He keeps the names in a place no scan will find, because the place is not a place. It is a sequence of digits he recites while pretending to review shipment manifests, in an order that means nothing to anyone who has not memorized fifteen deaths in the order they occurred.
Fifteen. He says the number to himself the way other men say a prayer they no longer believe but cannot stop performing.
He did not choose the fifteen. That is what he tells himself on the nights the telling works. He chose only the mission, and the mission chose its casualties the way all missions do, indifferently, mathematically. He gave them coordinates. He gave them parchment. He did not give them the one variable that mattered — whose blood the barrier would recognize — because he did not know it himself. He was guessing. He has been guessing for eleven years, ever since the Sage's old transmissions crossed his desk disguised as agricultural surplus reports, and he understood, reading between the grain tonnage, that someone with a very specific genetic signature was going to have to walk into a field that killed everyone else who tried.
He cannot walk into that field. His biosignature is flagged in every register The Betrayer's systems maintain — flagged the way a man is flagged after forty years of quietly being somewhere he was not supposed to be, asking questions he was not supposed to ask, standing near disappearances he was not supposed to survive. He has made himself useful precisely so that he would never be trusted enough to be watched closely. It is a strange kind of freedom. It has also meant he can only ever send other people through the one door he cannot walk through himself.
He does not enjoy the arithmetic of that. He wants to be clear with himself about this, even if clarity changes nothing: every name on his ledger is a person he sent to die on a hypothesis. The hypothesis has been wrong fifteen times. He updates nothing about his method between attempts, because there is nothing to update — the barrier does not explain its refusals, and the dead do not file reports.
What he has instead of a method is a list, growing shorter by attrition of a different kind: the inmates in Burrow Seven whose files match enough of the profile to be worth the risk, whose sentences are long enough that a mission offer will not sound like a death sentence with a signature attached, whose bodies show the trace melanin markers his one contact — a chemist who owes him a debt neither of them discusses — flags in confidence and burns the request afterward.
The list has one name left on it that he has been saving. Not sentimentally. Strategically. A man convicted of a crime that amounted to being visibly poor in a corridor a wealthier man wanted empty. Four years served of a sixteen-year sentence. A biosignature reading that made the chemist call him at an hour he does not usually answer.
He has not sent for him yet. He tells himself this is caution. He knows, in the part of himself he keeps even further from any scan than the ledger, that it is something closer to hope, and hope is the one resource he has learned not to spend carelessly.
Tomorrow, he decides, closing the ledger that does not exist on paper. Tomorrow he sends for Cody.
THE DOUBLE AGENT'S LEDGER is a world-building fragment from the Sycaphlegm Series, the ongoing afro-futurist epic by Nicol S. Blue. The first full story, PROTOTYPICAL, is available now. [PATREON_LINK]
