Page 111 of In the Dark of the Past

I grinned, and Finn pushed the door.

It was a records room. Nothing dramatic, no red thread or string, no photographs on the walls, no evidence of occupation. Just shelving units. Floor to ceiling, on both sides. It was the kind you saw in courthouse basements. And on every shelf down here? Bankers boxes, each one labeled in the same block lettering, and every one dated.

The oldest boxes went back to 1987.

There were a lot of boxes.

“Split it,” Finn said. “Atlas, take the financial records. I’ll take the personnel files. River⁠—”

“I know what I’m looking for,” I said.

He nodded and didn’t argue.

I moved along the shelves reading labels. The boxes were organized by year and then by category: DIRECTIVES. TRANSFERS. COMPLIANCE. TARGETS.

That last word.

I stopped at TARGETS and pulled the most recent box.

Inside were manila folders, each one labeled with a year and a cycle number. Seven folders per cycle. And inside each folder was a name, a photograph, and a notation of disposition.

Relocated.

Silenced.

Deceased.

I read them the way I read case files, systematically and without letting myself feel the weight of each one until I had the full picture. There were names I didn’t know. Names I half-recognized. A retired schoolteacher. A county clerk. A man who had apparently written several letters to the state about the water quality in the eastern neighborhoods and then, per the notation, stopped writing letters.

I found my father’s folder in a cycle.

The notation read, Discredited. Compliant outcome achieved.

I set it down carefully, face-down. I would come back to it later. I couldn’t deal with that now.

I found my mother’s folder in a different cycle.

Hers read, Relocated (Stonybrooke). Contained. Deceased — reported suicide.

The parenthetical in her own handwriting from the letter surfaced in my mind. Stonybrooke was never a hospital. It was a holding cell for people who knew too much.

Reported suicide.

I set that one face-down, too.

Then I kept going to the current cycle and its most recent folder.

I opened it.

A photograph slid out first. The timestamp on the back told me it was from eight weeks ago.

It was me.

Coming out of the clinic where I’d worked, my bag over my shoulder and keys in hand. It was the picture of a person who didn’t know she was being watched.

The notation beneath my name read, Pending. Return to Maple Ridge — monitoring active.

They’d known I was coming back before I did.