When Noa opened the door to the squad room, she was hit with a wave of voices. Surveying the room, she noticed that the entirety of her unit was there. That was an oddity at this time, given that they often worked on a rotating schedule. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and flipped it open to notice a few missed calls and a voicemail- there had been an all-hands-on-deck situation. Noa lived the furthest from the headquarters, so she had missed the announcement during her ride. The symphony of voices hushed at once, and Noa snapped her phone closed and looked up to see that Olivier had entered the room from his office. She walked towards the center of the room, joining the huddle.
“Good morning, everyone-”
“Good morning, Captain,” the small crowd returned.
“Yes, yes, thank you. I’m sorry to call you all in this morning, and so late at that. I received word this morning from the higher-ups that a high-level diplomat is expected to be visiting here in two days, and so we’ve been asked to run status update checks on the karamats around the city. All of them.”
A groan emanated from the crowd.
“Captain, we just checked them three weeks ago…”
Noa turned to look at the slouching man who had just spoken, Gabriel Rossi. Gabriel was a member of the patrol unit and had been the one to show Noa around the DMI building on her first day. Noa had always gotten the impression that he was rather listless when it came to his job. Despite being younger than Noa, he had joined the team before she had, so she imagined that there was some aspect of his skill that made up for his attitude towards work. He was pale, with dark eyes and overgrown hair that was messily parted. He was dressed so carelessly that Noa would’ve assumed that he was running late this morning, if it weren’t for the fact that he looked like this every day.
“This is straight from the Prime Minister’s cabinet, so it can’t be avoided. And you seem to have misheard me Rossi- we are to check every karamat. Three weeks ago, we only checked the Alephs.”
Typically, a karamat would only have to be properly calibrated every few months. Updates were staggered so that a patrol team would only have to check a handful any given week. But to check all of them, and only in two days, seemed to be an insurmountable task, especially when half of the unit was new enough to have only done it a handful of times.
Dajin Pung, Noa’s training instructor, had described karamats as a sort of radar gun for energy fluctuations from the Atziluth realm. The DMI had a little north of 300 across the city to monitor for unusual levels of divine energy and report back to DMI headquarters. There were only seven “Aleph” karamats- the range of these was large, but they relied on smaller karamats, called Bethlines, to get a more precise reading. Pung had described the importance of them to Noa during her training.
“Divine energy can fluctuate drastically between two blocks- in certain places, there tends to be a larger amount of divine energy naturally, like in shrines, churches, even graveyards. We have the bethlines in these areas to serve as a high-water mark. The Alephlines synthesizes the data they gather, but without the bethlines, we’d never get an accurate reading. With all of the karamats working in sync, we can find and respond to the smallest fluctuations as soon as they appear.”
Turning to her left, Noa noticed that there was only one other officer besides her who wasn’t sighing or grumbling in some way. Emmanuel Koh. At Noa’s welcome party, he had curtly introduced himself, but spent the rest of the night standing by the edge of the room, staring ahead pointedly. Besides their introduction months ago, Noa couldn’t think of another time that she had talked with him. She didn’t have much cause to speak with him anyway. Koh was a lieutenant who oversaw the small task force focused on the November Disaster, a group that Noa was too inexperienced to join yet.
As if sensing her gaze, Koh snapped his head to the right and met Noa’s eyes directly. She inadvertently stiffened and turned her head forward. Koh’s intensity made Noa uneasy, but she told herself that it was probably better that a member of the DMI possessed the kind of sixth sense that Koh seemed to have.
“Your assignments will be posted on the wall behind me. Please be ready to depart in fifteen minutes,” Olivier started. “If we manage to finish this in time, dinner will be on me.”
“Yeah, there’s hoping. I think you mean breakfast.”
A chuckle erupted from the crowd as they began to disperse to figure out their assignments. As Noa passed by Olivier, they exchanged a wordless smile.
…
Noa had been partnered with Gabriel, whose complaints about the work had continued from the office to every stop they made throughout the day. They were in Tanglin, which was located in the southern region of the island. While she was checking the Karamat, a large blue-grey indiscrete pillar, Gabriel had been kicking around a small rock by his feet and rubbing the sweat off the back of his neck. The morning rain had caused the humidity to reach sweltering heights, another thing Gabriel made sure to illustrate.
“So damn hot…” Gabriel stopped to lean over Noa’s shoulder. “It looks fine, right? Are we good to move to the next one?”
“Why don’t you go ahead and get something to drink and just let me finish this up, okay?” Noa’s patience was growing thin, and she was doing all that she could to remind herself that Rossi surely had something to offer to the team.
“Alright, fine by me.” Gabriel sighed and headed off towards the back entrance of the tiny mall behind them.
When he had left, Noa shook her head in disbelief and continued to calibrate the karamat. The job was fairly simple, but slow-moving. Every officer was issued a Dalet, a small handheld device. The Dalet was primarily used to evoke small amounts of divine energy, but it could also be used to read the energy of the immediate area. By connecting the device to the karamat, they would be able to manually recalibrate it. Pung had likened it to tuning the strings of a guitar.
A small ping played on Noa’s device. The screen showed a large spike in energy. If it had really been this high, Noa reasoned, headquarters would have already been alerted and dispatched to the area. Divine energy often fluctuated, with things such as religious festivals and funerals raising the divine energy of a certain area. Because of this, a spike did not always indicate instability. Noa hoped for the best.
“This thing hasn’t been calibrated in months…”
She selected “Full Report” on her device. As the Dalet slowly loaded, she took a moment to stand up and stretch. Even though the job was tedious, the day had gone by quickly. It was only now, when she noticed that a purple dusk had begun to set in, that she realized the day was almost over. Young children, holding their mother’s hands, filtered out from the after-school program across the street. Noa watched as one of the boys jumped up and down while his mom yawned and lagged behind him. After a few minutes, the machine made a gentle ping, indicating that a full reading had been completed.
Noa furrowed her brow and began to read through the report. It was dotted with small graphs and charts. While she was scrolling through, a textbox appeared in the middle of the screen.
COULD NOT CONNECT TO ALEPHLINE.
“Something wrong?”
Noa jumped, and turned to see that Gabriel was directly behind her with a can of coffee in his hand.
“Aw, what did you do? Those readings are way off… this is going to be a total pain to fix,” Gabriel whined.
“I didn’t do anything but run a check, Rossi. There’s something wrong with the karamat.” Noa’s irritation had begun to break through.
“Alright, move over and let me see it then.”
Gabriel took a long drink from his can and set it on the ground, squatting next to Noa. He poked around on the Dalet for a few minutes. Noa watched as the lights of the building across from her switched off one by one, save for one on the second floor. A gentle breeze picked up, carrying the smell of jasmine. In the distance, streetlights dotted the landscape. Next to her, Gabriel tensed up.
“Someone sidelined this.’
Gabriel seemed more serious now, and his voice was without the grating edge it had when he was complaining.
“You mean like take it off network? Wouldn’t we have seen that?”
“No, not necessarily.” Eyes glued to the Dalet, Gabriel picked up his drink off the ground and took a quick sip. “It looks like they were able to make this one send a dummy report to the Alephline.”
“So the readings really were out of range…”
Gabriel was tapping furiously on the Dalet, and when Noa leaned down to look over his shoulder, she could see that he was furiously typing out lines of code.
“I’m going to call this in,” Noa said, flipping her phone screen open. Without turning, Gabriel stuck out his hand.
“Don’t. Not yet. I’m going to try and trace the origin of this first- we don’t have time to distract the support team with this, not when we have this many other karamats to deal with.”
“This could be serious, Rossi. We need to report this now.”
“No, we need to figure out what exactly is going on and see if we can deal with it ourselves. And if we can’t, then we’ll report it.” Gabriel’s voice was stern, and Noa flinched at his tone. Realizing this, he took a breath and continued calmly.
“It’s our job to handle these kinds of things. We’re both capable, and it’s a good chance to prove that. You want to join Koh’s task force, right?”
He was right. The members of the November Taskforce were handpicked by Koh, and it was comprised of only the most experienced and talented officers.
“Okay, well, do you have any other information?”
“I’m trying to find out the location of the last readi-”
A ping from the Dalet quieted Gabriel. He sat still for a second before turning to face Noa.
“There’s a new reading…” Gabriel spoke quietly. “There’s been a spike in divine energy…”
“When?” Noa shouted, fear rising in her throat.
“Just now. And it’s close.”
A heavy silence fell between them. Noa opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. The reading on the Daleth Gabriel held showed energy that was five times the normal reading.
“Can you lead us to the location?”
Noa and Gabriel climbed onto their mopeds and sped off towards the source of the spike. The closer they got, the cicadas around them seemed to crescendo. Gabriel steered through a small back alley before coming to a stop in front of an old underground mall. Noa could feel her heart beating in her ears. She could only see a little past the bottom of the staircase in front of her, illuminated by a sickly green light.
As she slid her helmet off and approached the top step, she tried to steel her nerves. Gabriel was frozen next to her.
“Do you hear that?”
Noa tried to clear her head, but all she could hear was the drumbeat of her heart mixing together with the shrill droning of the cicadas to create a cacophony of sound. As she focused, she could feel a rumbling through the tiles beneath her feet. A bike leaned against the entrance began to shake, causing the bell to ring lightly.
It was then that she heard it. A deep, rolling wail was emanating from the mall.