“Sorry!” I call over my shoulder, but the word gets lost in the wind.
Then, out of nowhere—a barking dog, a huge blur of black fur, leaps for me. I jerk my handlebars to the right and lose my balance. I tumble off the bike, hitting the ground hard on my elbow, and skid several feet as pain rips up my right side. My bike thuds next to me, screeching across the concrete, and someone is yelling, and the dog is still barking. One of my feet is entangled in the spokes of my front wheel. The dog circles me, panting.
“Are you okay?” A man speed-walks across the street. “Bad dog,” he says, smacking the dog’s head roughly. The dog slinks several feet away, whimpering.
I sit up, extracting my foot carefully from my bike. My right arm and shin are cut up, but miraculously, I don’t think I’ve broken anything. “I’m all right.” I pull myself carefully to my feet, rolling my ankles and wrists slowly, checking for pain. Nothing.
“You should watch where you’re going,” the man says. He looks annoyed. “You could have been killed.” Then he stalks off down the street, whistling for his dog to follow. The dog trots after him, head down.
I pick up my bike and wheel it onto the sidewalk. The chain has come off the stay, and one handlebar is slightly crooked, but other than that, it looks okay. As I bend down to adjust the chain, I notice that I’ve landed directly in front of the Center for Organization, Research, and Education. I must have been circling it for the past hour.
The CORE keeps Portland’s public records: the incorporation documents for its businesses, but also the names, birth dates, and addresses of its citizens; copies of their birth, marriage, medical, and dental records; violations against them and report cards and annual review scores, as well as evaluation results and suggested matches.
An open society is a healthy society; transparency is necessary to trust. That’s what The Book of Shhh teaches. My mom used to phrase it differently: Only people who have something to hide make a fuss about privacy.
Without consciously making the decision, I lock my bike to a streetlamp and jog up the stairs. I push through the revolving doors and step into a large, plain lobby, decorated with gray linoleum floor tiles and buzzing overhead lights.
A woman sits behind a fake-wood desk, in front of an ancient-looking computer. Behind her a heavy chain is hung across an open doorway; from it, a large sign is dangling: PERSONNEL AND AUTHORIZED CORE EMPLOYEES ONLY.
The woman barely glances at me as I approach the desk. A small plastic name tag identifies her as TANYA BOURNE, SECURITY ASSISTANT.
“Can I help you?” she asks in a monotone. I can tell that she doesn’t recognize me.
“I hope so,” I say cheerfully, placing my hands on the desk and forcing her to meet my gaze. Lena used to call it my Buy a bridge look. “See, my wedding’s coming up, and I completely flaked on Cassie, and now I have barely any time to track her down. . . .”
The woman sighs and resettles in her chair.
“And of course Cassie has to be there. I mean, even if we haven’t spoken . . . well, she invited me to her wedding, and it just wouldn’t be nice, would it?” I let out a giggle.
“Miss?” she prompts tiredly.
I giggle again. “Oh, sorry. Babbling—it’s a bad habit. I guess I’m just nervous, you know, because of the wedding and everything.” I pause and suck in a deep breath. “So can you help me?”
She blinks. Her eyes are a dirty-bathwater color. “What?”
“Can you help me find Cassie?” I ask, squeezing my hands into fists, hoping she won’t notice. Please say yes. “Cassandra O’Donnell.”
I watch Tanya carefully, but she doesn’t appear to recognize the name. She heaves an exaggerated sigh, pushes up from her chair, and moves over to a tiered stack of papers. She waddles back to me and practically slaps it on the desk. It’s as thick as a medical intake form—at least twenty pages long. “Personal Information Requests may be sent to CORE, attention Census Department, and will be processed within ninety days—”
“Ninety days!” I cut her off. “My wedding’s in two weeks.”
She draws her mouth into a line. Her whole face is the color of bad water. Maybe being here day after day, under the dull, buzzing lights, has begun to pickle her. She says determinedly, “Expedited Personal Information Request Forms must be accompanied by a personal statement—”
“Look.” I spread my fingers flat on the counter and press my frustration down through my palms. “The truth is, Cassandra is a little witch, okay? I don’t even like her.”
Tanya perks up a little.