The Glass Wall Interview

The turbines were the first thing you noticed about New Meridian, even before you got inside the mountain proper, because the whole entrance hall was lit by these salvaged turbine blades that some genius had rigged up with strips of glow-glass along the leading edges, so the whole ceiling looked like a field of frozen white combs humming with light. I stood under them for a good thirty seconds with my wool blazer already sticking to my back, because I was nervous as hell and sweating through it like an idiot, and I kept telling myself that a man who'd run four marathons in his life should not be shaking over a job interview. But this wasn't just a job interview. This was the job interview, the one that decided who ran the whole reclamation office, and after six years of pushing paperwork in a converted shipping container office and one daughter gone off to the coastal settlements with barely a backward glance, I needed it more than I wanted to admit.

And that's when I saw Kent Rogers leaning against the corridor wall like he'd been installed there by the original builders.

"Don Taggart," he said, pushing off the wall with one shoulder, and I could see the old scars catching the turbine light, the long shiny seams down the side of his neck and jaw where the collapse had tried to take him and only half succeeded. "Heard they were letting two dogs into this fight. Didn't figure you'd show up early though."

"Couldn't sleep," I said. "You?"

"Oh, I slept fine," he said, grinning. "I slept like a man who already knows the other guy's going to fumble the technical panel."

"That's a lot of confidence for a guy who got buried under a parking structure."

The grin dropped for maybe half a second, then came back, and I'll give him credit, it came back quick. "Yeah, well, I walked out of that one, didn't I. Anyway. You look like a man who ironed his shirt twice."

I had, actually, but I wasn't going to tell him that. We stood there in the humming entrance hall, two grown men somewhere in our forties pretending they weren't checking each other over like horses at auction, and the whole time the recycled air kept coming through the vents with that faint rust smell the whole settlement had, like the mountain itself was slowly bleeding iron into the air we breathed.

A side door opened at eleven sharp and a woman came out, and I knew before she said a word that this was Olwen Crenshaw, chief of operations, because everybody in New Meridian described her the same way, small, gray-haired, calm as a lake at dawn, and completely unreadable. She was wearing a plain work jacket over a patched shirt, which I guess was her way of telling us she didn't dress up for anybody, and behind her came a younger woman with a clipboard and the kind of expression you see on people who are watching a fight they've already bet on.

"Gentlemen," Olwen said. "Don Taggart, Kent Rogers. I'm Olwen Crenshaw. This is Holly Goldman, personnel. You'll be seeing a lot of her today, whether you like it or not."

"Oh, they'll like it," Holly said, dry as chalk. "I'm very likeable."

"Today is two phases," Olwen went on, like Holly hadn't spoken. "The first is the technical panel, upstairs, one hour, three examiners, standard reclamation management material. Budgets, crew allocation, salvage priority scenarios. You've both done panels before, so I won't insult you by explaining them."

"And the second phase?" Kent asked.

Olwen looked at him the way you look at a clock that's run a little fast. "The second phase is a personal compatibility trial. It's part of every senior appointment in this settlement, and I'm afraid the details are not negotiable and not available in advance. You'll each take it separately, tonight. You'll be given instructions when the time comes, and you'll follow them, or you'll walk back down to the surface and take the long road home. That's the whole of it."

"That's not the whole of it," Holly said, checking her clipboard. "That's maybe a third of it."

"Holly."

"Sorry, chief."

I looked at Kent and Kent looked at me, and I could see he was doing the same math I was, trying to figure out what a personal compatibility trial even meant in a place like this, where everything from housing to marriages got sorted by committee and rumor. I'd heard stories, of course, everybody had, about the old trial days when the founders tested people by locking them in dark rooms together, but those stories were mostly drunk-talk and nobody had ever confirmed a damn one of them.

"Any questions before we go up?" Olwen asked.

"Yeah, just one," I said. "Who's watching us during this compatibility thing? Because that sounds like the kind of test that comes with an audience."

"Good question, Taggart," Holly said, and she smiled at me with all the warmth of a fluorescent tube. "You'll find out tonight. Not before. But I'll tell you this much for free, since you asked so nicely. It's observation, not participation. Mostly."

"Mostly," Kent repeated.

"I said what I said."

Olwen turned and started toward the freight elevator without waiting for us, and Holly fell in behind her, and Kent and I brought up the rear like two dogs on the same short leash. The elevator cage rattled up through four levels of the mountain, past catwalks where shift crews glanced up at us with that particular New Meridian expression, mild curiosity over total indifference, and I spent the whole ride trying to slow my heart down and not doing a very good job of it.

"Technical panel first," Kent said quietly, watching the floors go by. "That part's mine. I've run three settlements' salvage boards, Taggart. You've pushed paper in a tin can for six years."

"And you've got a scar on your brain from a building that fell on you," I said. "Everybody in this office knows the story, Kent. The question is whether the chief wants somebody who survived a disaster or somebody who never caused one."

That landed harder than I expected it to, and for a second I actually felt bad, because there was a flicker in his face that wasn't anger, it was something older and tireder than anger. But then the cage stopped and the gate rattled open and the flicker was gone, packed away behind the smirk where he kept everything, and we stepped out onto the operations level.

The panel room was a long reclaimed meeting hall with a real glass wall on one side, actual salvaged window glass, floor to ceiling, which was such a luxury in a mountain settlement that people used to come up here just to look at it. It looked out over the mid-shaft, the great open throat of the mountain where the old mining equipment hung like the bones of something that had died mid-stride. We took our seats at the table, me on the left, Kent on the right, and Holly settled herself in a chair against the glass wall with her clipboard on her knee and a cup of something steaming, watching us like she'd paid for tickets.

"Three examiners," Olwen said, taking the head of the table. "Myself, Marla Quinn from finance, and Deacon Ruiz, shift operations. One hour. We'll start with budget."

The hour went about how you'd expect. Kent was good, I'll say that to his face and to yours, he was smooth and fast and he'd clearly rehearsed every scenario they threw, and he talked about crew rotation like a man who'd actually stood on a shift floor and screamed over the noise of a plasma cutter, which he had. I was slower, but I'd spent six years learning where the money actually leaked out of a reclamation office, in the freight schedules and the tool counts and the quiet little monthly thefts nobody wants to report, and when Marla Quinn asked the follow-up questions, it was my numbers she kept coming back to. I caught Kent watching that with his jaw working, and Holly watching both of us with her cup halfway to her mouth, not drinking, just watching.

When the hour was up, Olwen closed her folder and looked at us both for a long moment, and the room got very quiet except for the low thrum of the mountain's air system.

"Thank you, gentlemen," she said. "The panel is concluded. Mr. Rogers, your trial begins at nineteen hundred. Mr. Taggart, yours begins at twenty-one hundred. You will not discuss your trials with each other, before, during, or after, and yes, we will know if you do. Holly will escort you to the holding room."

"Holding room," Kent said. "That's a reassuring phrase."

"Isn't it," Holly said, standing up and stretching like a cat. "Come on, boys. Down and west, through the maintenance level. And Rogers? Try to look surprised tonight. The chief loves that."

* * *

The holding room turned out to be a disused maintenance tunnel off the west galleries, half-finished, with a cot, a chair, a table with water and bread, and walls that wept condensation in long slow beads, so the whole place smelled wet and mineral, like the inside of a bottle. Holly walked me down there personally at twenty to nine, chatting the whole way like we were old friends, telling me the tunnel had flooded twice and been abandoned twice, and I kept trying to read her face for a clue about what was coming and getting nothing but amusement.

"Nervous, Taggart?" she asked, stopping at the tunnel mouth.

"Ask me again in an hour."

"Oh, I will," she said, and grinned. "Believe me, I will."

I ducked under the lintel and stepped into the tunnel, and the first thing I saw was Kent Rogers sitting on the edge of the cot with his jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled up, looking like a man who'd been waiting long enough to get bored of waiting. "You," I said. "Where's your trial?"

"Over," he said. "Started at seven, finished at eight, and I'm not allowed to tell you what it was, before you get clever. Chief's orders."

"And you're in my room because?"

"It's not your room," Holly said from behind me, and I turned and she was already halfway back up the corridor with her lantern, walking backwards like this was the funniest thing she'd done all week. "It's both your rooms. Sixty minutes, gentlemen. There's a card on the table. Oh, and the glass in the door is one-way, so don't bother performing, we can see you but you can't see us, which I find delicious. Have fun." And then she was gone, and the dark came down like a lid, and there was just the hum of the air system somewhere and the slow drip of water off the walls and me and Kent Rogers and a cot built for one.

I looked at the door. There was a panel of glass set into it, salvaged stuff, wavy and green at the edges, and beyond it a blackness that could've held a person or a camera or nothing at all. "They're watching," I said. "Obviously," Kent said. "That's the whole point of the glass, Taggart. Glass is the chief's favorite material. Haven't you noticed? Her office, this tunnel, probably her kitchen. Woman thinks in windows." He nodded at the table, and I picked up the card. It was heavy stock, the kind they used for official postings, and it had been written out by hand, which somehow made it worse. I read it out loud, because the silence needed breaking and because I wanted to hear how stupid it sounded. "Demonstrate mutual trust for sixty minutes. No further instruction will be given. Your conduct will be evaluated." I put it down. "That's it? That's the trial?"

"That's it," Kent said, and lay back on the cot and put his arm over his eyes like he could sleep through an exam. "Welcome to management."

I sat down on the chair, which put us about four feet apart, and I did some arithmetic in my head, because that's what I do when I'm scared. Sixty minutes, two men, one cot, one door with glass in it, and a job riding on the outcome. Whatever Olwen Crenshaw wanted, she wasn't going to get it from watching us sit quietly, and I figured the only worse thing than doing something was being the one who cracked first. So I sat. And Kent lay there. And the water dripped, and the air hummed, and somewhere behind that glass Holly Goldman was probably eating something and enjoying herself, and I got to about eleven minutes by my watch before I couldn't stand it anymore. "You're not going to talk?"

"Nope."

"You've got nothing to say? Six years of working in the same office and you've got nothing?"

"I've got plenty to say," he said into his arm. "None of it helps me."

I waited. He waited. Then he lifted the arm off his eyes and looked at the ceiling, and he said, "We could argue."

"Argue."

"Honestly, I mean. No rehearsal, no numbers, no getting up and pacing like a man who practiced in a mirror. Sixty minutes of telling each other the