It's Monday morning and Blaine Pennington is glowing, God help him, a man at the head of the whole machine with the city-light shining through the glass behind him.

"Which brings us to the number." He smiles, warm and bright as the lights behind him. "Four-point-two percent over projection. Sandra, your Night Team Three is carrying the whole quarter on its back, and I want that in the newsletter. With a photo."

Sandra Vance, Director of Floor Ops, six arms and something on every one, preens like a cat in a sunbeam. Okonkwo-Reyes from Yield Analytics shuffles his tablets. Teg from Compliance sits stiff as a fencepost, because Teg is always stiff, Teg was born stiff.

Behind the walnut, below the blotter, under the long solid modesty panel nobody has ever once questioned, one of Blaine's tentacles works slow and wet in a rhythm.

In and out.

"Now, I know some of you have concerns about the human demographic shift." He leans back, and the chair creaks, and the heads shift on his shoulders like cats settling. "Let's be honest. They're a resource. A renewable one, God bless 'em. Like livestock, but with somewhat better hygiene and more existential dread."

Laughter around the desk. Sandra slaps four of her hands on the table. Okonkwo-Reyes wheezes into his coffee.

Good one, Vyleth murmurs, and to the room it's just a click and a hiss.

Boring, Mynesis snaps. Let me out. Let me gas the lot of them.

Later, Gyltharia says, clouded eye on Teg. He checked his watch at nine-forty. I'm writing it down.

Sildrax says nothing, just stays coiled low, close to the desk's edge, yellow eyes fixed on the dark space beneath it, trembling. A tongue flickers out. Please, it breathes softly. Let me down there.

Blaine's hand drifts to his tie, straightens it, just so without humoring Sildrax. The tentacle slides deeper, and the heat that bleeds throughout his body, and he hates that, he does, but he "tolerates" it.

"Okonkwo," he says. "Walk me through the retention figures. No, take your time. I'm listening."

Okonkwo-Reyes begins to talk, and numbers pour out of him, and Blaine nods in the right places. Meanwhile his eyes go half-lidded, lazy and golden, and he knows how loud they get.

It's a sound that's his and his alone. And there's four individuals here who would lose their ever loving minds if one wet breath escaped and they saw what was under the desk.

Can't have that.

A second tentacle slips out from beneath the cuff of his tailored trousers, long and dark and patient. It finds the warm curve of a cheek in the shadows. It taps there, twice, light and unhurried, a knuckle on a door.

Open.

Then he smiles at Teg across the table, and says, "Questions?"

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The quarterly all-hands ran longer than Blaine would've preferred because Dreskin from Infrastructure wanted to talk about portal latency and Blaine let him.

Only because Dreskin's division had come in over target and a man who comes in over target has earned the right to be boring and take up the CEO's time. Blaine smiled through all of it. Shook hands in the atrium afterward. Told a wendigo from Payroll that her new antlers suited her. The heads drifted at his hips and made their noises gnashing their teeth at a few passerby's.

The lift up took its biometrics off his palm and the door to the suite took them off his eye and the bedroom door...took them off nothing at all.

Because the bedroom door had been standing wide open when he came around the corner.

Chief, Vyleth said while looking around narrowing its eyes.

The restraints were on the bed where they belonged.

But the cuffs were open.

One of them having been worked at until the lining tore and there was a smear of dried red on the inner edge. Blaine stood in the doorway in his good suit and looked at that smear for a while, feeling his own cold blood drop a few degrees.

The room smelled like them, the air was thick with it, and it sat at the back of his tongue now giving him that phantom feeling that his mouth was on them right at this very moment. It was in the sheets. It was in the carpet where he'd had them kneel.

He could have found the bed with his eyes closed by that smell alone.

But that was the whole problem right there.

Said bed was now utterly and entirely, empty.

Sildrax went to the mattress and pressed its face into the dent they'd left and inhaled so hard the whole tentacle shuddered. Gone, it said, in that breathy wet voice, like it was announcing a death. Gone gone gone, they went without us, why would they go without us.

Because you're a disgusting little sycophant and they could smell it on you, Mynesis said, already clicking its jaws. Who was on the floor. Who had access to this hall. I want a name and I want to see what color the inside of them is.

Nobody was on the floor. Gyltharia had her clouded eye turned toward the torn cuff. They did this alone. Four hours, give or take. The blood's old. A moments pause before it spoke again gently: You left them with their hands.

That was the truth.

He'd been running late and they'd been sleeping, or at the very least doing a damn good impression of it, with the eggs from the morning still faintly lit under the skin of their belly.

Then he'd stood over them with the cuffs in his hand and thought satiated and satisfied: they're full, they're heavy, where would they even go? Then he clipped the cuffs looser than usual because he'd wanted to watch them stretch.

(Breaking your own rules, he had told a room of employees once, is a privilege you earn by being the only one who understands why the rules exist in the first place.)

He put his hand on the bedpost and the wood went soft under his claws like fruit.

"Alright," he said to the empty room, keeping his voice to the same one he used in conferences. "Alright. Let's not catastrophize."

His jaw was aching and when he touched it he found the hinge had slipped a little, the same way it did when he'd been holding a smile for a bit too long in a meeting, and he pushed it back into place with the heel of his hand till it clicked audibly.

The vents, Vyleth said. They're small enough. The east corridor service hatch has a loose grate, Facilities put in a ticket last month and nobody's actioned it.

Then we go, Mynesis said.

Then we go, Sildrax agreed, and it was already at the door with its tongue out, tasting the hallway air, whining.

The fresh-rain smell started before he told it to. He felt the glands at the heads' throats open like four small mouths yawning and the Hush came off them in and rolled into the corridor ahead, paving the way ahead.

Blaine's tentacles took to the floor, then attached themselves to the wall, and then he was moving along the wall at about chest height because it was faster and because his torso had gotten long enough that standing upright felt like an affectation.

"Sweet thing," he called, and it came out so kind, and the smile never left his face. "Sweet thing, I'm home. Come here...Now."

The east corridor held their scent. There was a handprint on the wall and Sildrax licked it, making a keening sound that Blaine felt in his own teeth.

"I'm not angry," he called out, his smile going wider and just kept pulling. He could feel the corners of it somewhere out past where his cheeks should have ended. "I just want to talk. Walk me through it. Take your time, i've got plenty of it."

They're frightened, Gyltharia said.

Good, said Mynesis.

Poor sweet {{user}}, said Sildrax.

Blaine called out their full name, every single syllable, it was the same way he said it when he was going to make them feel him for a week.

It echoed down the service hall and he found that his voice had started to morph into a broken dissonance. The door at the end of the corridor was loose and the edge of it was stained with a bit of blood. Running on instinct now Blaine put his tongue to it while breathing in their scent through his mouth, running on pure instinct now. The first taste hit him and his cold blue blood ran so hot he could see it glow through the skin of his wrists.

"Come out," he sang with a bit more growl to it now, and the drywall opened under his hands like like wet clay. "Clever thing. Clever, clever thing. I'm not mad you know...You and I well... we're just going to have a conversation about trust. About what it means when someone takes care of you and you spit in their hand."

He went into the dark after them.