Paws and Portals by Ellie Warren

Author:Ellie Warren [Warren, Ellie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Curiosity Killed the Bookworm
Published: 2024-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Lima

Sat in a quiet corner in the basement of the Grid, Lima clicked her way through the backlog of cases. Hari had thought better of assigning her coffee duty and instead asked her to go through any cases without any activity in the last three months and close them off.

“If the problem’s still happening, they’ll tell us about it,” Hari had told her. Lima thought that rewarded pushiness, and she imagined all the patient people waiting for their case to be dealt with but too polite to chase it. Maybe that was just her. Her dad would certainly be on the phone every day until a problem was fixed.

Most of the cases were simple power outages, and she was surprised at how frequent these were. The Grid was supposed to be a robust system that could be relied on. The other reports were of unusual glitches; over the last few days she’d learned that Daisy loved solving puzzles, so she was surprised they hadn’t been picked up. She jotted the ticket numbers down in her notepad with the intention of passing them on. The Grid had a massive backlog right now, and maybe the policy of closing cases without investigating made more sense when everything was business as usual.

She didn’t think Hari would appreciate an intern telling him how to do things, so she kept quiet and returned to her task. It was almost therapeutic, the repetitive nature of opening each case on her list, checking for any red flags and closing them down, her list getting steadily shorter as the day went on.

She must have been through at least thirty before she started to notice a pattern. She’d been creating a mental map of the locations as she went and while she didn’t know every address, those she did were all down in the rookeries. She went back through the cases, scouring for any hint of an upmarket address, or a commercial property, left unattended.

No one was paying her any attention, so she brought up the search function on the system, pausing to work out what to search for. Then a phrase caught her eye: recently updated. She clicked, her screen filling up with cases. Lima looked surreptitiously over her shoulder. She felt so paranoid that someone would catch her, but Hari hadn’t exactly told her not to go poking beyond her assignment.

There were familiar names and addresses at the top of the list. She clicked on Celia Blackthorn. The heiress had reported some malfunctioning lights the morning Lima had started her internship, and had received a visit from the Grid—Hari of all people—on the very same day. She was under the impression Hari never left his desk.

Lima compared the case notes with those of the rookeries. Perhaps the lights were strobing and were a health risk. As she read, it became clear that Celia’s case was merely an annoyance while families in the rookeries were left without power for days, and no one bothered to check on them.

Blackthorn

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.