Remote work, part 6

 Ashley sat back down at her laptop and heaved a deep sigh of relief.

Sorted, she messaged to Dave, and then frowned as the messaging client returned a quick Failed to send reply.  Feeling curious, she tapped through her files and folders and discovered that most of her access to Interwork was gone, presumably because the keycard was missing.  Bizarrely her access to the hidden files that belonged to Dave was still present though.

“I don’t understand any of this,” she murmured to herself.  Even her semi-whisper seemed loud in the silent room.  Still, she had nothing else to do while she waited as all of her work was either in emails or files on the shared drive, so she opened up the rest of the files in Dave’s folder and read through them.

“Here you go,” said not-Iris.  She seemed to have breezed into the room without making a sound and Ashley started out of her reverie and looked at her, wide-eyed and trying to work out who she was.

“Oh!  Thank-you.”  She realised that not-Iris was holding out a slim white piece of plastic — the keycard.

“Don’t go getting too comfortable,” said not-Iris, her impish smile returning.  “Dunheim’s not a place you really want to spend too much time in.”

“Then why is there an office here?”

“It can be helpful to remind people that working at Doorways is a privilege, not a right,” said not-Iris.  It sounded like a practised statement.  “And management has its own reasons as well.”

“You’re not management?” Ashley realised as she spoke that she’d been assuming that Iris was somehow the owner, or at least reported directly into them.  “Is Doorways a chain then?”

Not-Iris grinned.  “I’m not management, no,” she said, “and your other questions would be better directed to management.  I need to get going now; if you think you can’t keep an eye on that card you should too.”

“Right, thank-you,” said Ashley.  The implication stung a little too much for comfort.  She gripped the keycard tightly, feeling its hard edges bite into the palm of her hand, and glanced back at her laptop.  “Oh, one more thing,” she said, but not-Iris had vanished as quickly and quietly as she had arrived.  “I guess not, then,” she said.

She started to pack her things up, agreeing with not-Iris that she’d rather not risk losing the keycard again, and then she paused.  She stared at the keycard and thought about the details of the documents she’d read; the clinical way it seemed Jenna had staged a takeover of Interwork’s Project Management division, and how Dave had been pushed aside.  She knew Jenna, and she knew that the woman was ambitious, but simply not that well organised.  There had to be something more, and the keycard, glistening in the fluorescent lights, seemed to be a key to finding out.

“To hell with her,” she whispered and opened her laptop back up.  “Can you show me what she’s got in her own files?” she asked the keycard, and started searching for Jenna’s home directory.

Two hours later there was a click behind her and she turned to see Iris, the actual Iris, dragging a young man with oddly red skin through the door by his ear.  He wasn’t saying anything but his expression indicated that he wasn’t enjoying his escort and when his eyes met Ashley’s they darted away again.  Guiltily, she thought.  She put her hand protectively on her replacement keycard, which Iris noticed.

“You found a replacement?  Then I’ll keep this one.”  She waved a thin piece of white plastic.  “But you’ll have to use Dunheim for the rest of the week now.”

Ashley thought of the suntan lotion bottle in her bag and wished, briefly, that she’d had the chance to spend more time at the beach.

“That’s ok,” she said.  “It’s probably more than I deserve.”

Iris smiled.  “Maybe,” she said. “But everything’s back as it should be, so there’s little harm done.  Be more careful, right?”

She pulled the young man through the doorway to the other room and it clicked shut behind her.  Ashley returned to her laptop and, re-reading the last line of the email she’d written once more, clicked on the Send button.

“Everything back as it should be,” she repeated to herself, deciding that the vague impression she had of a scream fading rapidly as though from someone who’d been pushed out of the door to the lightless depths below Dunheim was just her imagination.  “Let’s see how close we can get.”  On her screen the email window closed, though for a moment the From: line lingered.  From: Jenna Wilkinson.