There was a sliding door concealed in the yellow wall, one that required another access keypad. This one was DNA keyed, from the looks of it, and likely only Virtue was coded to enter directly. She was the gatekeeper.
The door led into a vast warehouse of an office, carpet even plusher underfoot than in the room outside, walls polished dark wood, priceless works of art and sculpture trapped here like flies in amber, for the enjoyment of one person. The entire back wall of the office was windows stretching up twenty feet, pure glass, not monitors. The windows overlooked a real park, green grass, neatly clipped bushes, a riot of colorful flowers. Trees swaying in the wind. A fountain spraying clean water high into the air.
Outside.
I felt it hit me like a punch in the gut, and swayed as I gulped for air. Virtue turned her dark, calm gaze on me. “I know,” she said quietly. “It does that. Take a second, then follow me.”
She waited while I sucked down a couple of steadying breaths, and at my nod, led me across what seemed like an entire level’s worth of carpet, past lush furniture and a library of real, solid books, to a desk that must have destroyed the largest tree that had ever lived. It was real wood, polished and lovingly maintained, and behind it sat a tired-looking middle-aged man with graying hair.
He was wearing a Corporate jacket, but it was a much finer one, and instead of black, it was blue, in the Company color. He had on a tie, faded blue, to match his eyes. A crisp white shirt. He extended his right hand to me as he rose, and I took it automatically. Corporate manners, drilled into me with harsh discipline.
“Is this him?” the man asked Virtue, who nodded. “Mr. Gray. Very nice to meet you. Virtue’s said so much about you.”
It had happened too fast. He wasn’t supposed to be here, not until tomorrow. I had expected to be in control and ready, and instead, I was still struggling to come to grips with the sight of the world outside of those windows behind him, and the tired smile he gave me as we shook hands.
This was the man who’d killed a whole trainload of kids down in the dark, and he looked . . . kind.
“I’m Tarrant Clark,” he said. “Global SVP, Corporate Resources.”
“Good to meet you, sir,” I said.
“Oh, no doubt,” he said. “Since I’m sure you’ve come to kill me.”
Virtue took in a breath, then let it slowly out. I said nothing. Clark was still holding my hand in a firm grip.
“Am I wrong, Zay?” he asked, and let go. We faced each other without blinking, and beneath the smile, the kindness, I saw a man who’d survived Corporate life. Someone who didn’t flinch. “You’re not the first K kid to come here to even the score. Ask Virtue about her first day with me.”
I darted a look at her, and saw that he wasn’t lying; she’d worked her way here for exactly the same reason I had . . . to get revenge.
Only she hadn’t followed through.
I felt the weight of the gun under my armpit, warm and deadly. I was fast. I could draw and fire in a second, and he’d be falling, a bloody memory. I’d certainly be dead about a second later, from any of a variety of automatic countermeasures, but I would have accomplished the one thing that I’d set out to do, all those years ago. What I’d been training to do ever since that day.
“I understand why you feel as you do,” Clark was saying. “I won’t lie to you; I knew about the planned downsizing. I voted to stop it, but it didn’t matter, in the end. It happened.”
“Yes,” I said. “It happened to us.”
Clark gazed at me without blinking, still. “Don’t kid yourself that it was only you on the level who suffered. A thing like that happens to everybody who touches it, everybody who knows. It’s toxic. It changes you.”
I was one twitch away from killing him. The powerful impact of the shock of the Outside beyond those windows was wearing off, and so was my first impression of him; the anger was coming back, a red tide that was going to carry me away.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I guess you’d think that.” It was sick thinking, to imagine that pushing a button, signing an order would be like being there, like seeing it happen. Like being one of those dead kids, riding the train to the incinerator. Or like the families who never spoke about it again.
He thought he’d suffered? Not by half. Not yet, he hadn’t.
She must have seen it in my eyes, because Virtue stepped up and put herself in front of me, between me and Tarrant Clark. “No,” she said. “It hasn’t come to knives. I told you, Zay. You need to listen to him.”
I wasn’t going to stop. Not for Virtue, not for anybody.
I made a move to draw, but she was too close, and I was too big to be that nimble. Virtue didn’t need a lot of leverage to stop me, she just had to choose the moment. She did, pinning my arm, and hung on with all the wiry strength of her body. “No,” she insisted softly, urgently. “Zay, listen. Listen to him. Please.”
“Let go of me,” I said to Virtue. “I don’t want to hurt you, but this is going to get done. We swore on it.”
“Listen!”
I did, but only because I knew I’d have to kill her first, and I was weighing whether or not I wanted that debt on my sheet.
“I’m in the middle of a hostile takeover of the Company,” Clark said, in the dead silence that followed. “I’m going to take out the CEO. Leo Pannizer is the man who designed and ordered the Cup Train operation; he forced me at gunpoint to sign the papers. It got him the big desk. Now I’m going to downsize him, tonight. If you’ll hold your anger a little longer, Zay, you can help me do that. You can get revenge on the man who pushed the button.”
Corporate. Always talking.
I stopped trying to move Virtue gently, and batted her out of the way with more violence than I probably needed. She fell heavily on her side, cracked her head against the wood of the desk, and lay still for a few stunned breaths.
I wasn’t looking at her. In the second it had taken her to fall, I had drawn my gun, and aimed it directly between Tarrant Clark’s eyes.
He didn’t flinch. At all. There was a kind of fatalistic acceptance in his face, a tense knowledge that he’d arrived at this moment under his own power, by making his own choices.
And that made me hesitate, for just a second, that Clark didn’t flinch from taking what was coming. I’d never imagined he’d be brave. Never.
Virtue kicked my legs out from under me, screaming out a raw challenge, the language of Level K, not this quiet Corporate haven. I fired as I fell.
The bullet missed Clark, hit the glass behind him, and simply . . . stopped. The glass didn’t break. It held the bullet, perfectly still, in transit. The surface vibrated.
And then I was in the fight of my life.
Virtue hadn’t gone soft, not at all, and she was armed with a knife, a little thing, deadly sharp, that flashed and hissed with her quick moves. The skirt she wore left her legs free to move, and she kicked off her severe shoes immediately to give herself better stability. That evened us as much as we could be evened, given the difference in our sizes.
Not that I had ever allowed size to come between us in a fight. Nor had she. Virtue was as dangerous as a rabid weasel when she was committed, and just now, she was fully, fatally committed.
I dodged out of the way of a stab, a feint, another stab that turned halfway and slashed through the arm of my jacket, barely scratching my flesh. The heavy black fabric and the shirt beneath parted with hardly a tug. That was a very sharp knife.
I had expected nothing less from her.
I had no knife, but I had a knuckle stunner, which I slipped my hand into in my pocket. I came out with a punch so fast it blurred, and caught Virtue on the chin as she slammed that knife in toward my chest for a crippling blow. The shock jolted my arm, but that was only bleed-through; the vast majority cascaded directly through her body, and I twisted to avoid the knife and caught her on the way down.
I eased Virtue to the carpet, checked to be sure she was still breathing, and then
looked back up at Tarrant Clark.
Who had not moved. The bullet vibrated gently in the glass behind him, giving off a soft humming sound as the field bled off the murderous energy of its passage. He hadn’t gone for a weapon. He hadn’t run. He hadn’t called for backup.
“Is she alive?” he asked.
“Do you care?”
“Yes. I like her. She’s a tough little thing.”
Oddly, I believed him. I stood up, limping a little from where she’d caught me with her kick, and raised the gun. “I’m not going to miss again,” I said.
Clark smiled faintly, and said nothing. He was just as ready now as he had been before, I saw.
I said, “What did you mean about the CEO?”
“I mean that I’ve been engineering a hostile takeover for a year now,” he said. “I’ve worked hard to load the Board of Directors. Tonight, I call a proxy vote, get authorization, and then my dogsbodies can carry out the redundancy orders. You can head it up, if you want the job.” He paused a moment, then said, “I know you don’t believe me about the Cup Train. I wouldn’t, either. But Virtue will open the records for you. You can see everything you want. Anything you want. I have nothing to hide.”
I didn’t believe that. Nobody in the entire world had nothing to hide, least of all a Corporate exec. But maybe, just maybe, he was telling the truth about not being behind the Cup Train massacre.
Maybe all my work to get here had just led me to one more step, one more villain, one more link.
Or maybe I could just kill this guy and call it even.
The only thing that stopped me was Virtue, lying insensible at my feet. Virtue hadn’t forgotten a single lesson learned down on Level K. She was still fighting. Still fierce.
Still difficult to fool.
So there was a chance, a slim one, that Tarrant wasn’t the hard Corporate bastard who’d ordered the deaths of kids, just to save a quarter’s results and grab another bonus. There was a chance that if I killed him, I risked the only opportunity for revenge that we had.
I took my finger off the trigger and holstered the gun. “I’ll look at the records,” I said. “I’ll probably still kill you.”
“No hurry,” Clark said. “I’m here all night.”
Virtue was out for almost an hour, which worried me; the stunning, on top of the crack on the head, probably hadn’t done her any favors. When she woke up, she was groggy and sick for a while, and finally, shakily, put on her shoes and concealed her knife again and led me out of Clark’s office to her own, less distracting work space.
Clark had asked if I required Medical to attend her. I’d refused. I knew Virtue well enough, even at this distance, to know she’d never want to show that kind of weakness, not if she could help it.
It was the sign of a significant injury that the first thing she did, on sitting behind her desk, was open a drawer and take out a dermal hypo, which she pressed against her skin, and dialed for what was probably a combination of headache and nausea meds. They hissed into her system, and she sighed and let her head sag forward for a moment as the drugs went to work. When she looked up at me, she looked almost back to herself.
Only fiercer.
“You really are a hard one,” she said, and rubbed at the bruise forming on her jaw. “I thought you’d shoot him for sure.”
“I did,” I said. “Missed. Doesn’t mean I can’t try again.”
She made no response to that, except to tap her desktop to bring up a built-in keyboard and monitor that rose silently in virtual display from the seemingly smooth surface of the wood. I came around behind her. She smelled . . . Corporate. Clean, sweet, powdered and perfumed. Civilized, unlike the life we’d both come from, where showers were mandatory once a week and perfume was a luxury you saved for to buy your mother—if you still had one—once a year, in a tiny little stoppered bottle.
She’d come a long way. So had I. I was suddenly conscious of how neat I was, too, how perfect. Save for the place where her knife had slashed my coat and shirt and dotted the white cloth with little spots of drying blood, I was just like everybody else up here. Owned.
Virtue tapped keys, doing things I only vaguely understood. Dogsbodies weren’t cleared for technical training, and it was impossible to get it without authorization, at least at the Corporate rank. Maybe you could sneak a black-market computer class down in the lower levels, but not up here, where every keystroke was tracked.
“There,” she said, and rolled her chair back from the desk. “Sit down. You can navigate through anything you like.”
I felt a slight flush creeping up my collar, but I sat down, feeling suddenly too large, too awkward. Give me a gun, a knife, a stunner, and I’m as graceful as anyone my size, but keyboards are built for smaller, smarter people. “I don’t know how,” I said. I hated to admit it, but saw the flash of immediate understanding in Virtue’s expression. It wasn’t pity. Just acknowledgment.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “You just tell me what you want to open, I’ll open it, you read it. Okay?”
I nodded. She leaned over my shoulder, and immediately the perfume overwhelmed my senses, woke uncomfortable feelings inside me. I could smell her under the floral scent, warm and female and very, very close. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted her to get away from me, or on me. Something of both. I’d been with a few girls before; it was one of the only cheap pleasures available to dogsbodies.
But Virtue was different. She was from home. And whatever else it was, home was special.
She tapped keys, and a small folder zoomed up and open on the virtual display. It clarified immediately to a resolution that let me read it easily, probably reading my own focus range through receptive sensors.
It was an official memo from Tarrant Clark, sent through official channels, lodging a protest against Operation Overflow—or, as we survivors called it, the Cup Train. He wrote, in passionate terms, about the wrongness of the action, about Corporate responsibility to its workers, core values, all that crap.
He was ignored. Not just once, but over and over. All the evidence was there, including video of the Board meeting where Clark had presented his side and been voted down. Where Pannizer had personally held a gun to his head to make him sign the orders.
Clark had walked out after that. There were more records, detailing a countermeasure team he’d put together via handheld as he sped back to his office. It was a good team, but it arrived ten minutes too late to stop the massacre, which meant that by the time the vote had been carried out, the plan had already been in motion. Tickets delivered, kids loaded on the train.
The votes were a sham. The Board was a sham.
And the man who’d engineered the whole thing was now CEO. Leo Franklin Pannizer.
I studied the video of him in close-up. I’d seen photos of him, of course; he was in all the Corporate brochures. But video made him real, not just another set of pixels; he had graceful mannerisms and a nervous, odd laugh, and a bald spot at the top of his head that he hadn’t troubled to have fixed. He was married. He had a beautiful wife and three children, all perfect little Corporate specimens, not a single flaw among them.
I had imagined some kind of monster. Some beast with madness in his eyes. And maybe he was. Maybe it just didn’t show up on video.
Virtue finally stepped back, rubbing a hand across her forehead. The bruise on her jaw was starting to discolor and looked painful. I wondered if her pain meds were working. “Well?” she asked.
I said nothing. I closed my eyes and thought about it, focusing on all that I’d done to get here, all that I’d learned. All that I hadn’t learned.
And then I said, “We’ll do it Clark’s way. Until I find out he’s lying. Then I do it my way.”
The role of a dogsbody, at the level I’d reached, was amazingly simple. Stand around. Look tough. If someone attacks, kill them real hard.
It got a little more complicated two hours later, when Clark’s messages began to go out, and his takeover plans st
arted rolling. For one thing, Tech Support tried to kill our connections; they sent a single operative, surrounded by three dogsbodies, to the central connection center, where three of Clark’s dogsbodies—not me—put all of them down. Next, messages began coming in to Virtue, Miss Pozynski, and Helman downstairs, warning them that imminent corrective action was scheduled to be taken by Management for breach of contract.
“That’s it, we’re locked up,” Virtue said, and shut down her console. She keyed in a rapid sequence of numbers, and a cabinet opened on the wall of her office. She tapped in another sequence. “Yanna, Aaron, get up here and get armed. We’re going to have direct incursion.”
The two Junior Admins were there in moments. Miss Pozynski wasn’t flirtatious anymore, and Helman wasn’t genial. They both had arms training, and it showed in the way that they took and checked their guns.
“You’re in charge of the dogsbodies,” Virtue told them. “All except Mr. Gray here. He’s mine. Last line of defense.”
I would be manning the balcony overlooking the entry hall until that last line was required. “Put somebody in the garden,” I said. They all looked at me. “I know the glass is ballistic. Just put somebody in the garden.”
Because that would be how I would come in. There’d be some flaw there, some hole I could exploit. If it was me, coming for the man I wanted to destroy, then the garden would be my entry point. They all imagined it was secure. It couldn’t be that good.
“I need to see the plans,” I said. “Every room. Every approach. Every defensive measure. Right now.”
Three sets of identical stares, and then Virtue said, “All right,” and dismissed her two juniors to their duties. She opened up a cabinet and took out a sheet of smart paper the size of the top of her desk. The paper contained blueprints of the complex and the grounds. I knew how to use these, at least; I’d been trained in reading and analyzing such diagrams. I double-tapped areas where I needed magnification, and the paper obligingly zoomed in for me. “Take this down,” I said to Virtue. “You’ve got a window of opportunity through the service entrance on the third floor.”