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At least this work wasn’t nearly as tedious as reading every single part of every file. I just had to open each folder and check for the symbol. Soon, I had a stack on either side of me, those without symbols on the left, those with on my right. I’d barely registered the symbol before, dismissing it as perhaps a part of the form. It was a magical company, so arcane
-looking signs on paperwork weren’t anything to get excited about. I supposed I should have found it odd that Rod never mentioned it, but it really hadn’t occurred to me that it might be meaningful.
I’d just tossed the last folder aside when Rod returned. “Find anything?” he asked.
I gestured toward the pile at my right hand. He picked up the top folder and raised an eyebrow at what he saw inside. “Really? Him? Okay, then.”
“What?”
“Oh, just someone I’ve had to counsel several times for not performing up to expectations. I guess he thought his connections got him out of having to work.”
“It’s a wonder you haven’t been turned into a frog.”
“Or he isn’t as important to his masters as he thinks, and they weren’t about to blow their long game over him.”
The next one made him grin. “I bet you got a kick out of this one.”
“Yeah, Gregor. Who’d have guessed it?” Gregor ran the Verification department and had been my first boss at the company. He had a tendency to turn into an ogre when he got angry, and the magically immune verifiers were the only ones who could see it, so they’d literally put him in the worst possible spot—or maybe the best. “You know, if they’re looking for magical immunes, he made an outstanding recruiting tool. He could identify the ones who showed promise, make their lives miserable, and then they’d jump when the Collegium made them a good offer.” I leaned back in my chair, shaking my head. “That explains so much.”
The list of possible Collegium-linked employees included a couple of members of the sales staff, a lot of accountants, and most of the middle management, and they were scattered through just about every department other than Research & Development. “How did they manage not to end up with any?” Rod mused out loud, shaking his head.
“Do these Collegium people sound like innovators to you?” I asked. “They seem more like parasites who feed on other people’s work. I guess there was Idris, but I wonder if he was really Collegium or if he was a convenient patsy.”
“Good point. If they didn’t really have the skills to do R and D work, it would show up pretty quickly, and if you’ve got those skills, you don’t need some secret society pulling strings to get you a job.”
I looked at the pretty substantial pile of folders representing all the employees we suspected might be Collegium-linked. “How many people do you think have come on board since you’ve been here who are with the Collegium?”
He shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing. I guess I could look for any relatives of past Collegium people. I find it hard to believe that it’s that widespread and I’m just now hearing about it. I mean, I heard stories growing up, but it was always something that happened long ago. It was history.”
“Like the way stories about fairies are always said to take place right before they vanished?”
“But they didn’t vanish.”
“Exactly my point.” Well, it wasn’t, because I’d learned not to think about people with wings as anything different from anyone else, and I never really associated our fairies with the creatures from storybooks. “Even the really old stories were set in some mythical lost time before things changed. But most people don’t know that they’re still here.”
“And I suppose it is a secret society. If everyone knew about it, it wouldn’t be so secret. They can’t be that bad, though, if no one’s talking about them.”
“They turned Philip into a frog and stole his business, and there’s no telling what they did to his brother,” I reminded him. “The people who’ve run afoul of them can’t talk, unless you can understand the nuances of ‘ribbit.’ But now that we know, what do we do?”
He looked at the stack of files and grimaced. “I guess we take these to the boss.”
It took both of us to lug all the folders to Merlin’s office. “Can’t you just poof these things up there?” I asked as I nudged a wayward folder back into my stack before it could slip out.
“There’s a slight risk they could be intercepted. I’m not taking any chances,” Rod said.
Merlin raised his eyebrows when he saw how many files there were and heard our explanation. “So, she was telling the truth about how deeply the Collegium has infiltrated our company,” he said.
“Now, what do we do?” Rod asked. “We can’t fire all these people. The company would shut down.”
“We would also be revealing our awareness of them,” Merlin said. “No, I think it best that we merely monitor the questionable personnel and only act if they give us reason to fire or reassign them.”
“We probably should find something to do with Gregor,” I said. “Right now, he’s probably running a recruitment scheme for them.”
“Or we keep him in place and make sure we recruit the next immune who quits,” Rod said. “That would be a good way to get our own double agent.”
“Kim’s still out there,” I said, “and it’s only been a few days. I think we’d be better off counting on her.” And I couldn’t believe I just said that. I did think she was loyal to MSI, or at least thought that was her best chance at advancement. I found it hard to believe that she hadn’t been approached by the Collegium earlier because she had been one of the few really competent verifiers in the company.
“Surveillance may be tricky because they have people in Security,” Rod said.
