A Certain Average Fixer

Chapter 2: Step Two

The morning light through my window was the color of dirty water, which meant it was about nine o'clock and the smog was thicker than usual. I sat at the desk that served as my office, my kitchen table, and my dining room all at once, staring at the screen of a cheap tablet that flickered whenever I breathed too hard near it. The Hana Association's client feedback portal was not designed for style. It was a gray box with gray text on a slightly lighter gray background, and it loaded slowly because the Backstreets' network infrastructure was held together with prayers and recycled cable. But it worked, and that was what mattered.

Aldric's review had appeared overnight. I opened it with the same quiet apprehension I always felt before reading feedback, a habit left over from years of working for other people. When you work for an office, a bad review means your Operator yells at you or docks your pay. When you are the Operator, a bad review means you sit alone in your apartment and wonder if you made a mistake starting this whole thing. Neither outcome is pleasant, but the second one is lonelier.

The review was positive. Four stars out of five, which was as high as most Nest clients ever went. The written portion was straightforward and professional:

"The Fixer completed the escort from District 12 Backstreets to District 11 Nest without incident. He maintained a calm and professional demeanor throughout the journey, which helped reduce the stress of crossing through unsafe territory. He engaged in light conversation that made the walk less awkward without imposing personal opinions or making me uncomfortable. When we were confronted by hostile elements, he handled the situation efficiently and ensured my safety. I would recommend Grey Sky Solutions to anyone needing affordable and reliable protection."

I read it twice, then a third time. The third time was not because I doubted the content. It was because I wanted to memorize the feeling that came with it. The feeling was small and warm, like a cup of cheap tea that had not quite gone cold. This is what I wanted my office to be known as. Reliable. Professional. Unremarkable in the best possible way. A name that people could trust without needing to think too hard about it. In the world inside my head, where I was the only god, I had built something that actually existed now in the real world, and someone else had seen it and confirmed it was real. That was worth something.

I closed the tablet and leaned back in my chair, which creaked in protest. The chair was old and the left armrest was missing, but it held my weight. Most things in my apartment were like that. Functional but tired. Built to last a little while longer. Outside the window, the Library was still visible in the distance, a dark vertical scar against the pale sky. I had not stopped looking at it since the escort job. It was not that I felt drawn to it. It was that I could not look away, the same way you cannot look away from a closed door in a room where you are alone. Nothing good comes from staring at things you do not understand, but the human brain is not very good at following that advice.

I let the morning drift by in the way I usually did between jobs. I made tea on the portable burner. I cleaned my blade and counted my ammunition. Twelve rounds in the magazine, one spare magazine in the drawer. I had not needed to fire a real shot during the escort, but the warning shots had worked well enough. Rats were not bulletproof, and they knew it. The trick was making sure they believed I would actually use the gun if pushed. I would. I just preferred not to. Bullets were expensive, and I didn't want to waste them on fights I was going to survive anyways.

Around noon, I opened the Hana job board. The interface was the same gray-on-gray as the feedback portal, but the contents were livelier. Requests scrolled past in a steady stream, color-coded by urgency and pay grade. Red for immediate threats, yellow for time-sensitive work, green for standard contracts. Most of the green ones were the kind of jobs I had built my career on. Escorts, deliveries, standing in a corner of a shop and looking intimidating enough that nobody tried to steal anything. The pay was not glamorous, but it was consistent. People always needed someone to walk them from one place to another, or to carry something valuable through streets where valuable things had a way of disappearing.