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It’s not that Anne hates her job. She’d just never planned to be the head of Operational Oversight – looking after multiple departments because of endless budget cuts – for a clandestine Crown agency tasked with keeping the supernatural out of the public eye and off the streets. She’d envisioned rather a different life when she was working her way up the ranks at GCHQ. She’d never even heard of S.P.E.A.R. then. Of course, few enough people had, and wasn’t that rather the point? But even just into her early twenties, she’d done well by herself in the intelligence community. Good fieldwork had landed her a desk job in the Doughnut, and though Cheltenham was a far cry from Brixton and farther from her family than she liked, she’d made it work.
The lonely days and lonelier nights had been worth it. Until the Foreign Secretary’s eye had fallen on her in a security briefing she’d been seconded to because of the time she’d spent handling Crown interests in the Congo. After rejecting the subsequent months of private briefings at his request and unwelcome advances in the bargain and one very loud slap his entire office heard when he finally dared lay hand on her, the Secretary spread it round that she’d been pursuing him. A young Black woman accused by a venerated member of the peerage with his eye on a run at the Prime Minister’s office in a handful of years? She hadn’t stood a chance.
Director Hearne had been kind, at least. Kiera had fought her own battles to rise to her position as an outsider with a history deeply tangled in the Troubles – Kiera hadn’t ventured the specifics, and Anne knew better than to ask what had driven her out of Ireland; she wielded enough power in her own right as a Permanent Secretary to forestall the Foreign Secretary’s demands about Anne’s future, or lack thereof; and she was all too familiar with the kind of lies that destroy the careers of promising young women. So, when Kiera offered her an alternative, a chance to disappear into working in the warrens of an offshoot, off-books branch of the GCHQ, Anne leapt at the chance.
In the decade since, having travelled the world and seen things no sane person should behold, sometimes Anne’s not sure she made the right choice. Misgivings exacerbated by governmental penny pinching that have left S.P.E.A.R. underfunded and understaffed for decades. The organization seen by many as a relic: a haven of superstitious fools fighting shadow wars against fairy tales. Which is, of course, absolutely what you want when you’ve got ridiculously powerful things you really should not have kept alive hidden away in the depths of a decaying building with decrepit arcane wards, organizational mundane tech that’s several generations out of date by necessity as well as cost, and staff turnover that’s as much a nightmare as the things you see on the daily. Turnover that doesn’t even account for the staff who keep getting eaten. On site and off.
