“See?” He looked at Jacob. “My point is, if Amber says things are going well so far, I believe her.”
He considered this.
“I also don’t know how aware it is,” Amber said.
“It’s doing things on its own.”
“It was always doing things on its own. That’s what procedural generation means.” She frowned a little in thought. “You said that it seemed like it was…dreaming.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so here’s the playbook. If we have the sense that it’s waking up and pulling bad shit, we pull Justin out. He’s ready and he’s found the keys. Otherwise…we let the two of them do what they’ve been doing so far. Because, let’s be honest, it’s helping him.”
Jacob hesitated, then nodded. “As long as all three of us agree.”
It was the way they had approached most of the big decisions involved in their work together. He put one shawarma-covered hand on the table for a three-way handshake.
“Yeah, I’m not touching that,” Nick said. “But I’m in.”
“I’m in,” Amber agreed.
“I’m in.” Jacob grimaced. “Now that we’ve decided that, do you have any idea what to tell Anna Price?”
His partners looked at one another.
“You’re the CEO,” they said in unison.
“Cowards,” he retorted.
The group ate in silence for a while as they considered the Twins’ apparent belief in their divinity.
“It seems to me,” Tina said finally, “that it’s a moral test.”
Justin looked at her in surprise. His mind hadn’t been able to settle. He’d been torn between seeing Zaara again, realizing this was goodbye, worrying about the two women being in the same place, and hearing that his opponents were hellbent on his death. His thoughts had simply leapt from problem to problem without addressing any of them.
One of the things he had been surprised to realize, however, was that his feelings for Zaara weren’t what he’d thought they were.
Having acknowledged that, he wasn’t sure what he felt for Tina yet. He knew she turned his world on his head, infuriated him, and made him question things about himself. Despite that, he wanted to get to know her better. He merely wasn’t sure where that was going.
And he was okay with that. With Zaara, things had seemed wrapped up in a nice, neat little bow. She was beautiful and smart, and she made him laugh. Plus, she looked damned good in leather armor and they’d had each other’s backs in a fight. He honestly hadn’t thought past the beautiful part in a long time. She had been there and she ticked all the boxes. Of course he would be attracted to her. It made sense that she was the love interest. She hadn’t taken that first kiss after they defeated Sephith, but she would fall for him over time. That was the love interest arc.
But that wasn’t how people worked. Sometimes, someone ticked all the boxes and there wasn’t a spark. He had been so caught up in the way he expected things to go that he hadn’t realized he didn’t feel that way about her.
She met his eyes now and he saw the same knowledge there. Both knew they would miss each other. They had been through too much not to. But—
He jerked his train of thought to a halt. Zaara was a video game character. He was clearly reading into this. He darted a glance at her and saw her tiny smile.
It was merely a very, very realistic video game. Right?
Justin cleared his throat. Tina had been talking and he tried to remember what she’d been talking about. Oh, right.
“A moral choice?”
“The Twins,” she said. “They’re willing to do literally anything to defeat you because they want unlimited power. Their motives and their means are cruel and to get the key, you have to defeat them. The question is whether you’ll cheat to do it.”
“Cheat?” He felt a wave of revulsion. “Bribe the MC, you mean?”
“Or do things like they did,” Zaara explained. “Take shots that could kill before the protective field kicks in. Try to injure them.” She looked thoughtful. “You could pay someone to slip them poisoned wine—nothing that would kill them, only something that would put them off their game.”
“No,” he said emphatically.
“Ah,” Lyle said. He nodded sagely. “So ye’re goin’ t’be stupid.”
“That’s not what this is!” he protested, stung.
“Oh?” Zaara raised an eyebrow. “You have two crazy people who are drunk on power, and the opportunity to eliminate them. Not to mention that they might be considering any of the things we mentioned. They might be trying to poison you.”
Justin stood and paced. Eventually, he turned to look at the group. “This wasn’t how I planned my goodbye with you two, by the way.”
“You didn’t plan one at all,” she pointed out. “You intended to disappear into another world with only a letter.” She seemed more amused than upset.
“Yeah, but I have the chance at one now and I’ll take it.” Justin made his mind up and sat. “I have almost two days to come up with a plan. Tonight, we’re going to sit and talk and laugh. We’re going to say a proper goodbye. Tina, you’ve never properly met Zaara. She helped me and Lyle take down Sephith.”
“And helped take Justin down a peg or two,” Tina interjected.
Justin darted her a look. “Right, because you had nothing to do with that.”
“I like to think it’s a group effort,” she said with a grin and clinked glasses with the other two friends.
“Justin, I have a question for you,” Zaara said.
He froze. Tina and Lyle looked on with open curiosity.
“Um…yes?” He cleared his throat awkwardly.
“In Sephith’s tower,” she said, “you told me you thought none of this was real and that you were dreaming this world.” She tilted her head to the side. “Now, you’re going home. D’you still think it’s all fake?”
Justin felt a swell of an emotion that seemed very close to grief. Something was ending here. A door was closing. He could come back to the game but he would never have these experiences again. This night, with the food and the music from the inn, would only ever be a memory like all his battles against Sephith and the demons and the bandits.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think that anymore. I know it’s real.”
Chapter Eighty-Two
Tad sat in his office and jiggled his foot with the single-minded determination of someone who both needed to not think and needed to work off the four cups of coffee he had drunk that morning. His bill was up for debate in the house at present, and he should absolutely watch the live feed from the floor.
He couldn’t bring himself to do that, though. Quite simply, he had poured everything he had into this and he wasn’t sure he could bear to listen to people argue against it. His aides watched in the other room. He could hear the muffled sounds of speeches and knew he should go out there and watch with them.
Instead, he stood and began to pace.
If I lose, I’ll lose on my own terms—on my own turf. He wouldn’t accept a yes or no vote on a fundamentally corrupt bill as his hill to die on. He intended to champion this bill and show people what was possible.
A sudden shout of celebration from the other room stopped him in his tracks. He turned his head so sharply he got a crick in his neck and had to rub it while the door opened and his aides peeked into the room.
“Sir,” Kyle said.
Tad’s mouth twitched. “Yes. I heard the cheer.”
“Oh. Spoiler alert, I guess.” The young man pushed the door open and the group came in with huge grins. “One of two down. Bipartisan support. Are you happy, sir?”
“Ask me again after the Senate vote,” he said. He went to sit at his desk before he looked up and saw the awkward expressions on their faces. “What?”
His staff all looked at each other. They seemed to be drawing figurative straws.
“Should I simply choose one of you at random?” he asked finally.
&nbs
p; “I’ll say it.” Kyle swallowed. “Sir, we don’t have the Senate votes. We haven’t from the start, and we’ve…well, we thought you knew that.”
He frowned at him. “We didn’t have the House votes to start with, either. We scraped those together.”
“Sir, the Senate vote is in two days and we’re so far away that it’s…impossible.”
“How many do we need?” He stood and leaned over his desk. “Tell me. How many? Six, right?”
“Eight, sir.” The young man swallowed. “We had two calls while waiting for the House vote tally to come in.”
“And you still cheered?” Tad threw a hand out in the direction of the TV. “Why? Because you were enjoying the idea of watching this get shot down in the Senate?”
“No, sir!” They all looked horrified and Kyle stepped forward. “These things take time. They take years to get pushed through. The fact that you got this through the House at all is incredible. It means there’s a base of support and someday, it might actually happen. We were cheering because you clearly changed some minds. You did a good job. Simply having this debated on the floor of the Senate will make ripples.”
“So, this whole time…” He struggled for calm. “This whole time I’ve talked about this bill and getting votes, not a single one of you thought it would be passed?”
The aides looked at one another. They didn’t speak but they didn’t have to. Their opinion was clear from their faces.
“I don’t believe this.” Tad leaned back in his chair. “Is there anything else you want to tell me? Will I be forced to resign? Am I being strung up on corruption charges?”
No answer was forthcoming.
“You know what?” He looked at them, his expression grim. “I have calls to make. I’m sure you all have things to do.”
He looked at the papers on his desk until they’d trailed out miserably before he lowered his head into his hands. This couldn’t be happening. He’d built his career on the impossible, running without a background or family in politics and against the prevailing party of his district. He’d been tested, but he thought his aides had been behind him.
Now he found out that they’d thought he would fail.
He shook his head once and picked the phone up, punched in a few numbers from memory, and waited. “Addie, yes, hello—it’s Tad Williams, is the senator available? Thanks.”
He waited for a few seconds before the other man came on the line.
“Tad. Hello.”
“Eric.” He leaned forward. Eric was on his second term, someone who had made his career bouncing back and forth between Tad’s brand of fiery outspokenness and middle-of-the-road, bland moderation. It was always difficult to determine what he would back, but he believed there was a chance here. “I’d like to speak to you about the bill that just passed the House.”
“Ah.” The man’s tone had become somewhat hesitant. “Senator, while I of course respect your passion, I think the bill overreaches somewhat.”
“How so?” he asked bluntly.
So far, he’d had good luck with bluntness. No one seemed to know what to do with it in DC.
Indeed, the senator paused for a moment before he said, “These are some very serious blanket reforms you’re proposing. Who can say what necessities might arise in the future?”
“What necessities might arise that make drug companies raise prices past agreed costs?” Tad asked.
“In my experience, forbidding something outright is a sure path to bad feeling,” Eric told him.
In your experience? This is your second term. He scratched his head. “So, let me get this straight. First, the problem was that there might be a problem that would require companies who were not in financial distress to raise prices out of the range of acceptable costs. When I asked what those problems might be, you shifted to talking about bad feelings.”
No response was forthcoming.
“Thank you for your time,” he said as civilly as he could and hung up.
He stared at the phone for a moment. Fiery outspokenness and absolute, bland moderation. When Eric had been elected, he had been far more toward the end of fiery outspokenness, but the bland moderation had become more and more prevalent. He had not, to Tad’s knowledge, authored any bills in line with his campaign promises.
Do you think you’re the first senator we’ve dealt with? Dru Metcalfe had asked.
Frustrated, he shook his head again and went back to the drawing board. He’d tried everyone he could think of. Now it was time to call anyone who would speak to him. He wouldn’t back down, not yet.
It was an hour later when he put the phone down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. One person had changed their vote. One person.
And they had changed it in the wrong direction.
Tad had learned more than he had ever wanted to know about exactly how many people the drug companies had bought off.
He sighed and dialed one more number. As it rang, he leaned back in his chair.
“Hello?” Mary said quietly.
“It’s me,” he said. “Do you not have my office number in your phone?”
“I do, but one day I called your aide sweetheart so I’ve been cautious ever since.”
Despite his despondency, he laughed. He had needed to laugh. “Ah.”
“So.” She had a sixth sense about these kinds of things. “How did the House vote go?”
“Fine. It passed.”
“That’s fine? Not…good?”
“We don’t have the Senate votes,” he told her simply. “And, having talked to the better part of the entire Senate during the last hour, I can tell you that it won’t have the votes. I don’t know what it would take. I really don’t, Mary.”
“Someone should spill the dirt on those CEOs,” she said darkly.
“I won’t throw mud, especially when I don’t have anything to back it up with yet,” he said. “I checked. People have tried that and not a single one of them was re-elected.”
“When you got into this, you said re-election wasn’t important,” Mary reminded him. “You said, and I quote, that compromising your morals for re-election would only give you longer in office to do the wrong thing.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t listen when I say things. It’s very inconvenient at times like these.”
She laughed. “Tad, you know you’re doing the right thing. And…”
He straightened. “And?”
“Well, I wanted to wait to show you this when you came home, but I think maybe you need it now. Just a second.” He heard background noise fade away. “Okay, I’m in the bathroom. Tina is in the game now, you know, and she and Justin are…getting along well.”
“Mm-hmm.” Tad could not, for the life of him, imagine where this was going.
“Well, the other day, they had a date. I left halfway through but when I got back, Nick showed me an excerpt of their conversation. Tina asked Justin what he would do when he woke up from his game. Do you know what he said?”
“Not a clue, but I’m intrigued.” He leaned on his elbows and a smile crept in.
“He said he would spend time talking to you,” she said. “Because part of why he never really left his room was that he didn’t see a way to help the world like he has in the game. Now he sees that you’re one of the people making a difference and bringing the villains down. He wants to know more about what you do.”
For a moment, he couldn’t speak. His jaw hung open. It had been years since he and Justin were on the same page. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked about morals without his son rolling his eyes. They’d had everything from silent ice-outs to screaming matches about how to effect positive change in the world, and Justin had usually gone back to his room after those—put off, his father had thought, by a grown-up’s assertions that change was more difficult than a young person thought.
And now, Justin wanted to know more.
“Tell him…” His voice was a little unsteady. “Uh. I’ll forward something t
o you if DuBois can get another letter to him.”
“Of course.” Mary’s voice was gentle. “Stay the course, Tad. You know you won’t win them all but if I know you, I can tell you that you’ll remember forever all the times you let yourself down.”
“You’re right. You’re always right.”
“I’ll remind you of that,” she said fondly. “I love you.”
“I love you, too. I’ll send that letter along in a moment.”
Tad sat down to write. For a long time, nothing came at all and he made several false starts. The letter he finally sent was brief and to the point, the kind of thing his father would have sent. He wasn’t very good at the emotional parts. That had always been Mary’s realm.
But he remembered one of the last times he and Justin had agreed. It had been years before, and they’d had months of good-natured debates.
He addressed the letter to Aristotle and signed it Socrates.
That done he went into the main room and looked at the aides. “Do you all have a moment?”
“Yes, sir.” Kyle stood nervously. “We’ve been talking—”
“You gave me a realistic assessment, and I had a temper tantrum,” Tad said. “I am, therefore, embarrassed and hope we can stop talking about it.”
The staff looked at one another as if they wondered if this might be a trap.
“I know we don’t have a hope in hell,” he said. “We need nine votes.”
“Eight, sir.”
“No, nine. It got worse.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “But I’ll be damned if I simply accept the idea that I don’t have enough votes. Jenny, if you’d see what we can scare up for interviews, I’d be grateful. Kyle and Teddy, you’re on social media patrol. Anne, I’ll send you some talking points and I’d appreciate your once-over on wording. Whatever else you think of, go for it. You all signed up for the off-the-wall junior senator and that’s who you’ll get.”
He walked into his office and left them smiling.
Chapter Eighty-Three
“Are you ready, Jacob?” Amber called.
Too Young to Die Page 62
