Death was a good place to hide. Ninety-nine percent of the reported dead stayed dead, but occasionally someone played possum. At the Norval Department of Marketing Necrology (NDMN), Raphael’s job was to find the possum’s pulse, no matter how faint.

Raphael glanced away from Professor Jason Klaes’s obituary, having read it for the fifth time, each read more frustrating than the one before. The details he needed weren’t there, but Maglio, the big boss, didn’t want excuses. Nail Klaes.

On the ultra-high-def screens protruding from the department’s wall, a plain woman in a plain smock ironed a sheet. Vapor rose from the sleek device in her hand. She drew the iron back and forth with a dreamy smile, unchanged as she set it upright, adjusted the linen, and then continued her labor in an endless loop. This mindfulness video with its soothing predictability was meant to relax, but it made Raphael uneasy. He couldn’t say why.

Above the screens, the Norval logo—a thick N with stubby wings like cupid—glowed. The name of the division appeared in neat silver letters followed by its charge: To Preserve and Protect the Online Remains of the Dead.

Corporate speak decoded, it meant hoarding every bit of personal data the deceased left behind and restricting it to Norval Portals. To those online portals came loved ones and scandalmongers, biographers and extortionists, seekers of juicy details and the merely curious—consumers all, valuable targets of the advertisers Norval solicited.

The PA system screeched.

“Stage Three Event. Repeat. Stage Three Event. Category: mass shooting. Location: Durham, North Carolina. Estimated deaths: fifty. Override status. All Necrology Department employees return to their desks.”

On the screens, the ironing woman faded to black. Multi-colored zigzag patterns filled the screens, resolving into police cars and ambulances, lights flashing on the exterior of a university quadrangle. Students streamed from the doorways of a white stone building and ran across the quad. Blanched faces filled the screen, then vanished. Trailing those fleeing, the injured—many bleeding—stumbled, limped, and crawled toward the police line.

A weight fell on Raphael’s shoulder. He glanced up at Mike Dreemont, his supervisor, a thickset man with a heavy jaw, wide mouth, and sickly-sweet cologne.

“You know the routine, Team Leader,” said Dreemont. “Take as many End Men as you want from Cancer, Stroke, Alzheimer’s, Overdose, Suicide, and Pneumonia. Let me know if you need more.” Releasing Raphael’s shoulder, Dreemont stood on his toes and called out to the office. “Let’s get busy, End Men!” Keyboards clicked furiously. Nodding, Dreemont dropped to his heels with a thump and glanced hard at Raphael. “But when you’re done—”

“Yeah, Mike. Back to Klaes.”

“Oh, better check on your new necrologist. It’s her first mass casualty event, so I gave her a heads-up. She didn’t take it well.”

Raphael found Jensy seated and bent over her desk, her slender, white cane within arm’s reach. Her long black hair hung forward, parting over pale-green frames containing thick, black lenses, but otherwise masking her face. She’d tucked her hands between her legs, and her headphones lay on her stippled keyboard. Jensy was a petite woman. When Raphael spoke to her, he always hunched over, and then his long hair covered his face. Two faceless people talking.

“It’s all right, Jensy.”

She lifted her head an inch. “All right? All those people dead. All right?”

“No, I meant …” What did he mean?

He lowered his hand but stopped short of touching her. Curiously, the visually impaired usually took longer to adjust to the work, if ever.

In a soft voice, Raphael said to Jensy, “I started at Norval on the day a tanker carrying chlorine gas ruptured within fifty yards of a county fair. Four hundred people—”

“Four hundred? How awful.”

“Yes, so many. Dreemont gave us new End Men ten minutes to get our act together and then compile. He was all business—emotionless. I ran right into his office and complained that their bodies weren’t even cold yet. We were talking about them like meat. He said, ‘Not meat, kid. Data. They’re dead but not less valuable. That’s our business. Get moving.’ Man, I wanted to hit him. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. I went back to my desk, my work.”

She faced him, her dark, smudged glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. Her sightless eyes glistened. “Those people are just data? College students. Teachers.” Jensy lowered her head and pushed her glasses into place. “All those people, all at once.”

“We do sad work, Jensy. You can’t let it get to you.” He searched for something profound but came up with a cliché. “You can’t take it personally.” Dreemont had hammered that into him, and now he was the one who could shrug off a mass casualty event. Just like Dreemont. Jesus, had he come that far?

Jensy raised her head again and seemed to peer into his eyes. “You can let it go?”

“It took time.”

“Yes.” She pushed her fists at the corners of her eyes. “Time.”

“It sounds cold, but that’s necrology.”

She nodded and wiped her cheeks. “I must look awful.”

“Hardly.”

He instructed her to continue with the task he’d assigned her the day before: culling the Natural Blanks—the dead who had been too old or too young for an online presence—from the Weekly Nevada Traffic Crash Fatalities List. “Have you found many yet?”

“Krill Larkov, a four-year-old boy; Polina Zatonsky, a female infant; and two 109-year-old women, Nancy and Sharon Blunt. Twins.”

“The names aren’t necessary.”

“Oh.”

“Good work,” he said softly, unmodulated by the twinge of melancholy he always felt when considering the Natural Blanks, especially the children. He wasn’t Dreemont yet.

Jensy nodded, put on her earphones, and spread her fingers over her braille keyboard. She smiled, froze, and smiled again, probably unsure of what to feel, like Dorothy touching her foot to the first brick of the yellow road, like all End Men on the first day they fully realized what kind of work they did.

As Stage Three Team Leader, Raphael spent the morning managing the preliminary event research, gliding from End Man to End Man—a name derived from the pronunciation of its acronym, NDMN, and adopted by the unit’s employees regardless of gender, though necrologist, keeper of lists of the dead, was their formal title—advising, encouraging, and channeling their efforts to gain and confirm the names of the dead.

By 1:00 pm the names of thirty-eight dead students and seven faculty members had made the list, plus the shooter. Now began the meticulous aggregation of the dead’s online remains, the opening of a new Norval Portal for each departed (offline in Norval-speak), and the linkage of the remains to the patented Norval Portal navigation system. Next came the delicate negotiations for portal rights, but this was handled by Contracts. Raphael’s team leader responsibilities were over. From the PA came a few bars of an ancient song, one of dozens comprising Norval’s looped background music, the favorite tunes of its CEO, who carried the songs from his youth.

“Fun, Fun, Fun” by the . . . Beach Boys.

On the Cumulative Clock, the hundreds digit flashed a nine. Fun? No. But—

Come next month, Raphael would have spent five years as an End Man, the last three as a possum specialist, outing those faking their deaths. Considering his spatial limitations, it wasn’t the worst of jobs, and playing detective could be a rush, even if the dark alleys, tough thugs, and femme fatales remained confined to his computer.

But sleuthing was a small part of the company’s mission. Norval harvested the data of the dead, and despite his bravado with Jensy, he would sometimes imagine that long line of the deceased, constantly refreshed, plodding toward him, led by a figure with a bewildered face, as if emerging from the fog to view an unfamiliar location.

Let it go.