Displaced

Chapter 134

Arlette Faredin sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, momentarily taking her gaze off of the array of screens set out on her desk and hanging from the wall behind it. She felt like she could see their light even through her eyelids, and the headache brought on by hours of staring at their glow was not helping either.

Arlette still wasn't quite sure that she believed Sofie's claim that many people from her world spent their entire days doing this. She could not imagine any but the most broken of people ever willingly subjecting themselves to such a life. So, what did it say about her? That she was also broken?

No, she insisted to herself, she was not broken; she was just... getting somewhat desperate. So much had occurred recently, throwing everybody's lives into chaos, but that didn't mean her normal responsibilities went away. No, if anything, all that chaos just increased the importance of her role, and she had little to show for herself.

That wasn't to say that she or the rest of the Ministry of Security never accomplished anything—far from it. They'd been highly successful in a variety of ways, from unmasking and destroying two separate black markets that dealt in all manner of unsavory and illicit goods and services, to discovering multiple embezzlers infesting the administrative ranks of several of the major cities, to locating a series of kidnapping victims and identifying a serial murderer. The problem was that none of these things was her department's mission. As if to prove the point, the Ministry of Justice had done most of the work on all of the aforementioned accomplishments once Arlette and her team had identified the relevant details. These were all just things they'd stumbled upon while trying to tackle their true task: dealing with the sinister cabal of insurrectionists hiding amongst the public. When it came to that mission, she could only report continued failure.

There wasn't much she could blame but her own incompetence, either. They had all the newest and best tools with which to work, including an army of death machines that would do her bidding even from a distance and a surveillance network of flying drones that covered all of the inhabited parts of the country and most of the uninhabited parts for good measure. With just a few button presses, she could get a somewhat-real-time overhead view of a farm village north of Eflok or the recording of a busy street in Nont from two days prior. Such an unparalleled ability to watch over such a wide area would cause spymasters of other nations to froth at the mouth with jealousy, and yet her Ministry seemed incapable of performing its most pressing duty.

She could offer no excuses for her failure. Well, that wasn't entirely true; there was one area where, at least in her mind, the ministry was quite deficient: manpower. Arlette had always been a believer in people over machines, a view not held by her employer. However, staffing a high-security organization like this had proven to be a nigh impossible task. Most Otharians who could be trusted with such power did not want it, and most who wanted it could not be trusted. And so, she was left relying on the machines. Still, it made a rather paltry excuse.

Feeling the need to stretch her legs, Arlette pushed herself out of her padded chair and strode out of her office. It was time for her to bother her subordinates, anyway—or what few were around today, at least.

Unlike most of the ministries, with their many smaller rooms, the Ministry of Security was almost entirely one large chamber with only a few offices and meeting rooms attached. Within the main chamber stood rows of desks, most of them covered with screens much like her own. Bits of writing-covered parchment covered various sections of the walls, with thin strings connecting many of them to form chaotic webs of suspicions, inferences, and hunches.

The room was nearly empty, as all but a pair of her twenty-three underlings were out on assignments right now. This was a very rare occurrence, as usually about half of the department was in Wroetin at any one time. Over the last couple of days, however, Arlette had decided to send agents off to investigate potential leads that the department had originally deemed unlikely to yield anything real or useful. It was a panicky decision and she knew it, but she didn't know what else she could do anymore.