Dawn bathed the city streets in its revealing radiance, highlighting the grime, the ugly marks of wear and deterioration normally overlooked in the evening's neon glamour. The fronts of the modern skyscrapers and complexes were unanimously shined and sharp, but beyond these facades the festering mouths of crumbling alleys and dingy byways yawned wide, baring all in the fresh morning light. Most people never saw Verweald in such a way. They only saw its mask, that pretty front Amoroth molded and designed to drape over her abominable child. They never thought of what lay beneath.

I couldn't see all of the ugliness. I'd only opened my eyes to the disturbing, subliminal nature of this place a few weeks ago. Sometimes it felt as if years had passed since Tara's death—at other times, minutes. Seconds. I stood at the bottom of Klau Incorporated's headquarters, troubled by the ugly spots of reality clinging to my peripheral vision. I tucked my hair behind an ear and used the move to glance across the street. IMOR was there, but it was no longer my destination. It had become a fixture in my past, a marker on the dismal road that was my life.

I squared my shoulders and marched forward.

Klau's lobby was as I remembered it, though the pond had been refilled and the resident koi returned to their watery home. There were new, incongruous metal detectors hulking inside the guarded doors, and one of the men flanking the ugly things stepped forward when I walked through. He asked me to open my purse and I did so to allow him a cursory peek inside before he waved me on.

Amoroth's text at six in the morning had jerked me from a sound sleep, and her demand for me to arrive at work in one hour set my teeth on edge. I nearly threw the phone across the room and decided to ignore the irritating woman, but I eventually mustered enough energy to fall out of bed and prepare for the day. With no choice in the matter and a need for the continued income, I tempered my willful pride and agreed to work for Amoroth. If anything, Klau Tower was a safer place for me to be than my own house.

The atmosphere within the lobby was reasonably subdued for the early hour. A loose handful of businesswomen and men drifted through the space as they spoke in soft tones and walked with resigned purpose to their destinations. I stopped at the reception counter, feeling out of place in my navy skirt and rumpled cardigan, but I far too sleepy and annoyed by the situation to care. The single receptionist behind the desk stopped typing at her computer and looked me over, smiling.

"Good morning, and welcome to Klau Incorporated. My name is Angela. How may I assist you?"

I remembered the bright woman from my first visit to Klau. She wore the same well-made uniform with her dark hair brushed into a tamed bun, and she didn't seem to recognize me, but considering the hulking monstrosity of mind-altering crystals looming above our heads, I wasn't surprised. I wondered how the chandelier affected the poor woman's short-term to long-term memory progression. Though I felt fine for the moment, I wondered if I would be fuzzy-headed and confused when I returned home.

"Hi," I said as I disregarded my misgivings concerning the lobby's décor. "I'm Sara. I'm supposed to be starting here today."

Angela's mouth popped open in a soundless circle. "Oh! Oh, that's right!"

My brow rose as I fought a nervous smile. I didn't understand her surprised reaction.

As if reading my mind, Angela blushed and began fussing with the items on her desk. "Sorry, it's just we haven't very many people applying for work, let alone showing up." Her voice dropped to precarious levels. "You know, with the...murders...."

I hummed in agreement, though I couldn't quite meet her gaze. Little did Angela know, the murders were the reason I was here. Amoroth thought I was in collusion with the killer. "I've seen the news. Terrible."

Angela's head bobbed as she extracted a few slips of paper from her desk. Her hip bumped the drawer closed as she handed the papers and an engraved pen to me. "Yes. Here were are. These are the new employee documents you need to fill out. You get these finished and take them down to Aarav in HR on B-One. He'll get you your uniform and then you can come back up here and I'll get you settled!"

I licked the pad of my thumb and flipped through the documents. There was a standard form requesting typical information, but there was also a strict non-disclosure agreement. I skimmed the ten-page pamphlet, coming away with the basic understanding that once I passed Klau Tower's threshold, anything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, or even tasted could not be discussed or divulged anywhere else. Yikes. How did that harpy of a woman get anyone to agree to this nightmare of a contract?

I then turned to the final page outlining my compensation and nearly choked on my tongue. It was almost double what I made at IMOR. With figures like that, I highly doubted Amoroth had any problem at all bribing people to abandon their morals and forget that their weird-eyed boss never appeared to age.

I signed where needed and provided my information before handing the fancy pen back to Angela and requesting directions to the HR department. She pointed me toward the bank of glass elevators with a vague finger wave. "Make sure you take the one farthest to the right! First sub-level. We call it the 'bone level.'"

With a grimace plastered on my face, I picked my way over to the empty car. Once inside, I thumbed "B-ONE" and descended.

On my first trip to Klau, I had noticed the impressive array of buttons and key-slots on the elevator's panel. I was in a different car this time—and thankfully without a behemoth guard and a seething Sin crammed into the finite space with me. I noted that this car lacked the card-slot for the CEO's floor that had been present in the middle car, but it also had several buttons and locks for other floors that hadn't been in that other elevator.

So, different elevators have different destinations?

I chewed my lip as the car soundlessly lowered below the earth. It would be simple for a person to become lost, and for certain...items or floors to be misplaced.

The basement floor wasn't well-lit in the morning, nor were there many workers milling about. The entire expanse was contemporary and clinical with opaque glass walls forming the cubicle boundaries separating the various divisions of the human resources department. The far wall was dominated by a glowing, holographic display of fish in a three-dimensional tank. Twin sets of unmarked stairs bracketed that inset wall and delved further below.

The bespectacled Indian man I was searching for—Aarav—was one of the only employees present in HR. His desk was partway down the middle row of cubicles, his desk lamp a crisp beacon in the otherwise murky office space. He greeted me as he took my proffered documents. He chatted affably as he filed them away and searched his cabinets for a uniform in my size. I stared in the direction of the faux aquarium, squinting.

"Amazing, isn't?"

I blinked and looked at Aarav. "What?"

He grinned and nodded his head. "That's some of the technology we develop here at Klau. We're forerunners in the newest craze of holographic displays and three-dimensional scanners. The fish even react if your fingers enter the perimeter of the 'tank' and swim away."

"Oh, wow." I was suitably impressed—but, truth be told, I had been more interested in the stairs than the aquarium. According to the directory in the elevator, there wasn't a level beneath this one. This entire building was a convoluted maze. Secrets, sinister and well-kept, seemed to whisper beneath my blue heels and vibrate in the tiled floor. I trusted Amoroth less and less.

Aarav handed me a slightly musty uniform and a temporary badge, promising my personalized ID tag would be finished within a week. My gaze found his tag on the left side of his skinny chest and I read the minimalistic letters of his name. I honed in on the blue stone faceted at the head of the pin. Again I found myself squinting—and suddenly I realized that steady, supine whispering mirrored the unsettling resonance of the lobby's chandelier, and somehow I could feel that same resonance emanating from Aarav's ID. It was yet another layer of Amoroth's mind subversion. I swore to God I'd jam my name tag down her throat—or have Darius do it—before I wore such a wretched thing.

I put on my uniform in one of the employee restrooms and was pleasantly surprised by the fit and how the professional black garb was. I returned to Angela, who commented on how well I pulled off the Klau uniform and set about training me to do my job. There weren't many discrepancies between my position here and the one I had held at IMOR as far as I could tell—though I retained dubious misgivings about my ability to memorize the staggering manual of extension codes for the telephone, enough extensions to phone a small country.

Amoroth strolled through the lobby with her contingent of advisers around noon. She was either on her way out to lunch or to terrorize small children, I wasn't sure. I stood behind the reception desk with Angela, grumbling at the insistent beep of the slender ear-piece I was attempting to connect to the main telephone system, because Angela had tried to help but I was just stubborn enough to refuse assistance and figure it out on my own. The CEO approached and paused before Angela to tap her freshly manicured nails on the desk.

"Angela, I need a copy of the call log to my division," she said, clearly bored as she swiped a finger along the counter as if checking for dust. There was none. Once Angela disappeared into the cramped copier room adjoined to our slice of the lobby, the Sin's lavender eyes flicked in my direction. She smirked. "Enjoying your first day, Gaspard?"

"Yes," I replied absently, flicking the device clamped to my ear. It emitted a slur of uncoordinated bleeps. I sighed. "As much as I am able."

Angela returned and a man detached himself from the conglomerate of consultants in Amoroth's shadow. As he accepted the stapled packet of recorded calls from Angela, I was intensely reminded of Martha and half-expected him to depart some crude comment for my benefit—but when the man turned to me, he casually smiled and offered his hand.

He was a straight-backed, possibly middle-aged, handsome guy who had surprisingly little presence for his remarkable height, looks, and lean physique. He parted his freshly cut brown hair on the side, and it complemented the thin-framed glasses over his lovely hazel eyes. The lack of lines on his pleasant face told me he smiled little outside of professional contexts, and his attire was pressed and tidy, lacking any patterns or reflections of personal choice.

His handshake was firm but brief. "Hello, I'm Dorian Ezra. I am Ms. Amoroth's personal assistant."

"Hi, I'm Sara Gaspard."

"Hello, Ms. Gaspard. Welcome to Klau Incorporated."

"Thank you." Thrown off-balance by the polite exchange, I could think of nothing else to say. Amoroth muttered something under her breath as she accepted the call log from Dorian and one of those engraved pens from Angela. She leaned on the desk for a moment to circle and scribble on the log. I watched the delicate sweep of her practiced hand, annoyed by the polish of her penmanship. She dotted a final line, slid the document into Dorian's expectant hands, and dropped the pen onto the counter. "Thank you, Angela. Enjoy the remainder of your day—the both of you." She swiveled on her designer heels and strode from the building with Dorian at her side and the remainder of her entourage flocking behind them.

All in all, it was a rather anti-climactic encounter. I was almost disappointed. I felt like a knight who had ridden onto the battlefield only to have my opponent flee. I was happy to have avoided injury but pissed off that I went through the effort of clamoring into all that heavy armor for nothing.

Sighing, I went back to work.