by Jane Galaxy
“Just because I made some money for pitching in doesn’t mean you can drag me into responsibility for your war crimes, Simon!” They were practically nose-to-nose now. “You can bribe and coerce governments to buy your stolen technologies and use that as an excuse to test more products, more weapons, on the people they agreed to shelter during a war, but just because some college kid gave you a couple thousand dollars. . . .”
He was breathing hard, holding off one of the unmanned power loader bots that Simon was using to attack him. One of them raised its arm along with Simon and gripped Dirk’s throat through the bars of the exoskeleton.
“I didn’t do anything you didn’t do in your business,” said Simon, and closed his fist in the controller glove.
Chapter Sixteen
“HAVE YOU MOVED in the last four hours?”
Vanessa tilted her head far back against the arm of the plastic-covered couch with a prolonged creaking sound to find her sister standing upside-down in the doorway. Claudia came over and stood in front of her.
“No?”
“What have you been doing?”
Vanessa looked at her phone, feeling a thick shot of irritation at the interruption. She had been reading each of the 556 comments on Roll For Initiative’s preview post about Patriot’s Duty, which would be released in less than a month, and relishing the mixture of breathless enthusiasm for Holland Matthews’ encore.
There were plenty of bitchy and pointed questions about what exactly had been going on with Jax Butler lately. Someone on the Protectorate boards had dropped the rumor that bad blood between co-stars in a Card One movie had prompted some internal panic for the producers. The gossip had managed to pick up steam when the two actors had made it to the red carpet of a pre-awards show season dinner at different times and had rather obviously not been photographed anywhere near each other.
“Reading about that clown school reality show,” she said.
“The entire time I’ve been gone?”
Vanessa hadn’t realized that she’d been alone in the apartment.
“Wikipedia is a bottomless pit,” she said after a moment, and started to get up from the couch with a lot of squeaking noises in an embarrassing attempt at retreating.
“Are you going in to work?”
That was surprising, from Claudia. Vanessa squinted at her sister.
“How long have you been gone?”
“Well, you have a batch of photos to turn in, stupid. Or at least you said you did when I left. Which is what I thought you were going to do while I was gone.”
Vanessa let several long seconds pass.
“Of course. Must be the greasepaint fumes.”
She hadn’t touched her gear bag from where it had been dumped on her bedroom floor several nights previously. Vanessa hadn’t even bothered to take the memory card out of the camera and do some initial image cleanup from the . . . debacle. She sat on the floor, pulled the bag into her lap, and thought about taking some kind of public transportation to go into Manhattan to turn in her memory card. It was a depressing, crowded, and smelly mental image.
Trevor might accept the images, might even repeat his by now overused line about finally putting a woman on staff, and then inevitably demand more drama and over-the-top scandal from her. It was all about moving that goalpost farther and farther away from the rookie-slash-walking-vagina.
Vanessa remembered the other black zippered case of memory cards under the bed suddenly.
The one with the pictures of a dark-haired man and a blonde who already had a boyfriend, standing together in an alley.
There was something to be said for the way Sam glared at her and turned down a different hallway when she arrived at the FB2 offices. It just reminded her that there were still unopened envelopes being shoved into the bureau drawers, a thought that made her stomach lurch.
“Ah, Vanessa,” said Trevor from a doorway nearby. He had a cell phone in one hand and the other hand covering the mouthpiece. “Back from Soho, good, glad that went well.” He turned the phone back toward himself and began speaking in Portuguese while beckoning her forward.
While she stood in the doorway of his office listening to him carry on one half of an agitated conversation, Vanessa snuck a peek at her phone, going back through her texts to see if Trevor had actually informed her that she had something in Soho recently. Nothing there, nothing in her emails. Just a case of her boss forgetting that she existed, that she had a purpose and a reason to be working for him.
Maybe this was a loyalty test.
Or maybe it was another reason to take control of her career once and for all.
She glanced up at Trevor, standing with his feet wide apart and framed in the window, looking out into the impressive and sweeping vantage of the air vents on the building across the alley.
Vanessa looked down at the memory cards she’d pulled from her bag, and the red indentions they had made on her skin when she’d gripped them in her palm on the elevator ride up. She could easily take these to another agency. She could just find another job somewhere else. These could be the splashy intro of a new force to be reckoned with.
But it would mean being the new girl all over again, and it would mean meeting another Trevor, one infected with some other kind of nastiness, all over again, and it would mean she’d have to reject the Sams of the office until they were disillusioned with the rare female paparazzi and started stepping into her shot line on purpose.
“What’ve you got?” asked Trevor, flicking his thumb across his phone’s screen and immediately dialing a new number. She could tell because he had put the phone on speaker now.
The memory cards seemed to produce themselves in her outstretched hand.
“Jax Butler and Joanna Hart, too close to be just co-stars,” Vanessa heard herself say.
Trevor narrowed his eyes at her, apparently not sure if her flat tone was a joke or not. He tapped his phone’s screen, tossed it onto the desk, and loaded the card into the laptop.
“Shitting Jesus,” he said when the images came up. He turned to look at her, and actually had the sense to be slightly thunderstruck this time. Vanessa swallowed, and Trevor looked back into the computer. She came around the desk and watched him cycle through the photos one by one. Joanna looking at a man with wavy dark hair, the man putting his hand on her waist, leaning in to nip at her ear while she looked upward with lustful awe, and the man turning his head, without a doubt Jax himself.
Trevor leaned back in his chair.
“These are—”
“More than enough to get you to finally consider that staff position, Trevor?” Vanessa crossed her arms and watched the gears turn in his head. He noticed her watching and raised a hand.
“Well—”
“Tell you what.” She held up the other card. “Approve the paperwork today with staff commission scale on these images, and I’ll show you what’s on this one.”
Trevor stared at her for several long moments, practically drooling, then retrieved a pen and a form from a drawer. He scribbled on it, pausing to think, and finally slid both across the desk to her. It was a staff employment contract.
She hadn’t really thought that he might call her bluff on this—it was almost funny that he finally had the real document in his hand. Vanessa scanned the paper for numbers and mentally tallied how much she’d be paid before Trevor could change his mind. It was a decent bump in pay, so long as there wasn’t some way he could claw it back through fees and waiting periods on paychecks.
Vanessa flicked her eyes up and looked into Trevor’s gaze.
Might as well make this hurt a little. She scratched out several lines and initialed next to them, then passed the sheet back to him.
“Paid quicker,” he noted.
“There’s something else.” Off his inquiring look, she went on. “I want off two-bit doorstep duty. I’ll be going to press events—interviews, panels, whatever. I’m not a rookie, and I haven’t been for several years.”
&nb
sp; “That’s not industry standard,” said Trevor. “We have people in those positions already.”
“I’m not industry standard,” said Vanessa.
She stood with her arms folded over her chest while he sat in his overpriced chair and sighed at her, apparently waiting for her to fold and be nice about it.
“You’re strong-arming me into this,” he muttered without much vitriol.
“And you’ve been promising me a move like this for two years now, but every time I bring you something, the deadline gets extended.”
“No, I mean I’m actually impressed,” Trevor replied. “Half the guys on freelance don’t have the balls to do this, and they’re all out on the streets shoving each other into traffic for a decent shot.”
The tension in her arms didn’t ease for one second, and she was glad.
Finally giving in, Trevor leaned his elbows on the desk, expectant. Vanessa handed him the camera card, and he loaded it in with a flick of a glance at her—he was honestly worried that she might have gotten one over on him, she realized, and bit back a smile.
Trevor tapped through the photographs once, and then leaned back with a genuine expression of shock.
“When were these taken?” he asked finally.
“Six months ago,” said Vanessa, looking around his office casually.
“And you sat on these? You know how fast Hollywood works—” Trevor tried, giving a flicker of a glance to the paperwork on the table, but Vanessa just shrugged and spoke delicately.
“You’re always asking me for drama, and here it is, just one month before the new Card One movie comes out.”
Silenced, Trevor looked through the photos again, carefully.
“And you were. . . ?”
“In the neighborhood looking for an opportunity.”
“See? Don’t diss door-stepping so quickly—”
“I’m standing by my demands.”
He flipped back to the best one, the shot of Georgina looking at Jax over her shoulder while the metal access door had closed behind them, revealing a sign that said “Decameron Lofts Authorized Access Only.”
“I’m gonna make a few phone calls,” Trevor murmured finally.
Suddenly Vanessa couldn’t tell if the feeling in her gut was one of triumph or defeat.
“Okay, I know I saw you actually leave the apartment this afternoon,” said Claudia, appearing at the end of the couch upside down again. “Did you get fired or something?”
“No,” said Vanessa. Her own voice sounded far away and flat. Maybe too much blood had been rushing to her head in this contorted position. The couch cover made its typical deep plastic crunching and squeaking as she rolled over onto her side.
“You weren’t gone long. Did they discover teleportation?” She nudged her older sister on the shoulder. “What happened?”
Vanessa looked up at her sister. They had so much in common, and at the same time, so little. Since their parents had died, she’d had to step up as far as being the one in charge, the one who was supposed to be able to pay bills and make sure there was food in the fridge. Or at least leftover takeout containers.
She had to make sure Claudia went to the hospital when she was supposed to, had her medication at the right times, had enough support on the days when she couldn’t get out of bed because she felt so strange, like she was coming apart piece by piece. It was like being roommates with a memory of a girl she had played with as a kid, whose face was still in school photographs in little wooden frames in the dark hallway along the two bedrooms.
“Something stupid,” said Vanessa.
Claudia sat on the far edge of the couch with a soft crumpling noise. It always amazed Vanessa how she could go through life in amounts of pain that were shifting, uncertain variables, but she still managed to be graceful and assertive at the same time.
“Did you get arrested again?”
Vanessa sat up in a cacophony of undignified squeaking and slipping.
“I didn’t get arrested the first time!”
Her sister smiled.
“I know, but you’re taking this so seriously, I wasn’t sure how bad it was.” She paused and looked down at her hands. “Is it money?”
“Not really.”
“Is it your job?”
“Kind of.”
“Did you quit?”
Vanessa didn’t answer for a minute.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. She hadn’t thought about it until Claudia said it, but now it suddenly seemed like another . . . solution wasn’t the right word. Response. Reaction.
“I’ve been meaning to give you something.” Claudia slowly stood and got her bag from where it was sitting on the kitchen counter. She dug around for her wallet and came over with a stack of dollar bills in her hand. “It’s the babysitting money. It’s not much, but. . . .” Claudia trailed off.
“Oh, Claudia,” said Vanessa. She was looking at the stack of bills. They were all wrinkled in different directions, which made the pile lumpy even though Claudia had probably smoothed out each one when she’d put it into her wallet. She’d been doing this for months and had never spent a dime of it. “You don’t have to give up your money. It’s yours. There’ll be enough from royalties. I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Her sister was quiet a moment, the bills resting in the palm of her upturned hand.
“You don’t have to do everything, you know,” Claudia said. “I mean, I know you feel like you have to be in charge, but you don’t have to.”
“I don’t feel like I have to be in charge,” Vanessa replied, “I have to be in charge.”
Claudia took a moment to let the sarcasm wash out of the conversation.
“I think . . . I think maybe you feel like being in control is the best way of helping me. But it isn’t helping me if I’m not doing anything.”
“I thought you liked working with the tipsters.”
“I do. It’s been fun, doing this with you, getting to talk to you and hang out—way better than when you were in school, as shitty as that sounds—but eventually you’re going to move on. You can’t pap forever.”
Vanessa sighed. “I . . . I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it anymore.”
“But does it make sense for everything I do to be tied to whatever it is you’re doing?”
She turned and looked at Claudia’s round face. Her sister had always had a childlike look to her, something in the shape of her cheeks and the way she wore her thick dark hair with bangs. Maybe it was in her eyelashes, but Claudia was always going to be young, somehow.
“I mean, I have a condition. I’m not dying. We both need to get out there and live a little, not just stay at home forever. This isn’t what mom and dad would want.” Claudia looked at her fully. “I don’t need you to control the world for me forever.”
“I just don’t want you to . . . .” Vanessa trailed off. “Not have what you need,” she managed in a stilted way.
“Experiencing something would be better than having everything handed to me,” Claudia said, sinking back onto the couch again. “It’s meaningful if I know I can do something myself—you don’t see that? I can do things. Maybe not all the time, but I’m not an invalid who can only leave the house for doctor’s appointments.”
“No, I know that.”
“It’s a relief, just being able to do something different and getting out of the house when I can.”
“So. . . .”
Claudia sighed again. “All I’m asking is that you see that I can help take care of us. That you don’t have to be the breadwinner all the time. I appreciate what you do, but I have something to offer, and”—she gestured—“ignoring that makes me feel like an even bigger burden.”
“I don’t think you’re a burden.”
“You gave up on college to work really hard at something that you hate, just so we can survive.”
Vanessa sat back against the couch.
“I don’t know if I hate it. I
like photographing people,” she mused. “This is just a different way of doing that.”
“But does it make you happy?”
Vanessa turned to see Claudia looking at her out of the corner of her eye, and her sister went on.
“You gonna talk about the fact that you left the country for a week with a complete stranger?”
“To you. He wasn’t a stranger to me.”
“You didn’t even take your toothbrush! And you left and came back without explaining anything! I didn’t know whether I should have been worried or calling the FBI for sex trafficking.”
Vanessa put her hand over Claudia’s.
“Yeah, that was . . . not nice. Or it was stupid. I meant to, really, but . . . we got caught up in stuff, and I was just glad to get away from things for a bit, and it’s so weird, talking to you about these things.”
“I am putting on my No Shame hat,” Claudia announced, and mimed setting something on top of her head. “Proceed at will, captain. You went on a trip overseas with Jax Butler, and. . . .” She gestured encouragingly.
“And. . . .” Vanessa looked at her sister sidelong. “And we went to the French Riviera so I could photograph him. We took a car, went on a boat, and went swimming. You saw the pictures in the tabloids.”
“And what else did you do?” Claudia enunciated each word.
“We flew to Greece, and he volunteered at a refugee camp, and I photographed him there, too.” Vanessa paused. “I got shots of some of the people in the camp.” She stood and went into the bedroom to grab the camera card. They flipped through them together, Claudia leaning against Vanessa’s shoulder. In a line of women waiting for canisters of water, a little girl was hiding her face against her mother’s skirts. Boys were grinning and playing soccer in a muddy rutted-out dirt road.
“This one is good,” said Claudia. Vanessa peered into the background where she was tapping her finger on the screen; there was a gleaming seven-story cruise ship sailing in the distance behind all the lines of dirty and tired people. There were others, white European tourists in bikinis striding past groups of women crouched on pieces of cardboard. Another picture, this one of men in ragged clothes curled up on the beach sleeping.
