Alpine

Gambit 1 - Crossroads

Knowing him destroyed my sense of time. Keeping track of what happened when is hard. I mean, if I really had to, I could write up an event timeline.

My first day of work. The day he asked me to take a smoke break with him. When everyone started turning against me. That whole deal with Ryan. Making the mistake of giving Switch a chance. The awful meeting with Boss that set my fate. The decision to stay on the surface. The car trip, the cabin, the woods—

That innocent, linear outline could never represent real time. Real time dilated in the gravity of his presence. Seconds stretched into hours. And when I was alone, days passed in a flash to compensate. I no longer trust the inevitable ticking of the clock that everyone else takes for granted. Not since the parking garage.

At first, things at work were quiet. I was busy to be sure. A late start meant I had work that literally needed to be done yesterday, so I was rushing to catch up. I still struggled pinning names to faces, but I got my key teammates down: Dave, Ryan, and, unfortunately, Switch.

Dave was fine with me, but things were awkward with Ryan. Ryan was close to Switch. I guessed it was because they both smoked. They took their breaks together to light up. Ryan could sense the tension between me and Switch, so he was standoffish with me.

That tension was all there was between Switch and I though. No escalation. No fights. No threats. Just the mutual understanding that I knew he was some kind of other. That I had seen through his mask. So, all things considered, it was going well.

When he did talk to me, it was brief pleasantries. A good morning at the start of the day and a good night at the end. Asking about my work when it was relevant to what he was doing. I was on the software end with Dave, while he was on hardware design with Ryan. I think he might have played a small role in assembly for the prototype too.

In any case, the relationship seemed to work. I said nothing about him to the others. Since I was bad at eye contact with everyone, I think no one noticed the lengths I went to avoid locking into a stare with him.

He knew, of course. There was an amused tremor in his tone that only came up when he was talking to me or loudly enough about me that I had to listen. I thought he was happy that I had seen through him but accepted him. That, whatever his game was, I would not interfere. It felt like a stable arrangement.

There was just one problem: I hated it that his desk was behind mine. I could never see where he was.

Sure, his back was to me too, so it was not like he could sit there staring at me all day. And he ignored my existence long enough to get his work done. But that is not the point. The point is: my back was always to him. That meant I could never get his presence off my mind.

It was so bad at first that when Ryan walked by my desk and I smelled the smoke on his clothes, I would tense up. I learned fast that Ryan's Marlboros smelled different from Switch's Crossroads. Charred s'mores and liquorish versus the medicinal burning of cherry-flavored cough drops.

It was that cherry smell that made my skin prickle as he silently approached my desk that day. I quick-saved my code and sat back in my chair. A signal that I knew he was coming. Trying to startle me was pointless.

He said, "Hey, you have a few minutes?"

I assumed he wanted to talk about product functionality, so my response was automatic. "What do you need?"

"Come take a smoke break with me, and we'll chat." He headed for the door.

This was unacceptable. What in the hell could he want that he needed to talk to me alone about it? I thought everything was settled. We were good. We had our silent truce. Nothing more needed to be said.