Underneath Us

chapter seven: cass

    The motel was even shabbier than Cassiopeia had expected. The wallpaper and paint was peeling, the bedsheets were filthy, there were various species of insects that had made a home there, and the bathroom was barely larger than the toilet.
Cassiopeia sat around for about 13 minutes, waiting for someone to come. She checked her phone— no texts. That's a bad sign. If they're coming, they'd say "sorry, can't come" or something along those lines to throw anyone off in case someone had hacked it.
She texted "should I plan on you coming?" then decided to check out the street.
10 minutes later, Cass had a full belly, but still no text. The street vendors had distracted her for a little while, but it was now clear that the person would not be coming. The fact they had not replied at all was suspicious and concerning.
So the question remained: what to do. The assignment must have been compromised, but what did that mean for Cass? And what did no reply at all mean?

Cass slowly trudged back to the motel, pondering over things no one had taught her. Just as her foot tapped onto the cold concrete of her front step, her phone vibrated.
"I'm afraid I won't be able to make it," the text read. Cass let out the breath she'd been holding since leaving the vendors and strolled to her room.

"90."
"115." Cass countered.
"100."
"110."
"105."
"109."
"109," the hooded figure agreed.
They handed Cass the money and gave her a small electronic chip the size of her fingernail. The chip was to inform her of what her assignment specifically was.
The "mailman" (which was what people who handed off the money and the chip were called) knew nothing the the details of the assignment except what the general deed was so they would have an idea of what a good price was. The less they managed to pay, the more they got paid, otherwise they wouldn't care how much the performer (the person who carried out the task) got paid because it was the advisors money they gave. The advisor was the person to oversee the assignment, the mailman, the performer, and things along those lines.
Selkath was run like a pyramid. The administrators sat at the top and decided what assignments were worth handing out, who needed to be taken care of, who should be recruited, etc. There were at least three to keep each other in check, but no one knew the exact number of administrators.
Then there were advisors. They distributed assignments, money, and chips to the mailman. Each supervised four mailmen and 12 performers, so there weren't many advisors since there weren't many mailmen and performers.
Next were the mailmen. They would be at the bottom considering they usually knew little to nothing about anything important, but there were fewer of them than performers and they knew of stuff before the performers.
At the bottom were the performers. They did the dirty work, kidnapping, stealing, stalking, and killing. Newbies mostly got the stealing jobs and, if they seemed like the type, they would then learn to be a stalker or to collect information. If they got really good at that, they were given an assignment that meant going undercover, and that gave them respect and made it easier to climb the rungs of the pyramid. Otherwise they were given low paying, easy thieving jobs that led to harder and more gruesome assignments.
Cass was a performer and a highly ranked one, at that. Her many years in Selkath and her lack of parents led the higher-ups to see her as trustworthy, or at least not a threat. She had mostly done stalking jobs and important theiving jobs, but never the gruesome ones because she was only 16
Now she was given her first kidnapping assignment. The promise was that if she did well with this one, she would get the best assignment a performer could have: undercover work.

And all she had to do was kidnap some teenager in the government.