Canon of Order

Heinrich Vanderbeck arrived at Harmonex Solutions BVBA on a Monday morning with a briefcase full of violation forms and the quiet certainty that he would be gone by Friday. Twenty years of auditing had taught him one thing: Perfect order doesn’t exist. There are only well-hidden violations.

The building had no windows on the ground floor. He hadn’t noticed that from the street.

The reception smelled of old dust and something sweet and faintly cloying, like wilted lilies left too long in a sealed room. The secretary sat with her hands folded in her lap, perfectly still, her eyes fixed on a point behind Heinrich’s shoulder. On her desk lay a sheet covered in dense, handwritten symbols — not a language he recognized, not quite numbers either. She folded it with practiced precision, dropped it into a small ceramic urn, and pressed the lid down with both thumbs until something clicked.

“The chief accountant is waiting for you,” she said. Her voice had the flat, careful quality of someone reciting from memory. “But first — have you touched the stapler of Saint Vincent?”

In the corner, behind glass, lay a stapler. The plastic had yellowed to the color of old teeth. The metal was spotted with rust. A small engraved plaque read: Saint Vincent the Clerical. 1987–2019.

“He stapled,” the secretary said, “and nothing was ever lost.”

Heinrich looked at the secretary. The secretary looked at the urn.

“Touch it,” she said. “It helps with concentration.”

He almost didn’t. But the glass case had no lock, and his hand moved before he’d decided to move it, and the surface was warm — genuinely, inexplicably warm — in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

He pulled his hand back. The secretary was watching him now with an expression of mild, satisfied approval, the way a doctor looks when a patient swallows the pill without argument.

Inside, he walked straight into a meeting.

The accountants stood in a circle. Not gathered — arranged. The spacing between them was identical, precise to within a few centimeters. Heinrich noticed this and immediately wished he hadn’t. At the center stood Gabriella van Osten, a woman with dark, depthless eyes, reading from a notebook so worn that its spine had been reinforced with surgical tape.

“Today we remember Saint Sebastian of the IT department.”

Her voice was the voice of someone who had said these words so many times they had ceased to carry meaning and had become something else, something closer to frequency than language.

The employees raised their heads. In chorus, without hesitation, without variation, they said:

“Data is fleeting.”

Gabriella turned a page.

“Sebastian was the last one who knew how to work without fear. In 2003, when the virus called ‘Sinful Desire’ entered our accounting systems, he went into the server room alone and did not come out for three days. No food. He licked condensation from the walls to stay hydrated. He restored everything. Files that had been deleted for years. Files that had never been backed up. Files that, according to every record we had, had never existed.”

A pause. The circle breathed together.

Anna, the cashier, spoke without looking at Heinrich. Her voice was soft and rehearsed and utterly without affect.

“When he came out, his eyelashes had turned gray. His hands had cramped around the shape of a keyboard. He could never fully straighten them again. He never spoke about what he had seen on those screens.”

“His covenant,” said Gabriella, “is simple. Create backups. For data is fleeting.”

“Data is fleeting.”

They moved to a low table. A calculator. A computer mouse, the cord frayed down to bare wire. A photograph, so faded that the face was more suggested than seen. One by one they touched these objects. Their lips moved. Heinrich watched a woman in her fifties press the calculator to her forehead and close her eyes, and the expression on her face was the expression of someone in pain that has finally, briefly, stopped.

Gabriella looked at him.

“Come. Sebastian favors those who verify.”

The refusal formed clearly in Heinrich’s mind. It had shape and weight and good reason behind it.

He walked to the table and then to the first desk of many.

A vase of paper clips bent into rings. A calculator wrapped in velvet. A framed printed email, the text redacted with black marker except for the signature and the date — always a date, always specific, always years ago.

“The chair of Saint Ezekiel the Tax,” said Gabriella, stopping beside a leather office chair that was otherwise indistinguishable from any other. “In it, thoughts become transparent. Sit.”

He sat because it was easier than explaining why he wouldn’t. The leather was cold for a moment, then adjusted. His breathing slowed without him deciding to slow it. He noticed, distantly, that he was smiling, and could not identify when that had started.

At the next desk, Anna opened a ledger. She reached into her drawer, took out a small needle, and without pausing, without expression, pressed it into the tip of her finger. A drop of dark blood fell onto the column of figures at the bottom of the page.

“The seal of honesty,” Gabriella said, watching Heinrich watch Anna. “Saint Clara the Cashier’s covenant: If you want the numbers to hold, you seal them. The numbers remember.”

Anna closed the ledger. Her face was entirely neutral. This was not something that made her uncomfortable. This was Tuesday.

At 1:00 PM exactly, the office went silent. Not quiet — silent, the way a recording goes silent when the track ends. Every keyboard stopped. Every mouse. Heinrich looked up from his documents and found the room already emptied, every chair pushed in at the same angle.

Anna appeared at his elbow.

“Saint Lawrence’s covenant,” she said, just above a whisper. “No eating at the desk. Errors follow. And during the meal hour, we don’t speak.”

He followed her to the cafeteria. Eighteen people ate in complete silence. The only sounds were cutlery and the faint mechanical hum of the ventilation system. Heinrich looked from face to face and found nothing — not contentment, not discomfort, not the suppressed restlessness of people forcing themselves to be quiet. Just absence. Faces between thoughts, waiting for the hour to end.

The quiet pressed against his ribs like something with hands.

After lunch, a semicircle assembled in the center of the room.

Jan, one of the junior accountants, stood in the middle with his head down and his hands trembling visibly at his sides. He was perhaps thirty. He looked older.

“Today we have a violation,” said Gabriella. The warmth that had been in her voice all morning was simply gone, with no transition, no cooling-down period. It had been a setting she had switched. “Jan did not touch the relic of Saint Sebastian this morning. He spoke during the meal hour. Twice.”

The circle watched Jan. Their faces were attentive in a way that Heinrich found difficult to look at directly.

Jan read from a laminated card in a voice that kept fracturing and recomposing itself: “May debit converge with credit, may assets equal liabilities, may what is given return to what is owed—” Three times. The words blurred together by the end until they were rhythm without meaning.

Then he was given the annual report from 2006 and told to copy it by hand.

He sat down and began.

The others watched for a while. Their eyes had something in them that Heinrich did not want to name.

“This seems—” he started.

“Discipline is sacred,” Gabriella said. Clean and final, like a door closing.

By Thursday, Heinrich had not found a single error.

Not one. In five years of consolidated reports, seventeen subsidiary accounts, three tax restructurings, and approximately four thousand line items. Not a rounding discrepancy. Not a miscategorized asset. Not the kind of minor clerical variance that appears in every real set of accounts because humans make small mistakes and then correct them and the corrections leave traces.

There were no traces.

He had never seen accounts like these. He had never seen anything like these. He began to wonder what it would take to produce documents this clean, and the answer that came back to him was more than ordinary care, and the answer underneath that one was something he didn’t follow all the way down.

The employees had stopped meeting his eyes after working hours. When he asked direct questions about the saints, about the rituals, about the photographs lining the corridor, they would murmur under their breath and turn back to their screens. Not rudely, but as if he had spoken in a language they decided not to engage.

He looked at the photographs more carefully.

They were labeled with names, designations, and dates formatted in the same way: Saint [Name] the [Title]. [Year]–[Year]. The spans were short. Two years. Three. One that read 2021–2021.

Some of the photographs had been replaced. He was certain of this now. The frames were the same but the faces had changed, new labels beneath them, and the old photographs were simply gone.

He found Jan’s photograph on Thursday afternoon.

Saint Jan the Penitent. 2020–2024.

Jan had been at his desk that morning.

“Where is Jan?” he asked Anna.

She looked at the photograph for a long moment.

“Jan is with us,” she said. “He is always with us.”

On Friday, Gabriella found him in the document archive.

“In the display case,” she said, in a voice so gentle it took him a moment to process the words, “your calculator is already there. We had to make a small adjustment to the plaque. We hope you don’t mind.”

He looked at her.

“Saint Heinrich the Auditor. Patron of honest inspections. 2025.“

The word 2025 landed somewhere in his chest and sat there.

“This is insane,” he said. He said it carefully, without shouting, because something told him shouting would not help. He picked up his briefcase. He walked to the door.

His hand found the handle. Cold metal. The right thing to do was pull.

He didn’t pull.

From here, the display case was perfectly visible. His calculator lay on the velvet — slightly crooked, as if it had always belonged there and had simply been waiting to be found. His glasses were beside it. He hadn’t noticed when they’d been taken.

Forty-three companies. Eight hundred and twelve violations. And after every report he drove to an empty hotel room and added a new address to the list and lay in the dark unable to sleep because the numbers never quite added up, because the violations he found were always small and the order underneath them was always wrong in some way he couldn’t document, and no one had ever said stay before.

He had his own cult. He’d been running it alone for twenty years.

He let go of the handle.

He walked back past the altars, past the velvet and the paper clip rings and the faded photographs, and he lowered himself into the chair of Saint Ezekiel the Tax. The leather received him. His breathing slowed.

He didn’t immediately realize he was smiling.

“Data is fleeting,” said Gabriella. Quietly. As if to herself.

“Data is fleeting,” said Heinrich.

His voice settled into the room like it had always been there.

Kateryna Kievit is a Ukrainian-born writer based in Belgium. She is the author of the short story collection Normal People Don’t Act Like This. Her work explores intimacy, the body, and the absurdities of modern life. She writes in several languages and is currently working on new literary and experimental prose projects.

A Song for Kateryna