第 039 Episode| The Regular

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 2 · 09:12 · Saint Tranya · the café across from QuarktoLabs

This café had changed its morning shift staff three times, and not one of them remembered when she had first started coming.

All they knew was that every morning, somewhere around 9, the second table by the window would be occupied by a woman. Medium build, medium age, in a grey coat of the kind you saw today and could not recall tomorrow. What she ordered was always the same: a cup of black coffee, no sugar, warm, not hot. She never hurried the staff, never complained, and tipped neither too much nor too little—just enough that no one would remember.

A customer once asked the staff what the woman by the window did for a living. The staff thought about it and found they had no answer. They saw her every day, yet could not say what she looked like, as if that face of hers had grown for the express purpose of being forgotten the moment you looked away.

---

The second table by the window had one advantage: the line of sight ran clean across the street and landed on the front door of the building opposite.

That building bore no sign. Its glass curtain wall reflected the whole street's grey straight back. Only those who knew, knew that inside was QuarktoLabs. The founder's surname was Spunks—a name many in the city had heard, and very few had seen the man behind.

She came every day, but not for the coffee. She rarely took so much as a sip of it. She would lift the cup, touch it to her lips, set it down, the temperature just right to make anyone think she was drinking. She could sit like this an entire morning, almost without moving—not enduring the stillness, but simply lacking that thing in her that gets restless from sitting too long. A table, a chair, a woman, sitting there no differently from the table and chair that sat there, blending in, unseen.

This seat by the window she had held for many years. Long enough that she was older than any shop on this street, long enough that the building opposite had gone from an empty lot, to a foundation laid, to a glass curtain wall hung, and through all of it she had sat here, watching it rise day by day.

She came for that door.

---

At 09:14, a man came round the corner.

Dark coat, a pace neither fast nor slow, hands in his pockets, as if thinking of something else—he was always thinking of something else. He crossed the street without looking either way, yet every time he stepped clear of the oncoming cars exactly. He himself had probably never noticed the habit. She had. Every habit of his that he had never noticed in himself, she knew, and had known for a long time.

Today was a little different.

Not him—the direction he came from. He had not come from the side where he lived—that road she could trace with her eyes shut. Today he had circled round through the west of the city before appearing, his coat the one from yesterday, a faint shadow of unshaven stubble on his chin. He had not slept at home last night. She did not know where he had been, and did not need to. She only set it down as one more entry: night of January 1, the subject did not spend the night at his residence, whereabouts unknown.

Lika walked up to that door. The door knew him, and opened without a sound. He went in. The door closed.

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She lifted the cup and touched it to her lips.

Then she did a very small thing: she turned over the unopened packet of sugar on the table, the side printed with the shop's logo now face down, the blank side face up.

To anyone else on the street, this was only a bored woman fiddling with a packet of sugar on her table.

To her, it was the day's first entry: on station, 09:14. One minute later than yesterday, two minutes later than the day before. He believed his routine was very random. It was not random. The hour at which he had stepped through that door on each of these years' days followed an entire system—not on paper, but in her head—laid out clear and exact. He did not know such a thing existed. Still less did he know that someone was keeping it for him.

What she recorded was not only the times. When he turned something up, he would forget to eat. When he lied, his voice did not change in the slightest, but his left hand would quietly go still. The day before he reached the limit of his exhaustion, he always took the long way round and stayed somewhere alone until very late—that road through the west of the city last night was the road of such a day. She set it down alongside all those days that had come before just like it, lined into an invisible line, climbing slowly upward. What would happen when the line reached the top, she did not know. Her job was not to know; it was to record, and then to wait.

As for last night's entry—the subject away from his residence all night, whereabouts unknown—an anomaly of this kind was, by the rules, to be reported upward. She was in no hurry. Report it, and those she answered to would put one more pair of eyes on him; one more pair of eyes, and one more measure of risk that a man like him would catch it. She had held this seat so long precisely because she never added that one extra measure. She would keep it noted for now. Wait until it became a second entry, a third, and then see.

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The staff came over and asked if she wanted a refill.

She shook her head and gave a small smile. That smile was perfectly standard, so standard you could not pick a single fault in it—the polite smile of an ordinary woman to an ordinary member of staff, the kind that would be forgotten three seconds later.

Last winter a man had sat down beside this table and tried to make conversation. She had smiled the same way then. After the smile she said three sentences: the weather, the coffee, a courtesy. The man sat for five minutes, found it dull, and left. When he came again the next day, he no longer remembered who he had spoken with the day before. She had worked it out—for one person to remember another, the other had to have at least one thing about them that was "different." She had not a single one. That had been trained into her.

The staff left too. She turned back and looked at that closed door.

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She would sit there until just before he came out for lunch. She sat like this every day. Every day he walked past this window.

In all these years, not once had he ever looked in through this window.

And she had never once intended to let him see her.

【Ch. 039 End · Saint Tranya · the café across from QuarktoLabs】