Snow doesn’t ask me to explain what that means. She looks at me like she already knows, and it’s the answer she wanted all along.
***
The second woman I’m thrown into the agency colosseum with is the head of HR, Elizabeth Yoshida. She’s one of burliest people I’ve ever seen in real life and has the furious and almighty scowl of a macaroni penguin. I hope I never have to meet whoever those eyebrows hail from.
Elizabeth’s perilous scowl is sat behind a pair of thin-frame spectacles, which are attached to a chain that loops round the back of her rather large head. She’s got a desk in her office that is much smaller than Snow’s was although part of that is the disparate sizes of the two women.
“Fill these in.” Elizabeth pushes a stack of multi-coloured dead tree and ink at me. “Answer all the questions, not just the ones you want to. Fill them in with a black pen, not a blue one, or a glittery gel pen, or a crayon.”
Is she just being facetious, or did an agent in the past try to fill out HR forms with a crayon? It’s impossible to tell from Elizabeth’s expression if she’s taking the piss or not.
There are several black pens in a pot sitting on her desk. I nod my head at them. “Can I borrow one of those?”
Elizabeth’s scowl somehow intensifies. It’s an absolutely terrifying arrangement of facial features.
“Give me twenty quid, rich boy, and find out,” she says.
Right, so she definitely knows who I am, then.
I grew up the son of a billionaire, including the expensive education that lifestyle entails, although I skipped several years ahead in school and graduated from Cambridge University at age thirteen. When I ran away from my life as Rohan Stone, I drained a few of my dad’s accounts, taking an obscene amount of his money with me.
Still, who carries cash anymore?
“Can I use a pencil?” I ask dryly. There’s one in my bag that I use to sketch out ideas for inventions.
Elizabeth remains viciously uncharmed by my attempts at civility, wrinkling her nose and squinting at me like she thinks I’m a special kind of idiot. “Afraid you’ll forget how to spell your own name, are you?”
I exhale loudly, praying for calm, and turn my head toward Aaron, who’s standing behind me, just inside the doorway. He has his obnoxiously large arms crossed over his equally obnoxiously broad chest, and there’s a mask of perfunctory patience on his face that I am not buying for a second. He’s finding this whole thing funny; I can feel it.
“Hey, handler,” I call over to him, jerking my head at Elizabeth, “you just gonna watch me get shaken down by discount Roz?”
Aaron brings up a hand to rub at his jaw. “Thought I would, yeah.”
“You know what this is?” I demand indignantly. “Bullying in the workplace, that’s what it is.” I turn back to Elizabeth.“Where’s the form for reporting my extensive feelings about FISA’s toxic office culture?”
Elizabeth doesn’t even hesitate to yank open her desk drawer, dig inside it for two seconds, and then slap down another bright-pink form on top of all the others. She stares impassively up at me and says, “You’re still going to need a pen for that. A blue one.”
I snatch up the forms. “Why do I need to fill in all the others with a black pen and this one with a blue one?” I shake the pink form furiously. “What the hell difference does it make?”
Elizabeth sits back in her seat and crosses her arms, unimpressed by my theatrics. “It makes the difference between me filing the forms and me feeding them to Mr. Shredder.” She nods at a large black device set to her left that I assume to be the dreaded Mr. Shredder.
Aaron finally takes pity on me and steps up, making like a hero. “Come on, kid, I have pens in my office you can use.”
A wiser man would turn around and walk away from Elizabeth with their head held high. A better man would thank her for her time and try to retain some level of dignity.
As I am neither of those things, I give Elizabeth the shittiest grin I can slash across my face and say, “Fuck you, Liz, my new supervisor is flush with his own stationary.” I throw him a wink, adding, “And I’m assuming all he’s gonna ask for as payment is a blow job under his desk, which I willhappilyagree to.”
Elizabeth barks out a laugh so feral it kicks off a fear response in me. Aaron, in contrast, doesn’t react at all.
ThenI walk out with my head held high.
…….
Aaron takes me to his office and gives up his precious biros without any sexual favours exchanged, much to my very vocal disappointment.
I’m caught up on the first question the forms ask of me: my name.
All my life, the name “Rohan Stone” has plagued every little piece of my existence. It’s dictated how other people have treated me and what decisions I’ve been allowed to make for myself. It’s forced me to behave in certain ways and influenced how I’ve behaved toward people, whether they knew who I was or not.
