The fourth shift

Halsey worked three shifts a week at the substation on Brenner Street. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. The schedule had been the schedule for nine years, since the long-haul system stabilized and the substations stopped needing crews of six and started running with single technicians who checked the panels and watched the dials and listened, mostly, for sounds that should not be there.

The shift on the schedule for Tuesday morning had been assigned to him.

Halsey was not in the habit of working Tuesdays. He did not remember signing up for Tuesday. He had checked the request log. There was no request. There was a Tuesday shift, assigned to him, in the morning, and a name signing the assignment that he could not quite read — a signature that looked, when he stared at it long enough, like his own signature written by someone who had been shown what his signature looked like but had not been shown the hand that wrote it.

He went home and did not sleep.

On Tuesday morning, at the appointed hour, Halsey arrived at the substation. The door was unlocked. The panels were lit. The dials were within tolerance. The board showed no alerts. He sat at the console and did the work of a shift. He read the dials. He listened. He checked the panels. He logged the readings. The readings were normal.

At the end of the shift, the board chimed once and showed him a single line of text. The line read: thank you for covering.

He logged out. The door locked behind him. He walked home in the daylight and did not tell anyone.

The Tuesday shift did not appear again. But Halsey had not told anyone about it, and as the weeks passed he began to wonder which was the right thing — the not-telling, which felt like complicity, or the telling, which would have required him to know what he was telling, and what he had covered, and for whom.