The Observer

Jessica Robbins did not run.

Running attracted attention. Attention compromised the assignment. These were things her father had told her when she was nine years old and they had never stopped being true.

So she walked.

Through the swinging doors of the nurse's office. Through the corridor filling back up with students now that the drama had passed and everyone had somewhere else to be. Past the Year Sevens near the water fountain who had already moved on to arguing about something on someone's phone. Past the noticeboard with its peeling edges and its posters about upcoming events that nobody would attend.

She walked at a pace that meant nothing. Not fast enough to suggest urgency. Not slow enough to suggest she was avoiding something.

She was very good at this.

She had been doing it since she was old enough to understand what it meant.

The empty classroom was on the second floor, fourth door on the left past the stairwell. Room 21. Chemistry. Mr Adeyemi's. She had identified it in September as a reliable space — he had a free period fourth lesson on Mondays and the room was never locked. She had used it twice before for check-ins and nobody had ever noticed.

She closed the door behind her.

The room smelled of old textbooks and the faint chemical residue that chemistry rooms never quite lost no matter how much they were cleaned. Rain pressed steadily against the windows. Outside, the school yard was visible below — a few students cutting across it with their hoods up, moving quickly.

Jessica stood at the window for a moment.

Not looking at them.

Thinking.

Then she pulled out her phone.

Not the one she used at school for ordinary things. The other one. Slim, black, no brand marking on the back, its interface stripped down to the essentials. Her father had given it to her on her thirteenth birthday, which was the kind of thing that told you everything you needed to know about what kind of birthday it had been.

She opened the secure channel.

Her thumbs moved efficiently across the screen. She had written reports like this enough times that the language came without effort — the clinical shorthand, the precise vocabulary, the careful removal of anything that sounded like an opinion.

*Subject: Sarah Smith.*

*Date: 01.04.2024. Time: 09.47.*

*Event: Unscheduled collapse during Period 1. Location: Main corridor, first floor.*

*Observed symptoms: Acute disorientation preceding collapse. Transient loss of consciousness. Rapid eye movement on recovery consistent with REM state intrusion. Duration of episode: approximately ninety seconds.*

*Assessment: Probable Awakening Event. Timing consistent with known environmental trigger patterns.*

*Recommendation: Observation level increase. Continued monitoring advised.*

She read it back once.

Removed the word probably from the assessment and replaced it with *probable.*

Hit send.

The message disappeared into the encrypted network. No delivery confirmation. No read receipt. That was how it worked — you sent and you waited and you trusted the infrastructure because you had no choice but to trust it.

She stood in the quiet chemistry room and waited.

The reply came in forty seconds.

Her father's messages always came fast. Not because he was always watching, he was careful to maintain the appearance that he had other things to attend to, but because he considered delayed responses to be a form of inefficiency and inefficiency was something Nathan Robbins did not tolerate.

Confirm details. Do not engage. Await further instruction.

That was all.

No acknowledgement of what she had witnessed. No question about whether she was alright, though that was not a surprise — field operatives were expected to be alright, the question would not have occurred to him. No indication of what *further instruction* would look like or when it would arrive.

Just the directive.

*Do not engage.*

Jessica stared at the screen.

She had been watching Sarah Smith since October. Four months of corridors and classrooms and carefully managed proximity. She knew Sarah's schedule better than Sarah probably knew it herself. She knew which seat she took in each lesson and why. She knew she went to the library during free periods and that the librarian knew her name. She knew about Jack, about Lily, about the glasses and the way Sarah pushed them up her nose when she was concentrating.

She knew that Sarah had been afraid this morning.

Not the ordinary afraid of a teenager having a bad day. Something deeper. The kind of fear that came from experiencing something your mind had no framework for. Jessica recognised it because she had felt it herself once, a long time ago, before she had been given frameworks for everything.

She locked the phone and slid it back into her inside pocket.

Do not engage.

She looked out at the rain.

She thought about the expression on Sarah's face in the nurse's office when she had first opened her eyes. The way her gaze had moved around the room, taking inventory, checking that reality was still where she had left it.

And then the way she had looked at Jessica.

Not with hostility. Not even with the wariness that Jessica had trained her to feel over four months of careful pressure. With something more direct than either of those things. Like she was actually seeing her. Like whatever had happened in that corridor had stripped away something and left Sarah looking at the world with less filter than before.

Jessica did not like being looked at like that.

It made things harder.

She straightened, picked up her bag from where she had set it on the nearest desk, and left the room exactly as she had found it.

The rest of the school day passed the way school days passed when you were paying attention to something other than school.

Jessica sat in lessons and wrote notes and answered questions when asked and contributed just enough to be considered a normal engaged student and not enough to be memorable. This was a calibration she had long since perfected. Invisible was not the goal , invisible people got noticed precisely because they were invisible. The goal was unremarkable. Present but not distinctive. The kind of person teachers would describe as *lovely, gets on with things* and struggle to say much more.

She sat two rows behind Sarah in English.

Sarah was quiet all lesson. She answered one question and it was technically correct but delivered without her usual precision, slightly slower than normal, like she was running at reduced capacity. Lily kept glancing at her. Jack, who shared this English class with them since year groups combined for it, sat across the room and spent most of the lesson with one eye on his sister.

Jessica noticed all of this.

She noted it internally the way she noted everything.

And said nothing.

She walked home alone.

She always walked home alone. This was not unusual enough for anyone to remark on — she was known as someone who kept to herself, who had acquaintances but not close friends, who was pleasant but somewhat private. This was by design. Close friends asked questions. Close friends noticed things. Close friends eventually wanted reciprocity , wanted you to open up in return for what they shared , and reciprocity was something Jessica could not offer.

The rain had thinned to a persistent drizzle by four o'clock.

She walked with her hood up and her hands in her pockets and her mind working through the day in the methodical way she had been taught to debrief herself. Events. Observations. Anomalies. Recommended actions.

The anomaly was Sarah's collapse.

The event was clear, the symptoms were clear, her report was accurate.

But there was something else underneath it that she had not included in the report and was not sure how to include.

The way Sarah had looked at her.

The specific quality of it.

Jessica had sat in that chair and maintained her composure and said the correct things and when the time came she had left cleanly. That was the job. That was what she was there to do.

But sitting in that chair, watching Sarah piece herself back together, she had felt something she did not have a clean clinical word for.

Not sympathy exactly.

Something closer to recognition.

She pushed it down where she kept everything else and walked faster.

The house was quiet when she arrived.

Number 19. Her father had moved them here six years ago and she had understood, later, that the address had been vetted the same way everything was vetted — its remoteness, its sight lines, its proximity to the nearest Directorate safe point. Home was a function as much as a place.

She made tea. Put her school bag down in its designated spot. Changed out of her uniform.

Her father would not be back until late. He was almost never back before eight.

She sat at the desk in her room and opened her laptop.

This was also part of the routine. She was expected to file a supplementary written report each evening after incidents of note, more detailed than the field message, cross-referenced with existing subject data. She had done this dozens of times. It was not complicated.

She opened the subject file for Sarah Smith.

It loaded the way it always loaded — the standard dossier format, the school information, the family details, the observation log she had been building since October. It was a thorough file. She was a thorough observer.

At the bottom of the file there was a section she had never paid particular attention to before. Related subjects. Links to other files in the network that the system had flagged as potentially relevant based on background data.

There was one link there that had not been there the last time she had looked.

It had appeared today.

She almost scrolled past it.

Then she stopped.

*Restricted Access. Subject Link: EMILY ROBBINS.*

The name sat on the screen in the same clean font as everything else on the Directorate's network. Neutral. Clinical. Formatted the same way every other name was formatted.

But it was not the same as every other name.

It was her sister's name.

Jessica sat very still.

Emily Robbins. Missing six years. Officially, according to everything the Directorate had ever told her family, deceased. A tragedy. A loss. The kind of thing you were encouraged to grieve properly and then move forward from because operational effectiveness depended on emotional stability and emotional stability required resolution.

She had grieved.

She had moved forward.

She had told herself, enough times that she believed it, that Emily was gone and that the best thing she could do was be what Emily never got the chance to be — disciplined, useful, effective.

Her finger hovered over the trackpad.

Restricted Access.

She knew what that meant. She knew exactly what clearance level she held and what clearance level this file required and she knew that the gap between them was not accidental. Restricted files had restricted access for reasons and those reasons were not questioned. That was another thing her father had told her. Another thing she had believed without examining it.

She clicked the link.

The screen flickered.

Warning messages cascaded too quickly to read , security protocol notifications, access violation alerts, clearance flags stacking up in a column on the right side of the screen that she was not looking at because she was looking at the image that had loaded in the centre.

A photograph.

Security camera. Low resolution, slightly overexposed from the brightness of the room it was taken in.

A white room.

A metal table.

Restraints.

And a girl on the table. Dark hair. Face turned slightly away from the camera but not enough. Not enough to make her unrecognisable. Not to someone who had grown up with that face.

Emily.

Alive.

Not six years ago. The timestamp in the corner of the image read eighteen months ago.

Alive and restrained in a white room that Jessica recognised, with a cold drop in her stomach, from the technical schematics she had once seen in a file she was not supposed to have accessed. She had been fourteen. She had thought it was a medical facility.

ACCESS TERMINATED.

The screen went black.

The file closed.

The terminal reverted to the standard login screen, blank and white and giving nothing away.

Jessica did not move.

The room was very quiet. The rain outside. The distant sound of a car somewhere on the road. The particular silence of an empty house that had never quite felt like a home.

She had spent four months watching a girl she had been told was a routine subject.

She had spent six years believing her sister was dead.

Both things, she now understood, had been lies.

The question was not whether the Directorate had lied to her.

The image had answered that with the finality of a door closing.

The question was why Sarah Smith's file had a link to Emily's.

What connected them.

What the Directorate knew that she didn't.

And whether the people who had taken her sister, who had kept her alive in a white room and told her family she was dead, were the same people who had trained Jessica to be exactly what she was.

She sat in the dark of her room for a long time.

The login screen glowed in front of her.

For the first time in years, Jessica Robbins questioned whether the Directorate had ever told her the truth.

And for the first time in years, she was afraid of the answer.

Roviel

(Testimony Aigbe)

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***