The thunder clapped once, then silent. The tumultuous passage of summer nights threaded the month with uneasy pelts of rain.
"Why the fuck did he have to do that?" She banged her head on her desk.
Val and she had a similar fate, to be frank. Their clients had relations to the Council. In Stephanie's case, it was even an A-lister family member.
She hissed and scribbled notes of the plan to help the abused clients and erased her writing again. Rinsed and repeated a few times. Her journal stared unassumingly at its owner, waiting for scratches of pen bled the ink into its fibres.
The safe house was not ready, and it was only a matter of days before someone got caught, she muttered to herself on and on. In the case of Val's absurdity, it was going to be a headache not only for Prattle, but threatening the sustainability of all Companions, too.
She dialled Gema on her video call. The digital clock blatantly glared at her. Almost eleven. Gema would still be awake. Not that the matter could be brushed off, anyway.
He appeared with sleepwear, a roll of tobacco between his fingers.
"You didn't smell it earlier because I'd been off this for a month. After you guys cherished this night here, I thought it was probably okay to continue indulging myself." His voice tapered off at the end of his uninvited and unnecessary explanation for the cigarette. Probably from one of his secret stash when digging out empty properties.
A jagged fork of lightning lit up her dark bedroom, save for a flickering desk lamp. She would need to replace the bulb this week. Maybe the depot had it. Or, she would steal it from the nearby units.
"I thought you swapped clients with him," Gema's rising voice echoed from her laptop speaker. Her screen went blank momentarily when the thunder illuminated the earth while the stubborn rain cleansed the past. Power surge. But then, like bloody-minded life itself that took no for an answer, Gema's face reappeared on the flat screen.
She twisted a pen between her fingers. "He would get us blacklisted. Rubbing in my face right after I completed the first mission of ex-inmate reintegration."
From her thirteen-inch screen, she could see Gema rolling his eyes and crossing his arms. He stared intensely at one point underneath the laptop that was not visible for her as if that dot could spell out the wisest decision in this brainstorming session.
"I try to view it logically. It'd only happen if they got caught," he spoke lightly, unsure.
Stephanie forced a smile. "If they did it in her house, who could guarantee there wasn't any camera or microphone planted?"
"No, S, you don't understand what I'm saying," Gema got impatient. "We always overestimate the impact. The worst case scenario."
He ran through some searching on his laptop to look up the background of Aluna's husband.
Stephanie could see he was scooting forward in his chair and a confident, mocking smile was wiped off his face. A blue glare could be seen from the reflection on his pupils.
Subconsciously, she sucked in her cheeks, anticipating for something she couldn't pin down.
"That guy was convicted with murder."
Wh- what? Why? Her brain ran a mile a minute. But before she could form a question, Gema said in finality,
"We should cut ties with him."
No matter how many times her brain spun tales of the worst possible outcomes, nothing prepared her for the reality when the words glid confidently out of Gema's mouth. Luckily there was no blitz of thunder to dramatise the comment.
"What happened?" She heard her voice trembling.
"He is a . . . boss in the NP, New Police. But his name popped up in a murder news article as a suspect, let free."
"No." The word left a bitter taste in her tongue. She balled her fist and put it on her lips. If whatever happened with Lila's booking was an honest mistake from her negligence of a feature development, now what Val did was an extreme carelessness.
Of all people, why was it the wife of an NP's official?
She would cry in this instant if Gema didn't continue harranguing her for the next steps. He also forwarded the profile.
"He knew it. He probably knew it but he didn't want to scare me back at your place. But he did. Not only did he violate the integrity standard a Companion should always hold dear in heart, but also he endangered everyone in this business. It is NP he offends. Someone as powerful with the authority to determine the Immune or Protected status of anyone," she massaged her forehead. No amount of sleep was within reach that night.
"Would we let him go? Cut ties with him from all Companionship? It's to protect everyone, Steph. Not just about Prattle."
She couldn't. Not at this point. However firm her answer was, fear still hooked itself on her heart.
"Just because he's your friend? The co-founder, the first person who saw the value in your ideas?"
The next things coming out of Gema's mouth were a series of objective ranting. Stephanie didn't know why her brain decided that 'objective' and 'rant' could be tied to form a phrase that made sense, but the phrase did make sense, by the way Gema defended his opinion.
"You understand that what he does is against our vision? I can't imagine why we should keep him around."
"I don't wanna harbour a homewrecker, Gem, you must know this. But I— I don't know how this will pan out. Her living environment—"
"You worry about him failing to find a new job if you sack him? Well, supply depots are open. Or let's see if Vision wants to welcome him."
"Vision wouldn't if they catch wind of why Val is no longer with us." She suppressed her urge to scream.
"Whose reputation should you consider now? The whole Prattle's as a young organisation, or his?"
He sighed. "I care about you, S. I don't want the idea you built all that we are today on toppled in vain because of one reckless action, even from the co-founder himself."
Too much logic in his coaxing. Stephanie's brain ventured sideways.
A strange recollection made her shudder. She asked, "What's the answer to my question about divorce, Gem? Did you do any research on it?"
He asked her to wait for a moment, for something Stephanie assumed browsing his notes on his laptop. After a few seconds, his eyes lit up and his face was focused back on the camera. "It's forbidden because the government wants to repopulate the earth."
Stephanie ran a quick dumb model in her head. If the remaining population had an equal distribution of adult males and females, and each adult human had their own spouse — meaning people like her, Val, Gema, Annisa, or Mark wouldn't exist — and everyone in this adult universe was fertile, so each couple was expected to give birth to at least one child . . .
With almost two billion people remaining, this fantasy universe would have an additional one billion children if this global government programme was successful.
"A flawed assumption," she chipped in. "Children can be born outside wedlock, though."
"Unfavoured complication, I believe," he shrugged. Stephanie heard the taps of the cigarette to an invisible ashtray.
"What are you trying to say?" he continued.
"If Aluna is going to be pregnant . . .," she spoke as she thought.
"Regardless of that, Val would face the wrath of Aluna's husband first."
They rattled ideas back and forth, bounced off the sloppy thinking disguised as a critical one when it was over midnight. No brainpower enough. No good decision ever came past midnight, and yet they went ahead with it.
They aligned that they shouldn't write this off. The husband might kill Val or her and then it would be a matter like a domino effect, a dumpster fire awaiting everyone. Next thing they knew, all other competitors providing similar services would be branded the same thing.
Useless, privilege-abusing lazybones. Prostitutes. Homewrecking individuals.
She couldn't spare any more thinking effort to ponder about this.
So, between Val's collateral damage and losing a substantial force from their organisation chart, they picked the latter.
"The priority is clear. We still need to save her, move her to the safe house. Val will be out. As for the husband, let's hope he doesn't hear of what's happening between them," Gema concluded, albeit with a corner of his mouth tipped down in powerlessness.
Stephanie sipped his tea anxiously. "How long can we put this off? Do you know the PIC from the Wellbeing department who takes care of this safe house? I just want to save her ASAP from the potential bloodbath."
That was the conclusion she dreaded. When someone became irrational, especially at the times when the police didn't appear in society and smaller cases would be omitted, people tended to take the matter into their own hands. They took violence, more often than not.
It was even worse when the opponent was someone from NP himself.
"To make a statement," she added in a hushed tone.
"To add nothing into this everlasting chaotic tension. When people lost hope, not much common sense remains." He illustrated his point further. "When you're at the breaking point, nothing much you do or say will tip the balance. You'll go down with it, so what's the point of refraining yourself?"
"Plus, the drones and choppers can only scan outside," she added.
"Aluna would be a dead body before someone can interrupt to save her life. And who knows if the frontliners would question anyone from the deceased's household for interrogation, especially someone from the NP's household."
"And if the one in the body bag is Val . . ."
"Yeah, too many more important things to do. One dead body, that's all."
Her mind helplessly supplied the recollection of Lila right when the words died down at the tip of Stephanie's tongue.
Her mind always jumped to the worst possible outcome, as if she couldn't train it. Rational thinking told her that Val and Aluna might still be safe under the radar.
But she couldn't risk it. Not with the entire Companionship business that she founded at stake. Too many people would lose their jobs if the Council declared that this profession was destabilising the society. So she needed to lay low.
She left her flat to go downstairs for fresh air. Technically, it didn't violate the curfew. She didn't leave her tower, nor did she do suspicious activities.
She rode the elevator down until reaching the ground floor.
There was no receptionist on this floor, it had been like that for so long. She crossed the narrow hallway to the gate of the pool area, feeling reluctant to step a toe over the line.
The dark sky encompassed everything under, decorative palm trees swayed because of the dance from the night breeze. Only in silence, in the presence of the vast, limitless universe, her mind softened, her anxiety subsided.
She was just a speck of dust in this infinity, trying to protect a little bit of life she newly found in this end of an era.
"Pak," she remembered she said it last time to Maryono. "What's your son's name? I might get some help from the other Companions to learn his whereabouts."
Or, when Lila said, "You can always give it to the . . . people . . . lurking on the streets."
Or, the recipes from elderly people without any living relatives that she posted online on Prattle blog for documentation.
Or, the brownish gauze on Lila's forearm.
She knew people's life stories. She hugged people living alone, isolated in this lockdown. They weren't just statistics, not a dead number, flatlining or falling accordingly based on how many more humans left on earth. Each one of them had memories, aspirations, past, and future. And more importantly, a destiny to fulfil.
It was ironic when she found meaning of her life and her job, this recklessness happened, trying to block the pathways she built with blood, sweat, and tears.
But the universe didn't allow her to be spiralling for too long, for a faint rustling voice heard in a distance.
Probably another Immune in the opposite tower also tried to release the mind blockage? They could say hello down here, she thought.
But it came from the adjacent tower. Shiver travelled down her spine as she felt being watched. The baby hair on her nape rose to the suspicion, and she twisted around, stretching her neck to look at the next tower.
The majority of it was dark, for most of the units were empty. The remaining inhabited flats had the soft yellowish glow radiated from inside, casting gentle rectangular shapes on the tower, from the glass panel of each balcony-facing door.
Stephanie counted not more than ten units, all on the first until the third floor. She deduced not all of them were initially the tenants of those floors. Probably soon after there were more missing people from that tower, the upper floors' tenants moved down. No man's an island, no one wanted to live alone when the rest of the group migrated somewhere.
But the nonexistent gaze that she felt targeted at her came from one of the upper floors. She looked up.
Stephanie could swear there was a slight movement from the corner of her eye. Her stomach roiled with worry. If there were people who shouldn't be there . . .
If there were rebellion being brewed in this very apartment complex . . .
Her heart thumped over a hundred beats per minute.
Relax, she could investigate it tomorrow. When there was no light, darkness manipulated human's heart for things that weren't there.
With that in mind, she anxiously stepped back to the comfort of the hall, riding the elevator up to the warmth of her old flat.