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“Hey,” he said, prompting a brief pause in Hank’s ranting, “you’re kind of an asshole, huh?”

This caused a longer pause. Hank appeared to have forgotten to close his mouth.

“Huh?” Hank said at last.

“Your garden looks nice,” Jack said. “Now, you coming or what?”

Hank’s mouth seemed to be working through a variety of options, not quite landing on anything for long enough for Jack to grow bored. He shrugged and trundled back to the car. A moment later, Hank whipped a “Hey, wait up” at Jack’s back before hurrying to catch up with him.

Back at the office, Jack quickly typed up the report for Hank’s collection and then made his way to the single-stall accessibility bathroom on the first floor. He really didn’t need The Eagle poking his beak over the dividing wall while he made this call.

Mr. Flores answered on the second ring, his voice rich and deep as it tumbled down the line. It was definitely the kind of voice that carried gravitas, Jack decided.

“Mr. Flores?” Jack said in a voice that carried the remnants of being a smoker in the ’70s. “I’m not sure if you’d remember me.”

• • •

As it turned out, Mr. Flores did remember Margaret, though she’d been on staff too long for him to have hired her. Still, they’d crossed paths from time to time over the years, apparently, and while Eli’s intel that Mr. Flores was the primary hiring authority for this branch of S.C.Y.T.H.E. was outdated, Mr. Flores was looking for someone for Accidental over at the branch he did most of his work out of and was willing to consider any referrals from current employees. In fact, that was one of the main S.C.Y.T.H.E. hiring practices. Because of the secretive nature of the company, most new hires came from referrals or headhunting, the latter of which had been the case for Margaret, who’d been a travel agent for years when she got the call for an interview. At least, that was the best Jack could piece together from the information he’d been accumulating over the past few months. In many ways, S.C.Y.T.H.E. employees were travel agents in their own right, really, only it was very much a one-way trip and no one really knew what the final destination was.

After twenty minutes of fiddling, Jack figured out how the fax machine worked and sent Carter’s résumé along to Mr. Flores, and after forty minutes, Mr. Flores called back to let Jack know he would be reaching out to Carter for an interview. Carter himself called Jack just after lunch. Apparently the interview had already been set for the next day, which meant Jack had the hazy hours between work’s end and the next morning to prep him on everything he might need to know about the organization.

It wasn’t their first cram session together. In fact, the You Agains had spent all of high school holed up in one bedroom or another, limbs jittering from a diet primarily consisting of the main three all-nighter food groups—energy drinks, Diet Coke, and candy bars—while they pored over Greer’s diligently kept notes from several years before. Granted, actually paying attention in class might have mitigated the need for most of these sleepless nights spent trying to memorize the twelve systems of the human body while actively assaulting several of their own, but it always seemed to pay off in the end. No one ever walked away with lower than a D, and that was a rousing success to Jack.

This time, though, the test at the end of the cramming would be worth more than grades. Carter needed to convincingly portray someone Margaret considered a good candidate for S.C.Y.T.H.E., and Jack wasn’t even sure he was doing a good job, despite already having the gig.

The best way he could think of to attack the situation was with a mock interview. He always preferred a hands-on approach where he could swing it. By the time Carter arrived at Margaret’s after work that night, Jack had transformed the living room into a stand-in office. The couch had been too heavy for his elderly body to shift alone, and Dale, despite his best efforts, wasn’t able to be much help, so he set up the TV tables he’d found in the kitchen cabinet a few feet in front of the couch and placed a kitchen chair on either side. Then, since he still had some time to spare, he collected an assortment of papers, a stapler, an antique lamp, and his laptop and arranged them on top of the table just so. If you ignored the couch on one side and the TV on the other, and maybe squinted a little, you could almost buy this as an office.

Jack guided Carter over to the faux office and pulled out the other chair for Dale, who was standing in as Mr. Flores for the dry run. Then Jack made his way over to the couch, which he decided was the “backstage” area, so he could observe, translate from spirit to living for Dale, and offer notes.

“Is this really necessary?” Carter asked, mindlessly fiddling with the edges of the paper on the table.

The honest answer here was a solid “maybe.” Since no one was really supposed to know about S.C.Y.T.H.E. or its goings-on outside of those who already worked for it or those utilizing its services, Jack imagined prep work for an interview probably didn’t involve too much foreknowledge about the organization. That said, those being interviewed were selected for a reason: they were physically nondescript and had a small social circle, or they had a skill set connected to the main causes of death in the department they were interviewing for. He’d even read about one instance where someone died on the operating table and ended up networking with an agent who was at the hospital on a different collection before being revived and offered the job. But Carter had none of these things going for him. He was a handsome, reasonably social graphic designer who had never come closer to dying than when he was put under anesthetic to have his wisdom teeth out. That meant he’d need to fake the rest.

“It is necessary,” Jack decided. “All right, let’s get this party started. Dale?”

“Right.” Dale cleared his throat, puffing himself up a bit in his seat and looking down at the list of questions Jack had left on the TV table for him. Jack didn’t know what Mr. Flores would ask, but based on all the research he’d done when he first slipped into Margaret’s life, he’d made some educated guesses. “Mr. King, thanks for coming in.” Dale glanced over his shoulder to gauge Jack’s response to this little flourish before carrying on, forgetting Jack would have to relay it all for Carter regardless. “First of all, it looks like you’re a graphic designer. Can you tell me a little about how you think that experience would help you in your role at our organization? Bearing in mind this is a customer-facing position and will require a lot of driving and paperwork, and a strong stomach.”

Carter blinked as Jack finished reiterating Dale’s words and slipped back into observer mode. “Uh…” Then he looked at Jack. “What should I say here? I’m not supposed to know what the actual job is, right?”

“Correct,” Jack said, punctuating the word with a sage nod. “Say you’ve got really strong attention to detail. They’re fucking animals for attention to detail. Every report I turn in, it’s always ‘we need more attention to detail.’ ”

“Okay…” Carter slid back into the mock interview. “I’ve got really good attention to detail.”

Another sage nod from Jack as Dale carried on with the list of questions. “Great. And how are you with severed body parts?”

• • •

Staying up all night in your teens was a breeze. You could bounce back enough to make it through a full day of school, including gym class, and still have enough energy left over at the end of the day to steal the novelty boxers off Mr. Bianchi’s washing line. Staying up all night in your thirties meant a fairly groggy next day fueled by no less than three to five coffees before three p.m. Staying up late in your eighties, it turned out, felt like the kind of hangover a dormouse might experience after a night of drinking with the Russian navy.

Jack dragged himself into the office on legs of lead, landing on his desk chair as if he’d been dropped by a giant. He cracked open his laptop and flipped through the thin stack of files waiting for him on his desk, his brain filled with fog too thick for names and dates to penetrate. Carter’s interview was set for eleven that morning, and with any luck, the hours spent cramming until the first scratches of dawn etched pastels across the night sky would pay off.

It was a little after eleven-thirty when the call came, and Jack once again sequestered himself in the single-stall bathroom to take it. Carter didn’t bother with pleasantries, but it seemed to be more down to an eagerness to share his news than anything.

“Okay,” he said as soon as he heard Jack inhale in preparation for a “hello.” “So this Flores guy can’t be our guy.”

“Did you remember to talk about your attention to detail?” Jack asked, hoping Carter’s proclamation wasn’t the result of him being caught out.

“Yeah, yeah, and he really liked that thing about work-life balance. Whatever. Not the point. The guy was out of town with his kids the week the list was stolen.”