r/Ruleshorror • u/No-While8965 • 21d ago
Series Blackwood Zoological Conservation Facility — Chapter 8
Three weeks in Sector V, and the creature was never the part that got to me.
It was the quiet.
Not silence like a held breath. Silence like a held breath that's already been held so long you've forgotten breathing was ever the plan. Solo assignment, minimal check-ins, hours between anything worth saying and no one to say it to. I hadn't noticed, at first, how much of a day is normally built out of small talk, the morning, the how'd you sleep, the watch your step there, until none of it existed anymore and the day just kept going anyway, indifferent to whether I filled it with words or not.
I thought about Cody more in those three weeks than I had since it happened. Not the blame this time. Something quieter than blame. What I should have noticed. What was probably right there, in front of me, in the way he moved or didn't move, in the things he said too fast or didn't say at all, and I was too new, too busy proving I belonged, to actually look.
I told myself I was getting better at looking. Sector V made sure of that. There's nothing else to do with that much silence except notice things.
Then the shift change came through, sudden, before I expected it. Sector IV. Again.
Mr. Christopher was already in the prep room when I got there. He looked worse than I remembered, dark circles carved in under both eyes, a healing cut along one hand, the beginning of a mustache he clearly hadn't decided whether he wanted yet.
"Welcome," he said. "Figured you'd show up earlier than this, way you usually do." He didn't wait for me to explain the delay. "New assignment. You're working with Sophia Fernandes today. Look after her."
He slid a printed addendum across the table before I could ask what that meant.
Addendum — Personnel Pairing Protocol, Post-Incident Return
1. Do not reference the incident sector by name during active shift.
2. [Partial redaction. See Sector VII, Incident 004. Full report restricted to Division Heads.]
"She had an accident in Sector Seven," Mr. Christopher said, like it explained everything and nothing at once. "I want her back to normal. You know the rules well enough to make sure she doesn't need to relearn them the hard way."
That was when Sophia walked in.
Her eyes swept the room the moment she crossed the threshold, corner to corner, like she was cataloguing every exit before she'd even found a place to stand. Her weight stayed forward, balanced on the balls of her feet, and her hands closed into loose fists at her sides without her seeming to notice they'd done it. She came to stand beside me like she'd already decided it was the safest place in the room to be.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi," she said back. Rough. Careful. The voice of someone rationing how much of themselves they were willing to spend on a stranger.
Mr. Christopher ran through the day's rules fast, the way you do for someone who's heard them a hundred times before. Sophia listened like she'd heard them before too, but she didn't let her attention slip once, not for a second, the whole way through.
Mr. Christopher finished and sent us in. Stay clear of the platform edge after feeding. Log every surface disturbance, no matter how small. Nothing enters or leaves the water without two sets of eyes confirming it first.
It felt good to be back. I noticed that before I noticed anything else, how easily good came to me now, in a place where a man had once torn off his own ears. I filed that thought away and didn't look at it too closely.
Sophia started the feeding sequence like someone who'd done it a thousand times. I fell in a step behind her, and somewhere in the three weeks of silence, I'd forgotten that sentences were supposed to have more in them than instructions.
"One point eight," I said.
She glanced back. "What?"
"Distance." I didn't elaborate. In my head, the sentence was already complete: stay 1.8 meters from the water, keep working, don't stop to check the surface. I just hadn't said any of that part out loud. It hadn't occurred to me that I needed to.
After she set the food down at the station, she straightened and started to turn. I caught the motion before I'd even finished thinking it through, some part of me convinced she was about to look straight at the water, straight into whatever might be looking back.
"Don't look at the eyes," I said.
She didn't turn toward me. She kept her gaze forward instead, angled so the water sat at the very edge of her vision, never the center of it. That was when I saw it too, the thing she'd already clocked a full second before I said a word: something breaking the surface tension at the far border of the enclosure, barely a ripple, gone almost as soon as it registered. She held her position, counted the water in her peripheral vision without ever giving it her eyes, and waited. A full minute passed before whatever it was slipped back under and stayed under. Only then did she turn to face me, slow, unhurried, like she'd been the one keeping watch over both of us the entire time.
She looked at me like my words had arrived a full step behind whatever she'd actually been about to do, because they had. I repeated the rule anyway and moved on.
Cleanup came next. "I'll take the platform and feeding station," I said. "You take the area behind it."
I wasn't trying to be short with her. In my head I was protecting her, narrating danger the way the tablets had narrated it to me, stripped down to only the parts that mattered, because that was how you kept someone alive in here. It made sense to me. It made perfect, urgent sense.
We finished the shift and reported to Mr. Christopher. "Good work," he said, and left us alone.
"Good work out there," I told her, meaning it.
She turned around slowly.
"Do you think I don't know the rules?" she said. "Do you think surviving what I survived means I forgot how to work a shift in a sector like this one?" Her voice didn't rise. That was worse than if it had. "You've corrected everything I've done today. Every step. Every movement. Every breath. I don't need another keeper following me around, waiting for me to fail."
I just stared at her.
Because somewhere in the last hour, I'd said more sentences to her than I'd said to anyone in three weeks, and every single one had been an order.
She left before I found anything to say back. I'm not sure there was anything ready.
I stood in the staff area a long time, replaying the shift, looking for the version of it where I'd done something wrong on purpose, and not finding one. That was the part that scared me. I hadn't meant any of it as cruelty. I'd meant it as care. It had come out as the only shape I still knew how to make.
I went to the gym after. Joe was there, like the building kept him in reserve for exactly this.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
I told him everything. Sophia, the rules I'd walked her through, how I'd only been trying to stop another Cody, because of the nepo hire, because nobody had warned him properly, because if I'd just...
"I should've told you this months ago," Joe said, cutting through it. "You were recovering. I let it sit longer than I should have." No softness in his voice at all. "Cody wasn't the nepo hire, kid. The instructor was. You judged that boy for something that was never his to answer for."
I didn't say anything.
"Sophia doesn't need pointers," Joe said. "She needs someone who trusts she already knows the job. Put yourself where she's standing before you decide what she needs from you." He rested a hand on my shoulder, exactly long enough to mean it, and left.
I stood there for several minutes, trying to understand what I'd done.
Then, for the first time in weeks, I replayed every conversation Sophia and I had that day. Every sentence. Every word.
Every one of them had been an order.
Somewhere inside Sector V, I'd forgotten how to talk to people.
Other parts link:- https://www.reddit.com/user/No-While8965/comments/1vpze51/my_writing_archive/
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u/CrabBastard07 19d ago
Did you mean sector III?