The shirt was plain white. The pants were dark. He had ironed both the night before without being asked.
Lucian stood in front of the small mirror above the dresser the one that had belonged to his grandmother, its edges slightly foxed with age. He looked at himself for a moment, not particularly long, then looked away.
Downstairs, the smell of toast and something fried reached him before anything else.
His grandmother was already at the stove, moving with the particular economy of someone who had cooked in the same kitchen for forty years. She glanced at him when he came in.
"Sit," she said.
He sat.
She put a plate in front of him without asking what he wanted. He ate without commenting on it. Somewhere in the back of the house his grandfather's radio murmured the morning news, too low to make out words.
Julian came in from outside, keys already in hand.
"Ready?"
Lucian picked up the card from the counter. A plain envelope had arrived four days ago no return address, just the Greybridge name printed in the upper left corner in small, clean type. Inside had been a single sheet of instructions, a key card in a paper sleeve, and a building pass with his name printed on it. He had read the sheet once, filed it, and not thought much about it since.
"Yeah," Lucian said.
The drive took twenty-three minutes. Julian kept the radio on low. Neither of them said much. At one point Julian asked if he had eaten enough and Lucian said yes. That was mostly the extent of it.
The building came into view before Lucian expected it to. Grey concrete, glass frontage, no signage visible from the street except a small mounted plate beside the entrance that read Greybridge Consulting in letters that were easy to miss. The kind of name that sounded like nothing in particular.
Julian pulled up to the front.
"I'll pick you up at five," he said.
Lucian opened the door. "You don't have to."
"Five," Julian repeated.
Lucian got out. He didn't look back as he heard the car pull away.
The guard at the front desk was a woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. Lucian placed the building pass on the counter. She looked at it, looked at him, typed something, and slid it back.
"Fifty-sixth floor," she said. "Elevator's on the left. Someone will meet you."
He nodded and walked.
The elevator opened onto a corridor that was quieter than he expected. Neutral carpet, neutral walls, overhead lighting that was just slightly too even. Three people passed him in the hall without looking at him. One was on the phone. One was carrying a folder. The third was just walking fast somewhere.
A man was waiting near the end of the corridor. Late forties, dark jacket, no tie. He had the look of someone who had been in this building long enough that it no longer registered as a place. He extended his hand when Lucian reached him.
"Adrian Solis. I handle onboarding for Section One."
They shook hands. His grip was brief and without ceremony.
"Follow me."
Adrian did not introduce him to anyone. They passed the main office an open floor with rows of workstations, people at screens, low conversation and kept walking. Lucian looked in as they passed. Nobody looked back.
Cabin four was at the end of a shorter corridor off the main floor. It was a small room. A desk, a monitor, a keyboard, a chair. One small window that faced another building's wall. A camera mounted in the upper corner of the ceiling, angled toward the desk.
Lucian sat down. The chair adjusted slightly under his weight.
He noticed the USB ports on the tower immediately. Two of them on the front panel had been physically blocked, the plastic around them slightly deformed. Not broken by accident. Done deliberately, carefully, with something precise.
Adrian set a thin folder on the desk.
"Your work is report compilation. You'll receive files through the internal system the login's already set up on that machine. Each file contains incident data. Your job is to read, analyse, and submit a consolidated report per file. Format is in there." He tapped the folder. "There's also a sample report from last quarter. Read that first."
Lucian opened the folder. The sample report was five pages. Clean structure. Neutral language throughout terms like intrusion event, lateral movement pattern, containment sequence. Nothing that named a system or a source directly.
"Questions?" Adrian said.
"How many files per week?"
"Two. Maybe three your first week.
Submission is through internal mail, flagged to my address."
Lucian nodded.
Adrian looked at him for a moment not long, just a beat past professional then turned toward the door.
"Lunch is twelve to one. Break room is back past the main floor, left at the end. Don't use the public network. Your browser access is listed in the folder."
He left without adding anything else.
Lucian sat alone in the cabin.
He pressed a key. There was a delay small, maybe half a second before the character appeared on screen. He pressed another. Same delay. He looked at the keyboard, then at the monitor, then typed a short line of nothing in particular and watched the letters appear one by one just slightly behind his fingers.
He wasn't sure what to make of it. Old hardware, probably. He let it go.
The first file came through internal mail at half past nine.
The filename read:
INC-REP-0041-PARTIAL-A.
He opened it.
The language inside was similar to the sample structured, vague in specific ways, precise in others. Words like payload signature and propagation window appeared without much surrounding context. Partial was in the filename and partial was what it was the data cut off at points that felt deliberate, references that led nowhere.
He read it twice. Then he opened the sample report beside it and began.
By four-thirty he had a draft. It was adequate. He read it back once, changed two sentences, and submitted it.
Then he sat.
The building made almost no sound from inside the cabin. Occasionally footsteps in the corridor. Once, a phone ringing somewhere and stopping. The camera in the corner didn't move. It didn't need to.
At five to five he shut the monitor off, picked up his jacket, and left.
Julian was parked outside.
They drove back the same way they had come. The radio played something Lucian didn't recognise. The city moved past the window in the early evening light.
"How was it," Julian said. Not quite a question.
"Fine," Lucian said.
Julian nodded and didn't push.
When they got home his mother had dinner ready. She asked the same thing in slightly different words. He gave her roughly the same answer. She smiled and passed him the rice and the conversation moved to something else, something about the neighbour's dog and a fence, and Lucian ate and listened and said small things when the rhythm of the table seemed to need it.
After dinner he went upstairs.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a while without turning the light on. Outside the window the street was going quiet.
Somewhere a door closed. A car started and left.
He thought, briefly, about who he might have been if the sequence of things had gone differently. The thought surfaced the way it always did uninvited, arriving with a specific weight. He felt the frustration begin to rise behind it.
He stopped the thought.
Lay back.
Closed his eyes.
Tomorrow was the same.
~to be continued
Vol 2 started