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When Mark is made Refiner of the Quarter for the second time, he smiles. He takes the good-natured teasing of Carol and Petey’s bright joy—the Department Chief so obviously happy to be able to give Mark an honor like this. Irving makes a crack about the good old days and soon he and the others are arguing good-naturedly about the merits of creamer versus waffles: but, later, Irving slips Mark peanuts paid for from his own tokens.
Irving hates peanuts.
Mark takes it with a nod, neither of them saying anything, and brings the extra snack to his desk while he works on his numbers. The trick to making snacks last is to eat them incrementally. Sometimes Mark even makes a game of it—for every batch of numbers binned he eats one more item—and in that way he can make a packet last the entire afternoon. Today, though, Mark’s feeling morbid. He stares into the blue screen where groups of scary numbers are lurking, coalescing, splotches of buzzing unease in an otherwise calm expanse, and shakes the entire packet of peanuts into the palm of his hand, where they sit in a dusty pile. Staring into the scary numbers, Mark tips the peanuts into his mouth and crunches down.
When the day is over he follows Milchick down the corridor toward Perpetuity. Once again, a pile of waffles is waiting; once again, electric candles line the walls. And Mark tries to enjoy the waffles, but even when he washes them down with milk they sit like a lump in the bottom of his stomach.
They have a new Woe, this time. Mark wonders what had happened to the last one. The dance is still beautiful, still distracting, and they’ve practiced a new choreography and everything. It must be a lot of work, so Mark claps politely when they’re done.
He stays on the bed and lets the Tempers come to him.
The trouble is simply that he’s not quite sure he wants—but anyway, it is an honor, and other refiners would kill to have this experience, probably, not that he’s asked because you don’t talk about Waffle Parties. You don’t talk about Waffle Parties and you don’t talk about the Break Room and you don’t talk about anything the entire team isn’t present for because if they aren’t present it’s for a reason.
And Mark knows, sort of, who to touch and when, and the Tempers aren’t shy about making it clear except that they never talk and you never do see their faces and the music never stops.
He still hasn’t worked out where the security cameras are.
So Mark thinks about whether this is the kind of thing you get rated on—say, how well you’re appreciating your Kier-given reward—and he tries to show appropriate enthusiasm. He thinks he’s maybe figuring out a trick for it, even. Like refining numbers, you let your focus go fuzzy so you can see the big picture. It helps if you can get enough into the motions, and forget why it’s all happening. And he can, for fits and starts—only then he’ll trip up on his mind again and remember that they’re watching.
Well.
Not they.
Someone more specific.
Her.
Harmony Cobel.
He doesn’t usually let himself think of her full name, because he’s not supposed to know about it. He knows she’s only told him her full name so she could see if he’d keep it a secret or not, because he’s not supposed to use it, not with anyone. Even thinking it makes him feel like he’s doing something wrong—
But in this situation, Mark finds himself turning the name over and over, the way you might worry over a seed that got stuck between your teeth. You just can’t stop until you’ve got it out.
He wonders if she watches all the Waffle Parties, or just his. She probably watches all of them. It’s got to be part of her job as Manager, right? You watch the Waffle Parties and you rate them on like, finesse, and reverence. Maybe she has a checklist, a ten-point scale, where she lines up all her observations to fit with the rest of Lumon’s curated knowledge.
It doesn’t really make him feel better, to think about the Waffle Party turning to printed paper, sliding into a file folder. Turning into a set of numbers.
When Mark is made Refiner of the Quarter for the third time, he isn’t really surprised. He’s faster at refining than anyone else on the floor and Petey likes him. Furthermore, there isn’t anyone else to choose. Petey can’t pick Irving, because Irving comes in last in refining and you can’t exactly reward that. He can’t pick Carol, either, because god forbid she has one of her moments and forgets what it is she’s supposed to do, with no one from MDR beside her to cover. And a Department Chief can’t pick himself for the perks. Well, like, he could, technically, but he wouldn’t be much of a Department Chief if he did.
So that leaves Mark with the duty.
And it’s fine, really. Mark gets a lot of work done that day and almost forgets about the evening events. Irving’s given him another thing of peanuts, which is sweet, but Mark doesn’t really need them. But he can’t say that, because that would make Irving feel bad, so he eats them instead and consoles himself.
It’s just that—Mark thinks as he fields a particularly tricky maneuver (Kier’s bed is big but with five people on it it’s a bit of a crowd)—he might feel better if he knew from what direction Lumon was watching.
If he could maybe see their response.
Just to know if he was doing it right.
Just so he didn’t feel like there were eyes behind him no matter where he put his back, itching over his shoulders.
They probably don’t have a checklist, even.
Waffle Parties and all.
It might be Wrong, somehow, to talk about. Even for Management. Even Cobel doesn’t say much about it, afterward. Last time she’d asked him if he liked the new Woe any better. Mark had asked her why she was so interested in Woe in particular when the others were right there. Cobel had asked him if he liked one of the others better than Woe.
Mark hadn’t known what to say, so he’d blurted out Malice. Cobel’s frown had gotten very cold and thoughtful.
“Do you have a sexual preference for men, Mark?”
Mark stares at Cobel. She seems utterly serious. Probing.
“I don’t know,” Mark says. Knee-jerk reaction. “Give me a chance to talk to my outie and I’ll get back to you.”
“I am not,” Cobel says, “asking about your outie.”
As if it were obvious.
“I don’t know?” Mark says again. When exactly would I have had the opportunity to compare? The thought flits through his mind—would gain Cobel’s ire—and he rephrases. “I haven’t, um, it’s not like we think about that, at work, Ms. Cobel.”
As if, maybe, she didn’t know.
That sex was something that belonged to outies.
It had been enough to placate her, anyway, and she’d dropped the question.
The mask of Kier is fogging up Mark’s breath as he concentrates. If you do the right things in the right order it’s almost like refining.
You can get lost in it.
Except then his mind nags at him again—
I don’t think she watches the others.
Mark doesn’t want to think about that, very much.
He chants the Nine under his breath until the thought disappears.
About a week before Mark is made Refiner of the Quarter for the fourth time, Cobel’s called him to his office for an “End of Year Review.” When Mark had mentioned it to Petey, Petey’d said that thing didn’t even exist, or hadn’t, until Cobel just invented it.
So, great. Milchick’s probably right outside, trying to figure out what they’re up to with the door shut. Or maybe he’s given Mark up as a lost cause.
Mark feels like a lost cause, sometimes.
Especially times like now, when he’s forced to remember he’s been here an entire year and he still hasn’t managed to pass even one note to his outie.
When he’s forced to remember he hasn’t even tried to pass a note to his outie for like, a quarter and a half.
Cobel asks him something about his time here—as though it matters what he thinks—and Mark answers her by rote. He thinks about the inevitability of making Refiner of the Quarter again.
“Ms. Cobel?” Mark says.
She pauses. Looks at him. She’s always looking at him, and he’s almost used to it. At least he knows from what direction she’s coming from.
“Yes, Mark?”
“It must be kind of pixellated,” Mark says. “The security footage from the Kier House, I mean. With it being so dark in there.”
“Occasionally,” Ms. Cobel says.
“Right, so, I was thinking,” Mark says. “It might increase productivity if observational activities were performed in person.”
“Are you speaking,” Ms. Cobel asks, “of Waffle Parties?”
You aren’t supposed to talk about Waffle Parties.
“No,” Mark says.
“I,” Cobel says. The word lingering. “Will consider it.”
When Mark is made Refiner of the Quarter for the fourth time, he takes it gracefully. He laughs and jokes with his colleagues, and he eats the consolatory peanuts Irving silently offers. If they hadn’t already hit quota he’d take the afternoon to refine, but MDR’s gotten faster at it—this time, they’d finished all the files with days to spare. It’s a big win.
So Mark doesn’t have anything to do but sit around in the kitchenette and wait.
Eventually Milchick takes him over to Perpetuity and Mark eats his plate of waffles. He wonders if outies enjoy waffles in the morning. Probably.
He thinks they probably get to put, like, strawberries on it too, or blueberries that aren’t shriveled. (He’s never eaten a strawberry. When he tries to imagine what it might taste like, all he can conjure up is shriveled blueberries, ice cubes, melon. Something cold and smooth and sweet.)
Mark fills every square of his waffles with syrup and watches the syrup sink down into the little compartments. He eats them, keeping the words on the plate covered for as long as he can.
The Tempers do their choreography. Malice is new, this time, though the second Woe has managed to keep her position.
Mark’s pretty sure that makes it a pattern: show any approval for one Temper over another and something happens to them. Even with his watch off, he can keep time if he recites the Nine under his breath, if he listens closely enough to the beats of the music. The Tempers walk over to the bed and slide on top, closing in on him, and Mark holds the flail in his hands, taps it against his thigh, tries to calculate how long he should spend Taming each Temper. He can get it right, this time.
He is getting it right. Woe, Frolic, and Malice have been dealt with according to protocol, and he’s in the middle of Taming Dread, when Mark notices a shiver of movement at the other end of the room.
The curtains sliding open, admitting a solitary figure who stands beyond the checkered floor and watches him in silence.
Unmoving, a statue in bronze.
Mark can’t help the instinctive glance upward—the motion, the sense that something new is occurring—but she can’t notice his attention, not behind the mask of Kier. He is not really Mark. Not the Mark S that Ms. Cobel knows; something indeed with the same body, although divested of its clothing; but with the mask, the flail, the ceremony—
He feels different.
He feels, in that singular moment when he sees her, as though she is a person standing uncertainly outside a ritual that is not her own. Wishing for some power that will never be her own.
Harmony Cobel.
Mark lets the word linger in his mind.