Chapter 7: Stamp

Felix's POV

I stamp things for a living.

At 6:40 on Wednesday morning I sat alone on the fourteenth floor with four thousand one hundred cremation orders on my conscience.

That was the number the system gave me when I searched my own inspector number, I-4471.

Six years of stamping, three or four orders a day, each one a yellow tag, a name and a courier slip.

Directive 7 had never asked me to look at a body, and I had been grateful.

The Bureau hires inspectors with no skill, because a skill can lie to a form and a stamp cannot.

My desk faced a window onto the river, and my second monitor held a map I had shown no one.

It showed Illinois, with a red dot for every person the Bureau had logged as Crack-adjacent Missing since October 2018.

There were 42,160 of them.

Each phone had stopped talking within two miles of a Crack, in the three hours before it opened.

The Bureau's word for these people was gone.

My word was taken, because I believed the Cracks took people somewhere, and I had believed it for seven years.

One dot sat near Rockford, at a street corner I knew by heart.

My sister had walked out for a pack of gum on the second of November, 2019, in a green coat.

She wore a silver thumb ring from a craft fair in Maine.

Her phone had pinged a tower a half mile from that corner at 9:14 p.m., and a Crack had opened across the street at 11:20.

I was thirty then, a claims adjuster, and four months later the Bureau was the only door that would let me in.

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