4338.214 · August 2, 2018 AD
The Faith of Futile Work
How do you send a room full of trained officers into a search you already know will find nothing? You do it because the alternative is telling them the world stopped working an hour ago, and that's not an instruction anyone can follow. Charlie Claiborne builds a briefing from the parts of the truth that can survive documentation, deploys every resource he has into gardens and bush that will yield nothing — and then faces the one deployment no manual covers when the woman from the gravel walks back in and asks to be put to work.
The foyer has become an operations centre — portable lighting, trestle table, aerial photographs, radios, and a room full of officers arranged in the unconscious hierarchy of people waiting to be told what to do. Charlie stands in front of the table rather than behind it, because standing behind it says procedure and standing in front says this is different.
He gives them the scaffolding version. Karl entered the shed. Karl did not exit. Luke Smith was believed to be inside. Neither man has been located. He assigns grid searches, garden sweeps, bushland arcs — every protocol designed for a world where people leave traces when they move through it. He seals the shed with an intensity that doesn't match its object, and the gap between the instruction and the three-metre garden outbuilding generates questions he accepts without answering.
Then the foyer empties and Sarah walks in. Not the woman from the gravel — a reconstruction of the woman before the gravel, held together with willpower and manufactured composure and the particular flatness of a voice being monitored for tremor in real time. Where do you need me? The professional calculation says remove her. Charlie's thirty years of reading people say the opposite — that stillness will destroy her faster than the search will, that the work is the only thing standing between her and the vacuum that fills itself with everything she's trying not to think about.
He gives her back her weapon. He gives her an assignment. He gives her a way in that isn't charity. Then he watches her walk into the darkening bush and wonders if being sure was ever anything more than a luxury this afternoon revoked hours ago.
