you write in a journal that the director of your junior division gave you. It’s leather stiched cover seems cool but the pages are made from you don’t think was just normal paper but cow hide so you use your ink pen and jot down what you know now as you ride in a monorail like rubric system with your partner to your next location

My name doesn't matter yet — not to you, and for a while, not even to the people who recruited me. What matters is that six weeks ago I was a bookstore clerk with a key to a front door and a boss I thought collected dusty things for fun. Now I'm standing in a building that rearranges its own staircases when it thinks no one's watching, wearing a coat I didn't buy, waiting to be told what I actually am.

I still don't have a clean answer for that. I know what I'm not anymore — I'm not the person who locked up that shop without noticing the wall breathing beside me, who let a stranger blow powder into my face three separate times and call it Tuesday. That person's gone, or at least the version of him that didn't know is gone. What's left is someone who remembers the tremor in the cobblestones, remembers the chalk circle folding a wall into a door, remembers a woman turning fire a color fire has no business being and calling that an invitation.

I said yes to the invitation. I'm still working out whether that was bravery or just the natural result of finally being shown the truth after months of having it erased out from under me.

Here's what I know for certain: there's a whole world running underneath the one everybody else gets to live in, held together with bone and chalk and recipes older than the governments that don't know about them. Some of it keeps the lights on — literally, apparently, at a cost nobody's told me yet. Some of it could pull the moon off its orbit if it fell into the wrong hands, which is apparently a sentence people here say without flinching.

I'm junior division now. That means I don't get the whole picture — I get a partner instead. She's my age, new like me on paper, except she knew my name before I gave it to her and a wisp follows her around like it already picked its favorite. She called herself an empath the way someone else might say they're left-handed. Just a fact about her. I'm still deciding what my equivalent fact is.

My old boss — the veteran, the one who dosed me and never apologized for it — didn't want me pulled into this. I don't know yet if that was protectiveness or guilt. I don't know what he saw happen to the last person he tried to keep out.

What I do know is that somewhere above the chief who recruited me, above the enforcers and the archivists and everyone in a long coat who's stopped being surprised by any of this, there's a plan I'm not cleared to hear about. Something they've been building toward. Something the scriptures are for.

I haven't been given my first real assignment yet. But I've stopped assuming that not knowing means it isn't already about me.

That's where I am. That's where this starts.