Handover

The Blood Guard kept its compound in the middle of the human city, a fenced town of vampires inside a city of humans, which both sides called the Block. Its offices were in a gray building with no sign over the door. Inside, the corridors smelled of floor wax and old paper, and everyone in them was a vampire. No human had ever come through the front door. That was the first thing the outgoing commander, Besnik, told Dritan.

With a face the sun had been working on for a century, Besnik was a lean man, and he knew every board in the corridors. He had come up from the bottom, a rank at a time. He looked once at the bars on Dritan’s shoulder and did not look at them again. “You have a year,” he said. “Don’t rush it.”

“A year,” Dritan said. “It sounds long.”

“It is long. My predecessor gave me two. I was told afterward that I had rushed.” He opened a door. “Ninety-nine years, and one to hand it over. The last year is the slowest.”

Past the kitchen he opened the annex: a counter, two chairs, and a door onto the side street. The human police reported there. It was the only room in the building a human might enter, and the bunker in the yard, where the Guard fed, the only other place. Nothing past the counter was theirs.

***

In the main room the watch stood drawn up in a line, and the third from the end was Agron.

A few years ago Agron had been brought back south, and had worn the gray in this building ever since. The bars on Dritan’s shoulder had come out of a drawer. Agron’s hand came up at the exact angle of the regulation. His face was a wall.

“At ease,” Dritan said, in a voice with nothing in it. He wanted, badly, to tell the man to sit down. He had never once sat next to him.

Agron’s eyes went once to the bars, and back. It was not quite a grin.

***

Every night the rosters came down, columns of numbers, each donor out by nightfall and home by dawn. Within the month he found the missing ones were a street renamed on one map and not the other, and fixed it in a night. Besnik said “Ah.” Humans harming each other he passed on. A coat spat on, a rhyme about the government, the Guard kept. On his first daylight patrol nobody looked at his face twice. It was the color of theirs now. Each night he decided again not to look for one two seven two.

***

The human police reported at the annex. The sergeant was a heavy man who smelled of tobacco and rain and said “Commander” to a point beside Dritan’s ear. He was the first human Dritan had ever spoken to. The case was a drawing on a bakery wall, a Guard with a tail, a boy of fourteen, and the regulation said the list for the boy and the father. Dritan knew the list now: summoned first and often, lot or no lot, and nothing ever came off it. He asked if it was a good drawing. The tail was good. He had the boy warned and the wall washed, and no list. A commander could waive it. Few did. Besnik, in the corner with his newspaper, did not look up.

***

In his first week he had moved into the officers’ quarters and refused a servant, and the months that followed went to learning what a kettle does. Each month the rulings went up to Upstairs, the bakery wall among them, and nothing came back. Nobody, it seemed, read what went up. Half a year passed before the thought turned into anything.

On Besnik’s nights off, once the patrols had gone out, the commander’s office was his, with a lamp and a terminal on the desk. The rosters let donors go when they married or grew old. The registry never did: one number for life, the manual on the shelf said. Every question was somebody’s. Tonight the somebody was Dritan.

He sat a long time with his hands on the keys. Then he typed one two seven two, and the terminal thought about it, and a line came up, green on black.

1272. BEQIRI, LINDITA. Below it, a street and a number.

He copied the street and the number onto a slip of paper before the screen cleared. He said the name once under his breath, and then again.