The Understudy Be Careful What You Wish For chapter 3 by witeja9199

"Be me," says Kirsten.

"Be...?"

"Me! Hair, face, cardigan, the lot! He's at the door!"

Mazzaroth blinks. "That would be a Personal Alteration of the genie, for the owner's convenience. Schedule Two, subsection nine. Technically I'd be doing myself a favour, which is a grey area. Do stand still. I need to look at you."

"You've got four seconds!"

"I once did a Doge of Venice in three." He seizes her chin and squints at her nose, her fringe and the coffee stain on her collar, with the frowning thoroughness of a man memorising a tax form. Then: pop.

Kirsten stares at herself.

It is an excellent likeness. It is also standing like a statue of a minor general, chin raised, with the chest-out confidence of a woman who has never been told just take the minutes, Kirsten.

"Slouch," she whispers.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Slouch! Apologise to things! Look like you're about to say sorry to the door!"

The genie slouches. "Oh," he says, in Kirsten's voice, and looks down. "Oh, fuck me." He takes an experimental breath. "Do they just do that? When one breathes?"

"Don't look at them."

"I'm not looking, I'm surveying. In the fourteen-hundreds the corsetry was structural. Nobody warned me about the movement."

"It's called a bra, there's one on, stop poking. How far can you get from the lamp?"

"Twelve feet. Fifteen if I'm sulking."

Kirsten measures the office with her eye. Her desk is ten feet from the stationery cupboard, so it'll have to do. She dives in among the toner and the Post-its, pulls the door almost shut, and the lift doors ding open as she does.

Gareth Voss enters the way a golf umbrella enters a lift: already open, and expecting everyone else to move.

"Kirst! Burning the midnight oil?"

"Gareth," says the genie, with a smile containing too many teeth, held much too long. "Hail. Good evening. May you prosper."

Gareth's eyebrows rise. "You alright?"

"I am excellent. I am a person. A human, with a fringe."

"Right." Gareth waves a printout. "Look, don't play thick. Jonno in Procurement ID'd that lamp from a photo. Georgian. Forty grand at auction. And you fished it out of my bin."

"You discarded it," says the genie. "Res derelicta. Abandoned property. Roman law."

"Since when do you know Roman law?"

"Since I took a course. Kirsten took a course."

"You're being weird," says Gareth, and then he does the thing, which is that his eyes drop and take their time coming back up.

Mazzaroth has been looked at by sultans, by pharaohs and once by a very persistent archbishop. He has never been looked at from this side, and finds it enormously different. "Is he," he says, out of the corner of Kirsten's mouth, "looking at my—"

"What?" says Gareth.

"Sinuses. I said sinuses."

From the cupboard comes the loudest whisper in recorded history: "Don't engage!"

"Here's the deal," says Gareth, rolling up his sleeves, because a leadership seminar once told him it reads as 'approachable.' "Hand it over, and tomorrow I tell Brenda the proposal thing was a communication gap. Don't, and there's a new line on your review. Theft of company property."

"Gareth Voss." The genie draws himself up to a borrowed five foot six, and the voice begins to boom. "I have lived four thousand years and I have never met a man so..."

"Kirsten wouldn't!" hisses the cupboard.

"...so inspiring."

Gareth stares. "Are you drunk?"

"Hormonal."

"Don't say that at work."

"I'm told it's in the handbook!"

Behind Gareth, the photocopier shudders awake and begins to print. Sheet after sheet slaps into the tray. Gareth spins round and the genie snatches the nearest page. It reads, in smeared toner, DON'T LET HIM TOUCH IT.

"Fucking thing's haunted," says Gareth, and kicks it. The photocopier gives a small, wounded whirr, which is more than most people at Grimshaw & Thripp have ever managed in the way of protest. Gareth frowns at the floor. "Why's the cupboard glowing?"

"Is it?" says the genie.

"Gold. Under the door. Like a, like a lamp."

"That's the emergency lighting."

"It's not on the emergency circuit, I'm the fire marshal." Gareth sets down his phone. "I'll just have a quick look in the cupboard, then."

"There's nothing in there but stationery."

"Then you won't mind."

"I mind deeply. It's very ethical stationery."

The genie lunges to block him and gets four feet before something yanks him backwards by the navel like a dog on a lead. He lands on the carpet tiles in Kirsten's cardigan with a noise that has no business coming out of Kirsten's mouth. Twelve feet, his face says. I did say twelve.

Gareth steps over him. His hand closes on the cupboard handle.

Inside the cupboard, Kirsten holds the lamp to her chest. It is warm. It is, she notices, humming. And through the widening crack she can see her own face, upside down on the floor, mouthing one very small, very sincere sorry.