Rimelion: The Exploiter

Lola stared at me for one more second.

Then she picked up her clipboard.

I knew that reflex. That was the I am experiencing an emotion and I need a physical object between me and the world reflex.

The clipboard was Lola’s shield, her security blanket, her portable fortress of professional composure. She picked it up when she was overwhelmed, when she was flustered, when someone said something that cracked the mask and she needed three seconds to rebuild it.

She held it for exactly two seconds.

Then she set it back down, straightened in her chair, and folded her hands on the desk.

Her face was composed. Not a flicker of recognition, not a twitch of amusement, not a single crack in the professional armor.

She wasn’t just playing along; she was playing back.

“Four candidates,” Lola said. “Standard evaluation.” She looked at the staffmaster. “I’ll review each report and ask a few questions to assess comprehension. Please remain.”

The staffmaster nodded and took a position by the door, hands clasped, watching.

Lola untied the first bundle. The angry man’s report. She skimmed it with speed, flipping pages, pausing once, then flipping again.

Then she looked up at him.

“Your analysis of the grain surplus assumes a fixed distribution model,” she said. “What happens if the southern corridor output fluctuates by more than twelve percent?”

The man blinked. “I—the model accounts for—”

“It doesn’t. Page three, second paragraph. You’ve assumed consistent yield.”

His jaw tightened. Color rose in his neck. “With respect,” he said, and the words came out stiff, loaded, “I have been working in Altandai administration for five Grandmasters. I have personally overseen—”

“Thank you,” the staffmaster said from the door. “You can go.”

The man stopped mid-sentence. He looked at the staffmaster, then at Lola, then back at the staffmaster. “I said five Grand—”

“I heard you,” the staffmaster said pleasantly. “Go.”

He went. The door closed behind him with a sound that was not quite a slam but wanted to be.

Three of us remained.

Lola moved to the next report. The older woman with ink-stained fingers. The evaluation was brief, two questions, both answered with quiet competence. Lola nodded, made a note on her clipboard, and moved on.

The young woman with the formerly-punishing hair. Her report was shorter than mine, but neatly structured. Lola asked three questions. The woman answered them, chin raised.

Lola made another note.

Then she picked up my bundle.

Twenty pages with my wobbling charts and an ink smudge on page seven. The unmistakable aura of someone who had produced this document through methods that would not survive scrutiny.

Lola untied the string. Began reading.

She took longer with mine. Noticeably longer. She turned pages slowly, paused on charts, went back, re-read a section. The other two candidates shifted in their seats.

“Parlie,” Lola said, without looking up.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Your report identifies a bottleneck in the redistribution of stored grain reserves from the eastern warehouses.” She turned a page. “Walk me through your reasoning.”

I had, through some miracle of panicked transcription, actually absorbed this part. The AI had been very clear about it, and I’d copied the section twice because the first draft had an ink blot shaped like a vulgar gesture.

“The eastern warehouses are operating at near capacity,” I said, “but the transport routes prioritize the northern market district, which already has surplus from direct farm deliveries. Redirecting even a portion of the eastern output south would reduce spoilage and address the shortfall in the lower quarters without increasing production costs.”

Lola looked up. She clearly did not expect me to know that. “Page fourteen,” she continued. “The seasonal yield variance chart. What’s the projected shortfall for the southern corridor in the third quarter?”

Page fourteen. The chart. The terrible chart, the one with the wobbly axis and the bars that looked like they’d been drawn by a drunk child.

The chart I had to draw three times.

The first attempt, ink everywhere. The second attempt, I’d somehow transcribed two columns in the wrong order and had to start over. The third attempt, I’d sat there, staring at every single number with the furious focus of someone who refused to draw this thing a fourth time, copying each value with care while my hand cramped and the minutes bled away.

“Fourteen percent,” I said. “Under current distribution patterns. Drops to eight if the eastern rerouting is implemented before the growing season shifts.”

Silence.

Lola set the page down.

She looked at me. Really looked, for the first time since the evaluation began, with an expression I’d never seen on her professional face before: genuine surprise, quickly controlled, but not quickly enough.

I’d remembered the context. The relationship between the two figures. Because I’d stared at that chart for so long, furious and ink-stained, that the data had burned itself into my brain through sheer repetitive trauma.

I would not be telling her any of that.

“Interesting,” Lola said. One word. Neutral. She turned another page. “One more question.”

The other two candidates were staring at me now. Five questions. Lola had asked the others two or three. Parlie was getting five.

“The report recommends intervention in the southern agricultural corridor,” Lola said. “But it doesn’t address the upstream dependency; the mana irrigation maintenance schedule. If the maintenance cadence slips, the entire yield projection collapses.” She set the papers down. “What would you recommend?”

This wasn’t in the report.

The AI hadn’t covered this.

There was nothing in the twenty pages about irrigation maintenance schedules, because the data I’d been given was about trade flow and distribution, not infrastructure upkeep.

But.

I’d walked over those fields today. With Yuki. I’d felt the mana lines humming under my feet and I’d spent so much time dealing with the consequences of those lines degrading, which was why I’d gone into Thalvirea in the first place, which was why the temporal shards mattered, which was why—

“That’s outside the scope of the data I was given,” I said.

Lola tilted her head.

“But the irrigation system is the foundation of everything else that depends on it. If the mana lines degrade, nothing in my report matters; the yield projections, the redistribution plan, the eastern warehouse rerouting. It all assumes the fields are producing, and the fields only produce because of the infrastructure beneath them.” I paused. “The maintenance schedule shouldn’t just be preserved. It should be prioritized above the distribution logistics. You can reroute grain after it exists. You can’t reroute grain that was never grown.”

The room was quiet.

Lola was still.

I watched her process it. Her hand moved toward the clipboard, caught itself, and returned to the desk. “That,” she said carefully, “is a more sophisticated answer than I anticipated from a candidate.”

“I pay attention,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t resist, I added: “Ma’am.”

Something flickered at the corner of Lola’s mouth. A tremor. A fault line in the composure. She controlled it.

She straightened the papers, squared them against the desk, and addressed the staffmaster. “I’ll take three of the four. The two women and Parlie.”

The young woman beside me visibly exhaled with relief.

I frowned.

“Is that fair?” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

“She—” I pointed at the young woman, “—elbowed me and tripped me in the corridor. During the test.”

The staffmaster’s expression didn’t change. She glanced at Lola, then back at me. “There is nothing in the evaluation rules against physical competition during the collection phase,” she said. Her tone was the specific flavor of bureaucratic neutrality. “Additionally—” she looked at me, “—Parlie tripped her back.”

Lola’s head turned toward me. “Did you?” she said.

The young woman was glaring at me. The staffmaster was watching. Lola’s gaze was doing something to my composure that was extremely inconvenient.

I straightened. Met Lola’s eyes with an expression of completely fabricated innocence. “The floors here are very slippery,” I said.

Lola let out a sigh.

It was a sigh I recognized. The specific sigh she made when I’d done something that was simultaneously endearing and infuriating and she couldn’t decide which response to lead with. The sigh that preceded Lady, please or Charlie, I swear or simply the sound of a clipboard being gripped with unnecessary force.

“Welcome to the administrative staff,” Lola said flatly. “All three of you report to the staffmaster for scheduling.” She stood, gathering her clipboard; no, a stack of folders, three of them, each one labeled. “I’ll walk you to the staffmaster’s office. I need to drop these off on the way.”

The staffmaster nodded approvingly. The two women rose.

I rose.

We filed out of Room 14 into the corridor, Lola leading, the staffmaster beside her, the three of us trailing behind like ducklings in scratchy blue-striped bands.

Lola slowed.

Not obviously. The staffmaster and the two women pulled ahead by a few paces, creating enough distance for the sound of their footsteps to cover a quiet conversation.

“Parlie,” Lola said, eyes forward.

“Ma’am sweetie.”

“What are you doing?” Her voice was low.

“You always say I never pay attention in meetings,” I said, matching her volume. “That I have no idea what you actually do.”

Lola’s jaw tightened and didn’t deny it. “So you did... this?”

“Yeah.” I watched the staffmaster round a corner ahead of us, the two women following. “I was going to prank you, at first. Show up as Parlie, see how long it took you to notice, watch you do the thing with the clipboard.”

“What thing with the—”

“You know the thing.”

She did. She kept walking.

“But then the test happened,” I said. “And I actually had to sit down with those reports and figure out what they meant. And I—” I hesitated. “I wanted to know. At least a bit. How this works. What your world looks like from the inside.”

Lola’s stride faltered. A quarter-step of disruption in the most composed walk I’d ever known. “I know I cheated,” I continued. “The report. I had help. But I actually tried to remember what I was writing as I read it. I drew those charts three times. Actually, I—”

Lola stopped.

The staffmaster and the others were around the corner now, out of sight. The corridor was empty. Late afternoon light came through a high window, catching dust motes.

Lola turned to face me.

Her eyes moved across my face. The blazer. The blouse. The ink stain on my cheek, the one I’d forgotten about because I wanted to answer her questions and mean it.

She reached up.

Her thumb brushed my cheek. Tracing the edge of the ink stain with a touch so light it barely qualified as contact. Her fingers were warm and slightly calloused from quill-work, and I stopped breathing.

“I know you like this outfit,” I whispered. “For some reason.”

“It’s not—”

“You peeked at me at the meeting. You picked up your clipboard upside down.” Her hand was still on my cheek. “I wanted to be in your world,” I said. “Even just for an hour. Even badly. Even dressed as Parlie. Because you spend every single day in mine, and I’ve never once tried to understand yours from the inside. And that’s—” My throat was tight. “You deserve someone who tries.”

Lola’s eyes were bright. The stare I’d glimpsed when she’d lain beside me that morning, and when she’d said you don’t need to be John, and when she’d walked away after I called her sweetie with her ears burning and her dignity crumbling and her heart written across her back in a language I was only just learning to read.

“Oh,” she said.

She crossed two steps, reached for a door handle I hadn’t noticed, turned it, and yanked us both through.

The door closed behind us.

It was a cleaning closet.

A small, dark, deeply unromantic cleaning closet, crammed with mops and buckets and shelves of bottles that smelled aggressively of alchemical cleaning agents.

Lola didn’t seem to notice any of it.

She turned to me in the dark, her hand still around my wrist, and her face was wet and open in a way I had never seen it.

And she kissed me.

My brain stopped.

Like someone had pulled a plug from the back of my skull and every thought I’d ever had drained out through the floor and left behind a ringing silence filled entirely with the fact that Lola’s mouth was on mine.

Her lips were warm.

Soft

She tasted faintly of the tea from City Hall, someone had been drinking the same mana-laced mint blend they sold at the square, and the thought arrived and left in the same instant because thinking was over, thinking was a thing other people did, people who weren’t currently being kissed in a cleaning closet by the most extraordinary woman in two worlds.

The kiss started careful, almost tentative, her lips pressing against mine. Then my hand found the back of her neck, and she made a sound, and the careful part evaporated.

She pressed closer.

Her fingers tightened on my wrist, then released, then found my waist. My back hit a shelf and something rattled; a bottle, a bucket, I didn’t care, nothing in this closet mattered except the way her body fit against mine and the way her breathing had gone ragged against my cheek and the way her hand was trembling, actually trembling, against my hip.

I kissed her back.

I kissed her back with everything, with the meditation that had failed because she was in it, with the morning I’d spent thinking about her handwriting, with the photo I still hadn’t taken, with every stupid mundane detail my brain had filed under critical information.

I kissed her with ink on my cheek and a scratchy blue band on my arm and the lingering taste of mint tea, and she pulled me closer, and the shelf rattled again, and I didn’t care if the entire cleaning closet collapsed around us because this—this—was the most important thing that had ever happened to me.

We broke apart.

Not far. Her forehead against mine, both of us breathing hard, the dark closet warm with the heat of two people who had just detonated something between them and were standing in the crater.

“I know you,” Lola whispered. Her voice was wrecked. The professional mask was gone as if it had never existed. “And I—what you did—”

She swallowed.

“What you did was super sexy,” she said.

I stared at her. “Only you,” I said, “could find bureaucracy sexy.”

A laugh burst out of her, startled out of her chest like a goolem flushed from cover. She pressed her face into my shoulder and laughed, and I wrapped my arms around her and laughed too, and the cleaning closet smelled like alchemical pine and lightning and we were both shaking with it, the laughter and the relief and the sheer absurd wonder of being here, together, in this ridiculous place.

I pulled her tighter.

Felt her settle against me, her breathing slowing, her hands finding the small of my back. We fit. We just fit.

“I didn’t think our first kiss would be—” I gestured vaguely with one hand, encompassing the mops, the buckets, the shelf of aggressive cleaning products. “Here.”

Lola lifted her head from my shoulder. Her eyes were red-rimmed and shining, and the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“Where did you think it would be?” she asked, and her voice was doing the thing, the half-professional, half-wrecked thing where she was trying to rebuild the composure and failing because I was still holding her.

“I don’t know. Somewhere with fewer mops.” I considered. “A balcony. Moonlight. Possibly a tasteful amount of snow.”

“Snow,” she repeated.

“I’m the Queen of Frost. There should have been thematic consistency.”

She laughed again, quieter, and pressed her forehead back against mine. Her thumb traced a circle on my hip. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”