is the light of my life, but she is a random problem generator. If I didn’t have the stability of this job, I’d pop from the stress.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have kids?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “No, I don’t. My little sister just moved in, though. So maybe I kind of do.”

  “It’s cool to hear about siblings close enough to do that. I’ve got an older sister. One of us would kill the other before the end of the first week if we lived together.”

  “That’s not quite our situation. We haven’t seen each other since I moved out. Dumb family stuff.”

  McDouglas paused to answer a text on his phone before replying. “Yeah. Every family is at least a little messed up. Could be worse. You could be from one of those dungeon doom cults.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Oh, I’m a dick,” he said, embarrassed.

  “Don’t worry about it. The documentaries don’t do it justice. As soon as I could get out, I did. My sister did the same thing.”

  “Good of you to take her in like that.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t. Thus began a long silence as we sat in the dark watching the drone feed. McDouglas didn’t seem to mind the quiet. Neither did I, to be honest. I was worried we might have to make small talk until 4 a.m. and was happy not to.

  We slept in shifts for most of the night, and Beth did her best to keep me company, but she tapped out around 1 a.m.

  Other than me getting to catch the start of a LootLootLouis stream, which I usually missed because of the time difference, the most interesting thing to happen that night was a homeless guy looking in the window at one point. I was asleep at the time and woke up to McDouglas squeaking in surprise.

  That was it. I had been on watch from 1 p.m. to 4 a.m. the next day–nothing, nothing, and more nothing.

  With two hours of sleep, I started my Monday morning at the CDM and braced for another round of surveillance.

  That Monday night, I watched a gate in McKee’s Rocks with Enforcer Chapman, a severe woman with black hair that she always had in a drum-tight ponytail. I had seen her in the office several times but had never actually gone on an assignment with her. Her reputation of being a “stickler” was an undersell. She quizzed me on inspection policy the first hour and then had me retake the modules for every question I got wrong.

  Which was several.

  I had Tuesday night off and then back-to-back day shifts and night shifts until Friday. My greatest desire for that evening off was to sleep the night away, but I had barely seen Beth, so I cooked dinner for her and Nathan.

  “When did you learn to cook?” Beth asked as we sat down to watch TV as we ate.

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m not! I’m impressed.”

  Laughing, I said, “We don’t need to go that far. I boiled pasta and heated up some sauce.”

  “Don’t tap on the glass,” Nathan interjected. “If you spook him, he’ll stop cooking.”

  Beth glanced about nervously. “I have news. I got a job.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s just hostessing. Nothing big.”

  “Where at?” I asked.

  “Deerskull Saloon. I start next week, and they said I could learn to bartend when we’re slow.”

  Nathan leaned around me to have a clear view of Beth. “Don’t take any shit. The bar scene can get pretty sloppy down here. Don’t give the creeps the attention they want.”

  Beth paled.

  “Nathan’s not wrong,” I said. “It’s also not all bad. Nathan bartended when we were in college, and he had good nights.”

  “That’s also true,” Nathan echoed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.

  Beth waved. “No, please. Don’t feel bad. I’d rather know ahead of time, and I’m not that sheltered.”

  Nathan nodded. “Right.”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing,” Nathan said. “Just reminded me of when I met Dor.”

  “No, tell me.”

  I sighed and sank into the couch, resigned.

  Nathan grinned. “First girl Dorion tried to ask out, he wrote her this long poetic letter and slipped it under her door.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Beth asked.

  Standing to get seconds, Nathan sighed. “I don’t know why I shared that example like you’d think any different. You two came out of the same machine.”

  “It comes off as creepy,” I explained.

  “Really?” Beth asked.

  Nathan laughed from the kitchen.

  I nodded. “Yeah. It does. I misestimated a lot of things. In all seriousness, it’s great that you found work. Thank you for doing that.”

  “I don’t want to be a leech.”

  “Stop it,” Nathan said when he came back into the room, a full plate in his hand. “Dor still does the whole endless guilt thing. You’re welcome here forever, but that’s one of the conditions. You gotta work on not beating yourself up.”

  Beth wrinkled her face. “Endless guilt?”

  “He feels bad about everything. Needs to step away for thirty seconds to use the bathroom? He apologizes. Ate the last of his pizza while I was gone? He apologizes. Dared to turn the radio up in his car for a song he likes? He apologizes. Eats a slice of cheese out of the package without making a sandwich? He apologizes.”

  “Oh. Mom does hate the cheese thing. There were a lot of wrongs in our house.”

  I chuckled and changed the topic. “My schedule is going to be rough for the rest of the week. I’ll leave you some money for dinner.”

  “Crawling?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. Just watching cameras.”

  “Can I do anything around here to help?” Beth asked.

  “Relax. Take a look at a few schools maybe. We’re good otherwise.”

  We settled in to watch a movie Nathan insisted Beth see, an artsy mishmash of multiple overlapping characters, from boxers to stickup men. I agreed it was a good movie, but I was skeptical that it was the best introduction to secular cinema. We argued about it for a while and had to explain to Beth that we weren’t really fighting. We enjoyed disagreeing about dumb stuff.

  I can’t tell you if she liked the film or not. I fell asleep ten minutes in.

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