By the time his meeting with McGovern was starting, James had some semblance of a priorities list done for the files they’d been given. They ranged over approximately a hundred years, something James had been stunned to realize as he pulled file after file out of the box. The Foundation must have retrieved this box directly out of their own storage and sent it over. He’d spread the contents of both boxes over the floor by the bookshelf full of outdated demon encyclopedias and spent some time considering each. 

James had been about to spread them out on the hideous, yet amazingly comfortable flowered couch he’d gotten from his aunt, but they were so dirty that he didn’t want to risk ruining it. He already needed to dig out the vacuum for the mess he’d made on the rug while organizing the files. 

Some of the cases looked very interesting, he had to admit that. But he was going to look like a fucking jackass going to some of these for followups. People were going to be furious. If they were even still alive. James was going to have to interview some of these subjects via Ouija board, wasn’t he? 

By the time he’d scrubbed his hands and hurried back to his computer, McGovern was already in the meeting. James joined, then glanced at his screen and saw the streaks of dirt across his cheeks. But there was no time to fix it before his video connected. 

“Hi Captain,” McGovern said.

He looked neat, as always. McGovern was a large man around fifty years old. His broad smile contained the same grating cheer he’d always had, but it was strained lately, and had been for weeks. And when they’d met at the twenty-four hour Dunkin Donuts, he’d barely bothered to keep up that pretense of cheerful team liaison. 

“Sir,” James greeted him.

“How are you?”

“I’m good,” James said. “We’re taking advantage of the night shift to get organized. The second set of files arrived a little while ago.”

“Excellent,” McGovern said. “I know you have your current cases as well, but the Foundation wants you to prioritize getting through some of this backlog. The files themselves also need to be digitized, not just your reports.”

James kept his professional mask on as much as possible and he knew McGovern was doing the same on his end. He didn’t actually like McGovern all that much, and had a feeling that McGovern’s real self wasn’t that much different from the professional self he presented in their meetings. After all, he’d been far too keen to send James off to be the Delinsky family’s private security while chirping that they’d find a way to keep their other work going smoothly. If it hadn’t been for the fact that McGovern had called him on his cell phone, from his own cell phone, on his way already from Boston, to meet up in secret at a shitty Leominster coffee shop, he could easily assume that McGovern was an integral part of this whole retaliation campaign. 

“We are getting a system in place to digitize the old records and prioritize our workflow,” James said, feeling a bit like a robot as he spoke. 

McGovern’s mask flickered slightly at that. “You can expect another box,” he said carefully. “I would expect it tomorrow.”

“Why are they doing this?”

He was glad he’d kicked Bradley out when he did, since McGovern tended to want him at these meetings to work out logistics. Even if his feelings toward McGovern had softened slightly, James wasn’t sure if Bradley had. He probably wouldn’t give a shit, since all this work was still being run past McGovern. He just wasn’t the one who could approve or deny anything. 

“They are running out of space in the archives,” McGovern said. “Since the space they’re given has been reduced as some functions are moved out of the main branch, we have to resolve some lingering cases. It’s just loose ends.”

“It’s loose ends from eighty years ago.”

McGovern’s eyes widened slightly, and James saw them flick toward something offscreen. “Is anyone else joining the meeting?” James asked.

“Not on my end, no,” McGovern said, recovering that smile again. “How about yours? If Bradley’s available? We should loop him in on this.”

“No, he just finished a double plus. I sent him home to get some sleep.”

“Of course, of course,” McGovern said. “It’s important that you all stay as healthy and rested as possible.”

He didn’t look particularly healthy or rested himself right now. And the way his eyes kept moving made it clear that someone else was in the room. A higher up? Someone waiting for him to trip up? 

Someone said something on the other end that James couldn’t catch, but apparently they weren’t trying to hide. McGovern laughed fakely and waved them off. Then he turned back to James.

“I know they seem ridiculous,” he said. “But they are cases that the Foundation took on and it is important that we resolve them and give these people some closure.”

James pulled up another window, aware that he was on the edge of too much attitude. He quickly typed in the name of the woman who had sent in the thirty-seven year old case he’d been looking at earlier and got the exact result he’d expected. “We pulled a case earlier that’s almost forty years old. The woman who requested it died twenty years ago,” James said.

“For her family, then.”

McGovern sounded frustrated, a little more like he had when James refused to take on the Delinskys’ future problems. “Look,” James said, aware that they were not alone on this call. “I will do my best. But considering the number of new cases we’re being given – ones from this century – these will end up lower on the priority list. And unless the Foundation wants to loan us someone from somewhere, I have no idea when they will actually be digitized. We don’t have someone who can do that.”

“What about Bradley?”

Oh God, James was so glad he kicked him out. “He’s been on field duty significantly more lately.”

“Madelyn Arroyo?”

Madelyn was probably still right outside of this office right now, wasn’t she? “Madelyn is also a field agent,” James said.

“I just meant because she’s the technology officer, right?” McGovern said quickly. “So she would be more likely to have the means to get that done, or to fit that in. I didn’t mean anything else by it.”

McGovern was flailing slightly and it was almost funny, not that it was really James’s place to laugh if he had inadvertently insulted Madelyn. He did worry that Madelyn was out in the field too much. This increase in cases had them all running around, and he could see the way that Madelyn was still recovering from her surgery a few months earlier. And she wasn’t expected to not be disabled by the time she fully recovered, so James also worried about the impact the increased work would have on her. He wasn’t going to say this to her, of course. Not if he didn’t want to end up in whatever poor excuse from an HR department the foundation had. 

But he was too conscious of the fact that their headquarters was not wheelchair accessible in any way. And the way that she talked to Amelia when she thought none of the others were around made it clear that this was a concern for her in the upcoming years too. 

“No, Madelyn doesn’t have time either,” James said, ignoring all implications that Madelyn had nothing but time since she couldn’t run as fast as the others. “Like I said, none of the digitizing beyond maybe a picture of the file is going to be on the priority list for my team right now. We’re all on more double shifts than not, with often not even eight hours before the next one. Is there any word on any new hires?”

He knew the answer, but McGovern shook his head. “No, and since you had two new hires last year, the Foundation had told me in no uncertain terms that there won’t be any others in the foreseeable future.”

“One was to fill an empty spot when we were already understaffed. The other was to refill that empty spot after our captain snapped under the strain, tried to murder the previous hire, and got himself killed.”

Maybe part of this was the fact that he and McGovern had a kind of understanding, so that was what made James so frustrated here. He had seemed so close to truly getting it. McGovern’s face was flushed and James could tell he’d successfully pissed him off. But his eyes didn’t go to anyone else in the room this time, so maybe he could speak a little more freely.

“What happened with Robin Lombardo was a tragedy,” McGovern said. 

“If there’s a ‘but’ on the end of that, please, we need to end this conversation here.”

He’d come into this planning to be as professional as possible. There was work to be done and he was just going to suck it up and do it. But he was going to lose his temper if any excuses for what happened with Robin were to come out of McGovern’s mouth right now. McGovern looked at him for a long moment and even though James couldn’t technically hold his eye over the screen, he looked steadily back.

“We’ll leave that alone,” McGovern said finally.

“Thank you.”

“How do you plan to incorporate the older cases?”

James sighed. “As best we can,” he said. “I know it isn’t the answer you want, but it’s the only one I can give. If I have six new cases tomorrow morning, as I’ve been informed when I got here, then those are going to be the immediate ones we focus on. If there are any of the older cases that you wish for me to prioritize from the boxes I’ve received, then let me know and I’ll note those. But I can attempt to start one tomorrow and if you don’t tell me, then I’ll pick it at random.”

McGovern thought for a second. “I’ll ask if there are any to prioritize,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“And I understand your staffing concerns, I really do.”

“I know.”

McGovern looked away from the screen for a moment, then did something on his desk while James waited and wondered if he could get off the call. This was a little long for McGovern to write himself a reminder. But then his own phone buzzed on his desk.

MCGOVERN

I will call you at midnight.

Not unsettling at all about that. He looked back and saw that McGovern was looking at him as though nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. 

***

As expected, his phone rang at midnight. It had been a quiet evening, just like James had hoped for. He’d spend about four hours getting things organized and, by midnight, he had a schedule that looked fairly decent. Not as smooth as the system the Foundation had given them a while back. Bradley had finally set that up and gotten working, at least until it got overloaded with all their cases and the software refused to start. But there was now a functional schedule and James was fine with that. Tomorrow they would start the current cases and and choose one old case at random. Once that one was solved around everything else, it’d be time for another old case at random.

And maybe someday when James was also a hundred years old, they might catch up. Though he wasn’t going to bet anything on it.

He was in the living room with Amelia, an old movie going as both of them caught up on admin work. Fang had forgiven him his trespasses and was now curled up, asleep and purring, beside him on the couch. His phone rang and sure enough, McGovern’s name glowed up at him.

“Excuse me,” he said.

Amelia looked curiously at him as he got up and walked into the office. He didn’t bother closing the door all the way, just enough to cut out the sound of the movie. It wasn’t like any of this was secret, at least from his team.

“What’s going on?” James asked.

“They’ve cut some administrative positions.”

Shit, team admins? They were all going to die without Bradley. But no, it wasn’t time to panic yet. James was going to have to fight that one and it was going to be a battle. But if it meant not losing Bradley from the team, he could handle a few sleepless nights of making up work after fighting the Foundation in daylight hours. Maybe he could just set up a meeting with them to show them how much work Bradley actually did. Nobody would be able to replace that weird little fucker and actually get results.

“I mean, administrative positions within the main branch.” McGovern continued.

James was going to kill this man. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“They’re merging different departments and eliminating some of the middle management positions,” McGovern said over the sound of traffic on his end. Was he making this call from the side of the Mass Pike? There was no way that was safe. “Today they laid off fourteen people.”

“All in Boston?”

“Yeah. None of the investigation team. It was a mix of positions, but all administrative. And from the way my supervisor was talking earlier, I might become liaison for Rhode Island as well.”

How many teams were in Rhode Island? It was a tiny state, but there were at least a few. So they must have had their own liaison up until now. And if they were cutting at McGovern’s level, then James didn’t stand a chance of improving their situation on a suburban branch level.

“But everything is condensing,” McGovern continued. “They’re not just cutting staff, they’re rearranging the entire organization. These active changes are only happening at the main branch right now, there’s been no mentions of changes or layoffs at the branches. But things are changing. I’m sharing my office again.”

Even James didn’t have to share his office, at least beyond walking in to find his teammates asleep on his sofa, which happened about twice a week these days. But it also meant that McGovern was likely under surveillance, which explained his trip to the highway for this conversation. 

“But regardless, the work does need to get done,” McGovern said. “And I have every faith in all of you to do that.”

There it was, right back to normal. “I’m aware of that,” James said. “And appreciate the confidence. But it will take a long time. There are only so many hours in the day and my team is pulling, frankly, unsafe shifts. And the other alternative is to have a skeleton crew during the day, which we’re close to having already.”

“You can take your time with it,” McGovern said through a yawn. “But all teams have them. You’re the third captain I’ve talked to today who said they can’t get these done. But they have to.”

“Why?”

He knew he was pushing his luck, but McGovern was talking like this was a normal thing to request. And if three other captains in Massachusetts alone had complained, then he was probably safe. “Because it’s your responsibility. And they need that from you.”

“Do you truly believe…”

He trailed off, but yeah, McGovern truly believed in the Foundation, didn’t he? “They make mistakes,” McGovern said as a car honked on his end of the line. “They’re not perfect, I know. Trust me, I know. But they’re trying to do the right thing here. If we can wrap up those cases, there will be families at peace who have been waiting for resolution for decades. I know it’s a difficult time, but the transition is going to be worth it.”

“What is this transition?” James asked.

McGovern was quiet for a moment. “You mentioned it’ll be new management, but not quite,” James pressed. “Earlier this summer, when we met out here. And you thought it was important enough to mention then What’s going on?”

“This is a good thing,” McGovern insisted. “But it’s going to be hard. They’re transferring things around in the administrative level, including the higher ups. This means a new CEO and it’s pretty clear who it’s going to be. She’s going to clean house, but it’ll ultimately make us more effective.”

“If we still have jobs at the end.”

“There are no layoffs planned beyond what they did today.”

Did McGovern truly believe that? He’d seen the lies, did he really believe they weren’t lying about this? “Look, I need to get back to work,” James said. “Is there anything else you need to talk about? Is everything okay?”

McGovern laughed slightly, just enough to confuse James even further. “I’m fine,” he said, his voice falsely bright against the rumble of some large vehicle behind him. “I just want to make sure you’re aware of the context of what’s going on here.”

“When do you think these changes will happen?”

“It’ll be slow,” McGovern said. “Nothing moves quickly, especially in an institution the size of the Foundation. So I would expect things to roll on much as they have for at least a year, then gradual changes from there.”

Was that a good thing? James wasn’t sure, but as long as his team wasn’t messed with any further, he’d take it. “Alright,” he said.

“Is there anything you need from me?” McGovern asked.

“Is any of this still them retaliating?” James asked, aware he was being blunt and not really caring. It wasn’t a secret, especially not with McGovern. “Are you sure these boxes have nothing to do with what happened in Boston? If it is, is there anything that I can do to make them ease up on my team? None of it was their fault.”

Before now, he would have said he’d do anything short of apologizing, but James might consider that if things kept up this way. Amelia wouldn’t let him, but if he thought it’d do any good, then he’d take her anger over having the Foundation destroy her.

“I have no control over what’s assigned,” McGovern said. “If it’s in your county, it’s your responsibility. Now that they’re not sending you anything from the other counties, I don’t believe this is retaliation in any way. This is just the next step in restructuring the Foundation as a whole.”

This was a bit of a relief, at least. They were being destroyed by work, but it wasn’t being sent to hurt his team as revenge for James’s words anymore. And despite his frustrations, he had a feeling that McGovern had been part of the reason that ended. 

The rush of cases in surrounding counties had dried up after that horrible night when Gabs had been hurt, was on her way to the hospital, and the printer had ground out case after case after case in a way James had never seen before. But he hadn’t seen it happen since that night. He’d reported the cases outside their area and that was the end of it, at least as far as he could tell.

“I need to go home,” McGovern said through another yawn. “These changes are for the better, I promise. But we have to get through the tough parts first. And after that, I’ll see what I can do to get you another staff member. Maybe even two.”

Maybe even two. Man, he must have been loopy from the long hours if he was promising that. “Thanks,” James said, not even bothering to address whether he believed it or not within the privacy of his own mind. “Alright, I’m on through tomorrow afternoon so I’ll see you later.”

He hung up a moment later, then sat down on his couch with a groan, stretching out an ache in his shoulders as he did so. He’d only been here a few hours by now, but he was wiped already. And had at least ten more ahead of him.

He went out to the living room, where the TV was on mute and Amelia was wrapping something up as she half-typed, half-watched whatever monster was on the screen. 

“Fun call?” she asked.

James shrugged. “McGovern says that they laid off fourteen people at the administrative level within the main branch. And that the transition is going to suck but be worth it. And afterward, he’ll push for us to get two new team members.”

She laughed out loud at that, spinning around to look at him. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Our little group is going to grow.”

James sat back down at his station and took a sip of his cold coffee. “He scared me though, when he said that they were cutting admin positions. Asshole couldn’t resist a dramatic little pause in the conversation after that. I truly thought they were talking about laying off Bradley.”

“This place would crumble,” Amelia said. “Honestly, at this point, we’d be fucked if any of us were laid off.”

“We’re going to do what we can,” James said. “And if they have a problem with it, then they can come here and help us get through all the cases.”

---

CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 4