The Bureau (A Cage for Men and Wolves Book 1) (27 page)

Clover's eyes moved to Jeannette and Isaac. They were watching her, and while their expressions weren't as tense as those of the other workers, they still looked averted their eyes.

"Yes, sir."

His warning had been unnecessary. The other workers in her group side stepped her as they gathered their supplies. She'd considered asking Jeannette why everyone was avoiding her, but when she saw the older woman scurry away when she had tried seeking, she figured that her days of relying on her coworkers were over.

From across the room, standing out in the sea of black and brown, Clover caught a clips of red. Near the entrance, where Pierson stood to keep an eye on the crowd as one unit, she saw the black hair and red shoulder guard.

Rainer stood casually to the side, his mouth moving, but the sound of his voice lost in the noise of scraping buckets and squeaky carts. Clover knew that Pierson had been involved with her stay in the Bureau's holding cell. She'd not laid eyes on the woman, but she'd recognized her voice, and suddenly she knew the astringent woman was behind the poor reception she'd received from her coworkers.

Clover tried not to watch them—just looking at Rainer, even from a distance, made her body shiver and forced bile into the back of her throat. Just knowing that he took up space in the same room made her skin tingle with the memory of cold metal licking her skin.

Standing at the faucet, filling her mop bucket, Clover dared another glance at them. They were looking at her. She wondered if she was imagining it—how could they pick her out of such a big crowd?—then Rainer brought his fingers up to caress his own earlobe. Instinctively, Clover's hand moved to the bandaging at her own ear, and then he smiled in a gross display of gratification that told Clover she'd performed exactly as he'd hoped.

Clover's hand flew to her side and she felt her face heat up with shame. She turned her attention back to her bucket and squeezed her broken fingers until the pain was all she could think of. The white-out was a relief, and by the time she'd managed to lower her heart rate, Rainer was gone again. In his place, Clover heard the clacking of Pierson's heels as the woman approached Connell, who was still nearby, watching Clover like she might slip through the drain under her bucket.

"I'm changing your work region to number 5-2-7." Pierson said, turning a raised brow toward Clover. "The incinerator's holding cells."

- 26 -

The rattling wheels of the cart bounced down the hall, scouting the empty space ahead of them and announcing their arrival to the deepest part of the Bureau. They were underground. She knew even if she had no way to prove it. It wasn't just the time they'd spent on the elevator that gave that impression, either. The walls felt heavier there, like they were barely holding back the meters of dirt that would bury her and her crew alive if given the chance. Claustrophobia wasn't something Clover struggled with, given the small space she grew up in, but she found it hard to breathe with the weight of the building hanging over her head. 

Clover gripped the cart until her hands hurt, happy that the thing was noisy enough to provide a vague sense of privacy. With a compulsive glance over her shoulder she realized she couldn't see the elevator any more. Her internal map of the place was becoming harder to read every day. Where was she in relation to the cell she'd stayed in?

A constricting sensation pinched at Clover's throat and she took a deep breath, needing to remind herself that she still
could.

The heaviness of the door at the end of the hall was just one more ominous sign for her to add to the growing list. As Connell tapped a button on the access panel, though, the brutish slab of metal swung like it was no heavier than the kitchen door at Elliot's house, whose window still sat broken. Beyond the door was a smaller space—a little chunk of hallway sandwiched between two sets of the heavy, metal doors. On the long end of the walkway was a door that looked just like any other inside the Bureau, and the agent who exited the small office looked just like every other worker. If she'd not known any better, Clover would have thought they were in for a normal day of cleaning, but hidden behind the familiar smells of the place, she could detect something foul—something sickly.

"Palmer." The office worker—a man in his forties—shook hands with Connell. "Unusual for them to send a new cleaning crew down our way."

"Connell." He gave Palmer a one-shouldered shrug as they shook. "Guess we just got really lucky today."

Clover had known from the moment they'd received the orders that Connell was as unhappy about it as the rest of them, even if she got the distinct impression that he was upset for a different reason. Her work crew, which was already a quiet bunch, had seemed more solemn than usual. While this punishment was aimed at her, she knew she wasn't the only one who would be suffering.

"Well, I'm sorry we had to call you at all. We can usually make it to the end of the week without trouble, but we had really high numbers early in the week. That always makes the mess worse. We can't even get the new bodies in without walking in their mess at this point."

"Sounds great."

Connell's sarcasm disgusted Clover, and while Palmer hadn't said what sort of "mess" he'd meant, Clover knew. With the little context their conversation had provided, she managed to place the sour smell she could only guess seeped from the second set of metal doors—sewage. Clover looked at Jeannette, who she'd still not had the chance to talk to, and saw that her face was sickly grey.

"It's against regulations to open the cells, so don't worry about the mess inside. We just need the walkways clean enough to walk on." Palmer handed Connell a white mask to wear over his mouth and nose, then offered him a small pack of gum. "Chew it while you have the mask on. Nothing keeps the smell out, but it helps, trust me. I'll buzz you in."

Palmer went back into the office, the sound of the closing door bouncing around the small space, reminding them that they were trapped in there. Clover looked to the other members of her crew again, hoping for reassurance. No one looked at her.

The sound of the latch clicking open on the massive door made Clover's stomach lurch. She wasn't ready, but the vault-like door wasn't waiting on her, either. Hot air rushed into the cramped space, carrying the putrid smell of sewage and decay with it. At first, Clover wondered if the heat came from the fires that stoked the incinerator, but soon she recognized the moisture that overtook them. It was the same sort of humid swelter that hung inside the freight cars during the height of summer—it was the sort of heat created by too many bodies trapped in too small a space.

Clover wasn't sure what she'd expected from a place that housed men who were there for no other reason than to die, but she'd learned already that trying to guess what the Bureau was capable of was pointless. Despite the immense size of the room, the ceiling hung low.  The cage-like cells were cruder than the ones in the Evaluators' hall, or even her own cell—each roughly twenty feet wide and deep made exclusively of bars. Every cell butted against its neighbor, a grid of walkways crisscrossing between groupings of four joined pens, forming a grotesque scaled model of an inner city. Clover assumed the network of walkways reached the far wall of the room, but the sheer number of bodies squeezed into each cubicle made it impossible to see more than a yard in any direction.

There was a low hum of voices that kept the room buzzing, but given the tremendous number of bodies in the space, it still felt uncomfortably quiet. The men swayed and shifted like cattle who had lost their drive to move at all. To Clover's left she heard Isaac gag, and that's when she realized what they were standing in. The aisles that rimmed every cell block were covered in a thin layer of liquid—a seeping concoction of feces and urine. Looking toward the nearest block of bodies, she realized it was overflow from what had pooled inside the cell long enough to overtake the small lip that was meant to hold the waste back.

Clover had heard people talk about out-of-body experiences before, and she wondered now if this is what they felt like. She could feel the numb weight of her body standing in the sewage-slicked room; she could feel the stinging in her eyes from the ammonia. Her body felt everything that it should be feeling, but her mind was numb. It was the muffled sobbing she heard from Jeannette that brought the detached state of her brain into focus.

Clover knew that her own cheeks were wet as well, but she wasn’t
really
crying. She didn't feel anything.  Every encounter she'd had with the Bureau's sick operations had left her thinking that she'd seen the worst of them. The beating on the train, the mass labor force they'd formed, the cilice, the interrogation—it was like they strove to outdo themselves every time. But this massive holding chamber, with its turbines lining the walls, waiting to blast the bodies that stood in their own waste to ash, was too much. What emotions were there that could respond to something so hateful?

Traffic in the subway terminal had eased as rush hour came and went. Now, as Clover leaned against the center railing on the landing of a major staircase, people only passed every minute or so, most of them not even bothering to glance at her. Her hands gripped and released the bar behind her over and over, the residual pain in her healing fingers giving her brain something to focus on. Across from where she stood was a small alcove where the public bathrooms were—where Elliot was. She'd forgotten that he'd packed a change of clothes that morning.

She'd also forgotten about their trip to retrieve Reed. The memories of her time in the incinerator holding area was foggy, but the rest of the day had been more-or-less stricken from her brain. Now, even the promise of getting her brother back was overshadowed by the phantasm smell of the holding cells that crawled over her like an invisible swarm of insects.

Clover gripped the railing again, trying to focus on the smooth, cool texture, though all it did was make her wonder if the cell bars felt the same way. She wiped her hands on her skirt—took a deep breath

"You okay?" Elliot was getting better at sneaking up on her. Or she was getting more distracted.

"I guess." She laced her fingers together, not wanting to touch the bar again.

"Something happened at work again?" It was barely a question.

Clover wondered if she should bother telling him—wondered if she knew
how
to tell him. Just the idea of putting what she'd experienced into words made her stomach squirm. Against her better judgment, she looked Elliot in the face. A sensation like warm liquid rushing down her throat calmed the panic that had been coiling inside her when she caught the green of his eyes. After seeing the time and care he put into her recovery it had become hard to ignore the kindness she saw there. 

"We were sent to clean the incinerator holding cells."

The silence between them told Clover that Elliot knew the weight of her punishment. She wondered if he would try to justify how the Bureau treated the men she'd seen huddled together in those cells. An echo of his words from the night of her branding ricocheted around inside her head, leaving suspicion everywhere they hit. He'd defended their interrogation styles and the use of finishing schools, but Clover had never pressed him for his opinion on the treatment of those werewolves found "unfit" for slavery. She didn't want to imagine that he might defend it now.

As if in direct response to the uncertainty she still held onto, Elliot slid his hand to the back of her neck, squeezing gently. Normally, this would be a major breech of her personal space—instead, it eased her. The ups and downs were starting to drive her crazy.

"I'm sorry you had to go there." Elliot's thumb brushed the skin behind her good ear, his voice quiet enough that even the concrete walls of the staircase couldn't catch an echo.

"Have you ever been?"

"No."

"But you still send people there."

"Sometimes."

"Doesn't that bother you?" Her words finally had the bite in them she'd lost inside the incinerator.

Elliot's sigh told Clover that he'd gotten good at reading her moods—too good, really. He let go of her neck, moving to lean against the railing beside her. While he left a defined space between them, he let their shoulders press together. Clover felt anchored by the contact.

"I do feel bad," Elliot said after a moment of silence. "I try not to let it happen, but sometimes there's nothing I can do.”

Clover didn't need to question his sincerity, even while the nasty voice in the back of her head still fought that trust. She could hear the pain he tried to cover with his infuriating calmness.

"Why do we always feel that way? Like there's nothing we can do?"

"Well, sometimes it really is true."

"And sometimes people are just cowards!" Clover thought she’d actually hurt his feeling that time when she saw the frown he was trying to hide. “I’m sorry.”

"Don't be." Elliot looked at his shoes that Clover realized were in an odd category between casual and dressy. "You're not lying. I feel bad every time it happens. But I always do it again eventually. We all do."

"You don't really have much of a choice, though." Clover wasn't sure why she was defending Elliot's work as an Evaluator. It was less than a week ago that she was burning his work files—holding him at knife-point and accusing him of murder. Now she was comforting him?