by Julie Hyzy
“We meet again,” she said to the growling monster. “But this time—”
All went gray. Then black.
Kenna blinked. But everything stayed black.
She whipped the VR headgear off her face, screaming in frustration. Outside the capsule, Vanessa met her with an expression of apologetic pain.
“What the hell happened?” Even as the question escaped her lips, Kenna knew the answer.
“I’m sorry,” Vanessa said. “The software update is about to kick in. I had to ease you out before it shut you down.”
Hands fisted, Kenna paced the small area to work off her anger. Vanessa had been right to ease her out. A system shut down in the middle of an excursion was not good for the brain. “I was so close,” Kenna said. “So close. Five more minutes, tops.”
“I’m so sorry,” Vanessa said.
“Not your fault.” Kenna found herself saying that a lot lately. “I should have worked faster.”
“We’ll get you back in tomorrow,” Vanessa said. “Count on it.”
EIGHTEEN
Her fiancé was dead and now her apartment destroyed. Cool moonlight bathed her living room with a silver-blue sheen that could have been beautiful if every single paper she owned hadn’t been trashed.
After a long moment staring at the mess, Kenna dropped her duffel bag inside the front door. Her shoulders sagged, weighed down by too much reality.
“What’s wrong?” Vanessa asked. “I waited for your lights to come on, but—” She sidestepped Kenna and moved into the room. “Yow. What happened here?”
“I don’t know.” Kenna strode across to the nearest lamp, reached up, and twisted the switch. “Who did this?”
“Thieves, most likely,” Vanessa said. “You should call the police.”
Kenna’s legs gave out, and she collapsed onto her sofa. Whoever had been here had made a mess of the house but had inexplicably cleared off the coffee table, except for one piece of paper folded in half.
She opened the note.
Kenna—
Come see me as soon as you get in. Don’t call. Don’t tell a soul you found this. We need to talk.
Lib
Charlie always called him Liberty, Lib for short, because of his full name: Patrick Henry Danaher.
“What’s that?” Vanessa asked.
Don’t tell a soul you found this.
What was going on?
“Nothing.” Kenna stuffed it into her pocket. “An old grocery list.”
NINETEEN
Vanessa stared down at the information she’d printed out, trying to find something—anything—that didn’t belong. She held an open but untouched candy bar in both hands, forearms steepled, head resting against them.
“I don’t get it,” she said aloud. A moment later, she looked up to see Stewart and Jason walking in. “Good morning, guys.”
“You don’t get what?” Jason asked.
“I’ll tell you what you’re going to get,” Stewart said. “A mess of chocolate dripping down your arm if you hold on to that thing much longer.”
Vanessa glanced up at her forgotten candy bar. “You’re right,” she said. It was starting to get soft already. “Ick.” Grabbing a tissue from a box on the corner of her desk, she set the candy down where it wouldn’t smear the reports.
“How can you eat that stuff?” Stewart asked.
“Good question.” Vanessa eyed her boss’s slim frame and, not for the first time, envied his apparently active metabolism. The man could pack it away with the aplomb of guys twice his size but never gained an ounce. She glanced over at the messy blob. “I don’t even like these very much,” she said.
“I love Flaxibars,” Jason said. “One of my all-time favorites.”
“I haven’t bitten into it yet. You want it?” she asked.
“Sure, thanks,” Jason said as he reached for the proffered snack and took a bite. “You’re here early. I thought AdventureSome didn’t open for another couple of hours.”
“Yeah, well. I have lots of questions and not enough answers.”
Jason chewed, looking thoughtful. “I was hoping to get some capsule time alone before Kenna gets in. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Shouldn’t be,” Stewart said. “Kenna has an appointment this morning. She’ll be in by early afternoon.”
“I won’t stop you,” Vanessa said, indicating the paperwork on the desk before her. “This is where I intend to spend my morning.”
“How late were you here with Kenna last night?” Stewart asked.
“Late,” Vanessa said. “She stayed in until the software update started.”
“Ha!” Jason said. “I had a feeling she’d sneak in to practice when I wasn’t around.”
“That’s not why she was in there,” Vanessa said.
“Did she find what she was looking for?” Stewart asked.
Vanessa made a so-so motion. “She swears that if it weren’t for the update, she would have extracted the werewolf matrix.”
“Werewolf?” Jason half laughed. “What the heck are you talking about?”
Realizing how crazy that sounded, Vanessa hurried to explain. “The werewolf is one of many unexplained inconsistencies Kenna experienced last time she went in.”
“The scenario where her fiancé died.”
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “You have to understand. Charlie was too good of an envoy to suffer mortal absorption.”
“Yet, he did.”
“Kenna’s convinced otherwise. She found a number of anomalies in the program,” Vanessa said. “Like a werewolf in a jungle with attacking Huns.”
Jason shrugged. “So someone with a wild imagination put those elements together. I’ve seen worse.”
“Except,” Stewart said, “the program was locked against anachronistic details.”
“Then how—?”
“We can’t explain it,” Stewart said.
“And all the safeties were turned off,” Vanessa said.
“Okay, wait.” Jason said. “Messing with safety protocols is no simple task. You’d have to have high-level permissions to make a change like that.”
“Exactly,” Stewart said. “And we’ve checked and double-checked. We can’t find any evidence of our system being compromised. We have multiple redundant fail-safes in place for every possible consequence. In fact, one of our fail-safe mechanisms is how we were alerted to Charlie’s imminent mortal absorption.”
“Which Kenna can’t accept,” Vanessa said. “She’s convinced that someone set out to deliberately hurt Charlie, or his client, and tapped into the system remotely.”
“That’s not possible,” Jason said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Stewart said. “What does matter is that we allow Kenna time to grieve in her own way. If revisiting the scenario to seek out a giant werewolf helps her accept the truth, I’m willing to give her the latitude she needs.”
“Sounds pretty messed up,” Jason said.
Stewart took a seat at a desk across from Vanessa’s. “Can you imagine how it feels? We all trusted Charlie. This has been a blow to business, sure. But it’s an even harder blow to those of us who knew him. Kenna most of all.”
“Sorry,” Jason said.
Vanessa couldn’t tell if Jason was expressing sympathy or remorse for having accepted the AdventureSome job. “Hey, you came in early to get a head start,” she said. “Don’t let us keep you.”
Jason took the hint. “Thanks. Talk later.”
The moment he was gone, Stewart leaned back in his chair. He pinched the bridge of his nose and focused his gaze upward. Pulling his attention back to Vanessa, he gave a feeble smile. “He seems like a decent kid,” he said. “Maybe it was a mistake to bring him in so soon. Maybe we should have shut the place down for a month.”
“Right
,” Vanessa said. “You think Kenna would sit still for that long?”
“Good point.” A second later, he blinked. “Seems as though you’re not scratching anymore,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said with a touch of wonder in her voice. She’d forgotten that itching spell. “Must have been nerves. I’m a lot better now.”
“But you still haven’t found anything that would explain Charlie’s actions that last day?”
“Not a thing. I do have a few more avenues to investigate,” she said. “Out-of-the-loop ideas, though. I’m not holding my breath.”
Stewart leaned forward again, rubbing his eye sockets with more pressure than Vanessa thought his poor eyeballs could handle. “I just don’t know,” he said. “We’ve checked everything we can. There’s nothing to indicate that Charlie and his client had anything beyond an ordinary VR adventure planned.”
“Unless”—Vanessa gave a deep sigh—“something really was wrong with the whole setup.”
Stewart opened his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“We’re trying to trace what went wrong—why Charlie was mortally absorbed in a scenario he’d programmed.”
“Right. And we checked the system’s internal diagnostics. Everything was functioning normally, within acceptable parameters. And when Charlie set up the VR chamber with his codes, everything was working perfectly. Exactly the way it was designed to.”
“Except a client and an envoy are dead.”
Stewart seemed to age ten years at Vanessa’s words. “Yeah, except for that.”
“Which means the safeties got turned off after they were in.”
“No kidding,” Stewart said. He compressed his lips and added, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap at you. But who could have monkeyed with the safeties? There was no one else here when they went in.”
“What if Kenna is right?” Vanessa asked. “What about someone from the outside? With a remote VR interface?”
Stewart frowned. “That’s still in developmental stages. Nobody has that technology yet. Not even the military.”
She stared down at the printouts again, silent for a long while. “What happens if Kenna can’t let this go?”
“If she clears her psych evaluation, then we’ll put her back in. If not—” He let the thought hang.
“If not, we’ll need to hire another envoy,” she said. “Kenna won’t like that very much.”
Stewart blew out a breath. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
TWENTY
When Trutenko was shown into her office, Celia Newell got to her feet. “Why didn’t you tell me things had gotten out of hand?”
Startled by her full-throated growl, Trutenko hesitated. Coughing up a smile, he resumed his approach and feigned nonchalance.
Thin and shapely as a lamp pole, Celia clearly reveled in the way her oversize desk and massive, windowless office dwarfed her. She liked being perceived as small. Trutenko had learned the hard way that her power lay in being underestimated.
High on the curtained wall behind Celia’s desk, portraits of Virtu-Tech’s eccentric founders, Vefa Noonan and Simon Huntington, stared down. Impossible, but both appeared terrified of her, too.
Trutenko rubbed his hands together. “Everything is under control.”
“Under control?”
Marionette lines bracketed Celia’s thin lips. Deep grooves spanned her forehead, speaking of a lifetime of fierce concentration and scorn.
She leaned forward, fingertips pressed hard against her desktop, poised as though ready to lunge and bite. Her dark hair fell to her shoulders in waves—an incongruous display of softness in an otherwise severe package. She was lean, hard, and as bitter as Lake Michigan in winter. As unforgiving, too.
To admit he’d made a tactical error would be suicide.
“Yes, of course,” he said, draping a hand over the back of a chair. “May I?” Without waiting for her assent, he sat, brimming with manufactured confidence. “And how are operations progressing in the other divisions? Are they on schedule?”
Newell levered herself into her seat. She sucked in her cheeks, making her look like an even angrier puppet than she had before. Without breaking her gaze, she picked up a remote from her desk and hit the power button.
Machinery above him clicked, then hummed. The room’s lights dimmed.
Drapery on the wall behind Celia lurched, the heavy fabric sliding away to reveal six large monitors. Three positioned to the right of the founders’ portraits, three to the left. Each screen displayed a different VR advertisement.
Spinning her chair to face the big screens, Celia pointed her remote and tapped a couple of buttons. All six screens went black.
“The new ads?” Trutenko squirmed. “How are they working?”
She ignored him. The six screens remained dark for another few seconds before five of them pinged alive, each with a different man’s face and each so huge Trutenko could practically see the men’s pores. These were the other five Virtu-Tech directors. Headquarters remained here, in DC, and these other men managed New York, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The silent sixth screen, the Chicago market—Trutenko’s market—remained blank.
Celia studied the remote before tapping its controls again. A moment later, Patrick Danaher’s face flickered into view on the final screen. He acknowledged the two-way communication with a nod.
“Patrick,” Trutenko said. “Report.”
“Not so fast.” Celia angled herself to be able to eye both Danaher and Trutenko at the same time. “Tell me, Werner,” she said, “why is Patrick in charge? Why not Tate?”
Trutenko glanced over to his brother, whose face remained damnably passive. “Patrick is handling the underground resistance,” he said with exaggerated authority. “He needs to maintain control.”
Apparently unimpressed, Celia lowered her chin so that her eyes bore into his. “I was under—the impression,” she said, taking a pause where none was required, “the underground had been—handled—already.”
Trutenko waved her comment away. “Yes, of course. I’m talking about a small loose end we discovered.”
She turned to face him, completely leaning forward, alert, as though he were the most important person in the world. If it weren’t for the piercing fury in her eyes, he may have been flattered. “Expand,” she said.
The six faces watched him, waiting. “In accordance with your directive,” Trutenko began, looking to the five other directors for agreement, “our operatives sought out those involved in the rebel movement. Once we established that Charles Russell was secretly involved with my Chicago operation, we devised a plan to trap him.” Trutenko’s mouth was dry, but he persevered. “We didn’t get as much as we needed from the infiltrator. He…expired before we could interrogate him fully.”
Celia sat eerily still, immobile as the rapt audience behind her.
“But Patrick,” Trutenko indicated the screen with his chin, “completed a search of the infiltrator’s apartment. And I, myself, questioned the owner of the VR facility where Charles Russell’s death occurred.”
“Why?” Celia’s eyes bore into him.
“Why…what?”
“It was my—understanding—Werner,” Celia said in that oddly cadenced way of hers, “that this ‘accident’ came as a direct result of your involvement. You caused the very incident you were purporting to investigate.” She paused, raising a dark eyebrow and sucking in her cheeks again. “What was the purpose of personally interviewing the franchise owner? What could you have possibly hoped to uncover?”
What a ridiculous question. “It would have looked more suspicious if I hadn’t.” He was about to add that he’d made a good show of it, but she interrupted.
“Dr. Larson was scheduled to head the Tribunal inquest. And yet you usurped his position. Why?”
“We needed t
o find out how much Charles Russell had uncovered,” Trutenko answered, defensiveness creeping in. “I needed to know,” he said. “This matter needed to be handled expeditiously. Who better to handle it than I?”
Her eyes lasered in on him. “You acted without authority.”
His chin came up. “I’m in charge of the Chicago operation. Despite the fact that we know there were no malfunctions, I had to make the investigation look good.”
“And now, individuals outside our organization know your face,” she said through scarcely moving lips, “thereby compromising the project’s overall stealth.”
Trutenko searched the giant eyes of the five on-screen directors who still watched and blinked, their expressions identically unreadable. He stared up at Patrick. Say something, dammit. Tell her why I’m right. Tell her that we’ve got it all under control.
Celia watched him for a long moment. Sweat from Trutenko’s brow seeped along the sides of his face.
“I’m certain Danaher would be willing to step into your position, Werner, as you are apparently no longer capable of carrying out my orders.” She turned toward the monitors. “Patrick,” Celia said, addressing the monitor again, “what do you say?”
Bursting from his seat, Trutenko interrupted. “I compromised nothing!” His gaze shot back and forth between Patrick’s obvious surprise and Celia’s derisive stare. “Charles Russell’s files are in our hands, thanks to me. We now know everything he knew.” Trutenko banged his fist on her desk. “Because of me.”
Five large sets of eyes blinked. Their nervous gazes began to rove as they made eye contact with one another via monitors and satellites. Only Patrick’s attention never wavered.
Trutenko wiped his free hand across his brow and sat back.
“Tell us exactly”—Celia dropped her voice—“what it is you have on Mr. Russell that we didn’t know already.”
