SESSION 1THE MISFILED PERSONNEL FILES

It was supposed to be a filing job. Pull some records, bring them back, clock out. That was the whole assignment.

You went out to Municipal Annex 14B — chain-link and sodium light, wet cardboard and machine grease, the edge of the industrial quarter where the city keeps the paperwork it would rather forget. Janine met you at reception, and Paulie charmed her the way Paulie charms everyone; by the time you were through the door she was already half in love with the lot of you. Security gave you a look. Nothing more, not yet.

Then Johnson reached for a helpful spirit and got an angry one instead. A poltergeist, furious and loud, boiling up out of the stacks. He bound her — not all the way, not enough to send her off, but enough. Billie talked her down. And into that fragile calm Paulie stepped, wearing the face of a lover from her past, and the spirit — grateful, grieving, fooled — led you to the records nobody wanted you to find.

They weren't misfiled. They were hidden. And they said more than a records job should:

• Pete had been shipped off to Happyville for “reassignment,” and it had hit him hard.
• He wasn't the only one. Other Rifts, the same destination.
• Every file bore the same mark — three lines pulled into a knot.
• And your names were in there too. You had been slated for Happyville, all of you. Something called the Order pulled you out at the last moment and buried you in the archive instead.

You didn't get long to sit with that. Security came down hard and you ran — out through the Elevator to Anywhere, which does not do “precise.” On the way, Susan reached out and woke the file cart itself, an awakened little Rift that scooped up the records and came along.

The elevator spat you onto the roof of some abandoned industrial hulk. You climbed down, found a payphone, and Johnson's boys came to haul you back to the family bar.

And at the bar, the night got honest. Billie squared off against her father and flirted with anything handsome that moved. Susan wanted the files back at the office right now, and when Billie tried to lean on her — a little Morpheus nudge, just a little — Susan shook it off and bolted with the records. Johnson went after her, and in the end got both Susan and the files home safe. Randall, meanwhile, caught a streak at the pool table that no one could explain, rode it into the small hours, and lost the rest of you entirely.

You walked out with the knot-marked files, a poltergeist bound but not gone, and the first cold suspicion that your quiet little archive job had never been quiet at all.