“Why?” she asked. “Why are you here?”
“Like I said, we like Jack. Jack likes you.”
Claire’s heart fluttered, hearing this man say the words so simply. She hated that her cheeks flushed with pleasure, and that the man noticed.
“That said, your current working arrangement is not tenable,” he continued. “You are holding him back in many dangerous ways. Jack finds this added risk acceptable. We do not.”
We? Who was “we”? She looked over at Lennox for a hint, but the man’s face was stone as he stood like a soldier waiting for an order from a commanding officer. And that commanding officer was not her.
“I think, if you knew the full picture, you would also find his risks unacceptable,” he continued, his gentle tones very convincing. Maybe … hypnotic? “I think you would agree with us that it is time for you to step forward or back, on your own terms. Either you belong in our world, or it’s time for you to save Jack’s life by stepping fully out of it.”
The man took another step forward, and this time Claire was inexplicably okay with the move.
Yep. This guy was dangerous.
“Your personal entanglement with each other convolutes the issue,” he said. “Feelings always do that. But the issue itself is cut-and-dry: Your internship must evolve. It’s time to see if you want the job and the job wants you. That’s option one. Option two is to leave with Lennox now, and never work with Jack again. It’s your call. Whatever your choice, I need you to ask me for the outcome you want as specifically as possible.”
“So…” Claire hedged. “To be clear, you’re saying I’m not fired as of this moment? Being hired or fired is still on the table?”
He smiled. “I see we understand each other. Although I would clarify that statement to say perma-hired or perma-fired. There are no second chances either direction. But you need to voice your preference now because the ball isn’t going to wait for Cinderella, and you have a very narrow window to impress the Prince.”
Did this guy ever speak normally? Cinderella? Ball? Prince? What were all the metaphors about?
Somehow being annoyed by that was easier than acknowledging the man’s claim that Claire wasn’t pulling her own weight on the team and putting Jack in danger. A huge part of her wanted to accuse the man—whose name she really needed to find out—of lying about that. But a small whisper in the back of her head brought to mind all the tense moments she had walked in on over the past few months between Margot and Jack … arguments that went abruptly silent as soon as she came within earshot.
Margot was worried about something, and Jack always seemed to be telling her not to worry. Neither of them ever discussed the issue with Claire.
The intruder pulled a pocket watch from his jacket and glanced at it. “You have ten seconds until you’re fired.”
Claire panicked, her heart triple-timing. “Why does this feel like a trap?”
His eyes stayed on the face of the watch. “Because I’m offering you a trip to where only fools dare tread, and you’re left asking yourself how much you trust the fool. Six seconds.”
His reply wasn’t comforting, but Claire knew her answer. Even if this man was asking her to walk into a trap, what choice did she have but to accept his invitation? Saying no meant game over. Period. And she didn’t want game over. She wanted in.
What if he isn’t the boss’s son? She glanced at Lennox and knew he wouldn’t answer. Boss’s son or not, the bearded man was definitely in charge.
“Yes,” Claire blurted, certain she’d regret the answer the moment it left her mouth. There were so many ways for this to turn bad.
So. Many. Ways.
The bearded man didn’t look concerned at all. He looked intrigued. “You’re saying yes to the dress, and no to your old world? Forever and ever, amen?”
Was she? The way he said it, the commitment felt biblical. If the verdict was still out on whether breaking into the office tonight was full crazy, then the verdict was definitely in on this madness.
Saying yes to this invitation, without consulting Jack about who this guy was and what his motives were, was full crazy. No question.
“Yes,” she repeated, proud when her voice didn’t shake.
The man tucked his watch back in his pocket. “Very well. Then please state your answer in the form of a request. Ask what you wish from this night, as specifically as possible.”
Asking a woman with OCD to be as specific as possible? Did this guy know who he was talking to?
Whether he did or not, Claire decided to aim for middle ground in her response.
“Will you please take me to wherever Jack is, and teach me whatever I’ve been missing over the past year? Give me a chance to keep this job. I know I’m not perfect, but show me how to fill the gaps. I know I can do it, whatever it is.” Her confidence wavered as soon as she heard those words, and she backpedaled a bit. “Or at least I can try.”
The man smiled slowly, as if she couldn’t have asked any better, and it made Claire feel proud for some silly reason. He made eye contact with Lennox next, and the guard left the room as the man gestured toward Margot’s private elevator.
“This way, if you please.”
Wait. Just like that? She couldn’t just go … could she? She’d opened the floor and logged on to computers, and there was still the mystery of the countdown clock that needed to be addressed.
Feeling a bit flustered, Claire looked back at the wallscreen. “I need to shut down everythi—”
He held up his hand to silence her. “Ace?”
Ace? What was he—
“Yes, Malachi,” an androgynous voice replied over the speaker system.
Claire jerked in surprise at the new voice. She’d never heard it before, but the man definitely had.
“Please secure the building, once we are clear,” he said, as if addressing a trusted servant.
“Of course,” the voice replied.
Malachi gestured toward the elevator. “There. Now that’s settled, shall we be on our way?”
Too stunned to move, Claire eyed the speakers. “Who were you just talking to?”
He smiled patiently. “Ace is the AI that runs all our systems.”
That didn’t make any sense. “Are you saying I outsmarted an AI when I broke in here tonight?”
Malachi laughed. “No. Ace was instructed to let you in if you put any effort into the task of breaking in.” He tapped the pocket with the watch in it. “Now, I’m afraid I must insist that we get going. Time is ticking on a lateral timeline, so mental scrutiny is best saved for when you have more information to work with anyway.”
He spoke like no one Claire had ever met before, but she liked it. Something about what he chose to say and how he chose to say it made sense to her. It felt logical, yet there was nothing logical about any of this. Her mind could do the math on the past several minutes of her life, and there was nothing normal about it. She’d been caught breaking into her boss’s office by the son of a boss she’d never met who was now saying she needed to dress up like Cinderella and go to a ball if she wanted a shot at getting hired?
That made zero sense.
So why was she willing to go?
This will either be the best or worst decision you ever make, a small voice said inside her. To find out, you have to go.
Claire found little comfort in that uncertain truth as she walked to the private elevator, which opened automatically at her approach.
An AI had done that? How had she missed the fact that an AI was wired into the building for an entire year?
Feeling as stupid as she was probably being, Claire took a deep breath and stepped into the elevator. Either this guy really was the boss’s son, or he was Jack’s arch nemesis. Whatever the case, it was best to play along with Malachi until his story started falling apart.
Then she’d freak out. Hard.
When the elevator doors shut, Claire expected the usual quick ride to the basement tunnel. Instead, she felt a
quick rise before they stopped again.
She glanced at the elevator buttons, verifying that there was no button for a level above Margot’s penthouse office. The only floor above her office was the roof, and the elevator didn’t go there.
Did it?
When the elevator opened again, a helicopter blocked the view of the Las Vegas cityscape, propellers spinning and ready for takeoff. On either side of the helicopter stood Uriah and Josh, two of Margot’s most trusted guards. They saluted when they saw Malachi.
They never saluted Margot.
You are in way over your head here, a nervous voice warned as she followed a man she’d known all of five minutes onto the helicopter. Few things were more certain in that moment than the fact that this was going to be the best or worst choice she’d ever made.
Chapter 3
Kali
“Poftiți! Tessék!” street vendors called out, holding up their wares at makeshift tables along the busy sidewalk.
Hood up, head down, Kali blended into the flow of the crowd. A virtual sun beat down on her, giving her the sensation of heat and a feeling of thirst. Knowing they were imagined states, Kali kept her focus on her surroundings. The local language seemed to be a split of Romanian and Hungarian, but Kali had yet to identify anything that definitively placed her in a specific country.
All she knew was that she needed to find food. Soon.
The aroma of chimney cakes filled the air with the temptation of quick energy, while the more savory smells of sausage-based dishes called out to her increasingly rubbery muscles.
Keeping pace with the flow of pedestrians, Kali made note of the merchandise splayed out on blankets and tables without making eye contact with any of the vendors. Bootleg DVDs and handmade wares seemed to be popular. Clothing was either traditional and hand-stitched with colorful flowers, or the fashion equivalent of single-ply toilet paper imported from China. Fake Rolexes, electronics, and paste jewelry abounded, all trying to seem like a bargain compared to the real deal.
Kali kept moving, reading the surrounding conversations as they turned into ticker-tape text at the bottom of her vision.
“Poftiți la castraveți! Tessék az uborkát!”
Someone was selling cucumbers, but not outside. The voice came from a large square building with a steady flow of people walking in and out of it.
Oh, yeah. This was totally a trap. It didn’t matter, though. Eating was non-negotiable at this point. She knew it, and the computer knew it. She had to go for it, or the next place the system dropped her might be a desert, and then she’d be screwed.
Kali followed the voice into the official marketplace. Food booths came into view, chickens and sausages hanging from rough wood beams. All the signs were in Romanian, and Kali quickly noticed that none of the vendors allowed customers to choose their own products.
Money first. Handoff second. No touching the merchandise until payment was received. These vendors were not the type to take getting ripped off lightly. They would engage.
Like always.
Kali pretended to be interested in the produce booth off to her left as an excuse to get an eye on the exits. Stealing food in the VR world was the only way to get herself fed in the real world. Kali had yet to figure out a way to outsmart the VR program when it came to that. Her mind might be in Romania, but in reality, she lay in a zero-gravity pod with IVs controlling fluid intake, catheters handling output, and headgear synching her brainwaves to the virtual environment while leaving her physical body in a paralyzed dream state.
Technically, there was nothing real about anything she was experiencing, except for the fact that everything she did in the virtual environment affected her physical body in the pod. If she wanted those IVs to pump nutrients into her body, she had to steal some virtual food.
In the meantime, the IVs would give her a steady diet of all the serums that would send her into a killing rage. Reinforcing assassin best practices was the point of the program, and most trainees got that done long before starvation set in. Kali was the exception. Not killing the target meant the system locked her in the VR environment and made her earn her dinner.
More often than not, she chose to skip on the food options. With her brain wired to feel everything happening in a virtual world, sensations like hunger from the physical world resonated like echoes in the back of her mind.
But it had been a while since she’d felt full strength.
It had been longer than a while.
She shouldn’t have waited so long. Stealing food in a place like this meant being seen, and being seen meant attracting infantry into the area. It was inevitable. She was loaded into a combat program, after all. The whole point was to engage the enemy and emerge the lone survivor. But for the past who knew how long, Kali had been using the program to see how well she could hide before being spotted, and to see how many “engagements” she could survive before someone found a weak spot and put an end to her run.
Today’s weak spot might end up being food.
She honestly had no idea how much real time had passed since she’d last eaten. Time was abstract in virtual reality. The reset button between deaths paid no heed to continuity. It wasn’t like a video game, where you regenerated in the same spot seconds after a miscalculation took one of your lives.
When Kali failed, she died. Everything went dark until a new program booted up with her fully intact again in a new location and an arbitrary time of day. New scenario, same goals—for both her and the program running it all.
Although … the scenarios had been looping a lot lately, some popping up more than others. Certain dynamics came up so often that she’d started to wonder if she was part of a security program running a quality check on itself. There was never any food in those sims. Just labyrinth-like hallways and sterile rooms that tracked everything by weight. No passkeys required in those spaces, because the walls and floors recognized everyone by their footprint, weight, and even breath.
Kali had needed to reload into that sim over a hundred times before she learned how not to die after taking a single step. That had been a fun challenge she never wanted to relive again. She’d take hawkish eyes in a Romanian market over those sterile halls any day.
A booth of pastries brought Kali’s feet to an involuntary stop. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered that she didn’t like pastries, but that thought faded as abruptly as it appeared.
It wasn’t a matter of liking sugary dough; it was a matter of needing it. And right then, those pastries looked like God’s oven-baked love.
Kali glanced around, seeking an escape route for when the sharp eyes filling the market caught her red-handed. She needed an exit—impassable to anyone but her—to give herself a headstart big enough to down some food before the inevitable fight to follow. It wouldn’t be pretty, but few things in Kali’s life were anymore.
Searching out her options, Kali’s eyes landed on the last person she expected to see. And he was walking straight at her.
Jack?
“Kali,” Jack’s voice said, his voice freezing the VR sim around her. Audio went silent and all images froze in place as Jack walked through them all like they didn’t exist. “I’m not here. This is a recording set to play automatically if your security is compromised on the island.”
He stopped in front of her, but his eyes didn’t meet hers. They focused as if looking into a camera lens. This was obviously a recording.
“If you’re listening to me now, you need to wake up and leave the island. Immediately. An unauthorized user has access to a database holding all your current information, so this location is burned for you. You will be leaving the island and never coming back. I hope you found what you were looking for while you were here.”
Part of Kali’s mind still registered intense hunger. She looked at the frozen scene with regret, knowing her chance to eat was gone. Couldn’t he have waited two more minutes?
“You know what to do,” Jack’s recording said. “All ite
ms you requested while running this scenario as a drill are being delivered to you as I speak. Be safe, get free, and I’ll see you on the other side.”
Then he was gone. Everything was gone, leaving Kali in darkness.
She heard a pressure seal break—the hiss of air rushing toward her before a firm surface pressed into her back from below. She tried to move but was met with paralysis until a little bell chimed like a kitchen timer.
Sensation flooded back into her body.
The motorized sound of machine gears removing her VR helmet got her eyes blinking open—unfocused at first, as her pupils adjusted to the flood of dim light. Her inability to focus visually confirmed that she was really awake, and the cherry on top of that awareness was the feeling of a catheter being removed.
“Ow!” she croaked, her vocal cords not exactly cooperating with the single syllable as they moved for the first time in who knew how long.
She reached toward the catheter, but her hands didn’t move an inch, thanks to the restraints of her bodysuit within the pod.
Her muscles ached as if she’d just finished a decathlon. She probably had. Every movement in the VR world sent a corresponding current through her muscles, allowing her to succeed or fail in the virtual world, based on the integrity of her real-world anatomy. If she was too weak to accomplish something in VR, she stole food and kept trying again and again until she succeeded.
It had definitely been days since she’d eaten. Her body felt like a hollow husk waiting for a strong wind to carry her to wherever all the autumn leaves ended up.
So, this is what you felt like after running electric currents through your body non-stop for an extended time. Muscles clenched, yet rubbery, with skin as sensitive as a sheet of bruises. Not good.
Mind over matter. You’ve got this, she coached herself as the top of the pod pulled away, revealing the isolated room she recalled from her last waking memory. Her bodysuit released next, seams splitting to allow her to sit up...if she could.
She started small, clenching her fist and raising her knee about an inch before sagging back into the table, exhausted.
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