I will but I have to go
I needed a plan. I also needed an insurance policy.
It came to me the next day.
“By the way,” said Langer, over a catered sushi lunch from a place he’d described as “the best,” and which I didn’t like nearly as much as tacos, though I liked it much better than I’d expected from the description. “I found out this morning that Corey invited two guys from the Orbital Dynamics marketing team to fly in from San Francisco. They were supposed to meet, have dinner, and tour the office and the labs, but apparently, no one got around to telling them he was, uh, indisposed. They can still do the tour, I guess, but I’m busy and won’t be around, so they aren’t going to be happy. But frankly, that’s not my problem.”
“Wait, Corey invited them?” I asked, pausing with a roll awkwardly impaled on the end of a chopstick, only to have the roll fall apart before it got to my mouth. Fuck this. I gave up and tossed the plate on the table. “To tour the labs? The White Cedar labs?”
These codes should help you next time. Feel free to bring some friends.
“Yeah, but you don’t have to do anything,” Langer replied. “I’m just giving you a heads-up to make yourself scarce, too. The assistants will get the dubious honor of trying to explain what happened to Corey, which I figured was better done in person. They’ll hate me for it, but what can you do?”
My brain was going about as fast as I had driven the Porsche down Interstate 10 the other day, despite having nowhere to go. I didn’t have a full strategy yet, but I could see the opening moves.Pawn to e4, set the trap, force a reaction.
“Has Corey ever met with them before? The marketing team?” I asked, hoping the question didn’t sound as urgent as I was afraid it did.
“Not as far as I know. Both of the guys are kind of new, from what I understand.” He flicked a glance over at me curiously. Not suspiciously. Not yet. “Why?”
Damn. “Just trying to figure out how many different areas of the business he managed to fuck up before you got rid of him,” I answered quickly. “Well,wegot rid of him.”
Max laughed and clapped me on the arm. I laughed, too, for a second. And notonlyabout Corey’s severe brain trauma.
And that’s when I realized that Max thought I had stopped snooping. He thought I had made peace with Resi. He thought I was on his side.
He thought I—his reluctant, stubborn, rude, insolent protégé—had made himproud.
And even though I’d rather die than admit it, there was the tiniest part of me, now, thatwantedto have made him proud.
Stunned and horrified by this realization, I stuffed one last piece of spicy eel roll in my mouth and slipped down the corridor and back to my office. Closed the door and rested my head against the thick, cool glass for a second, closed my eyes, and just breathed.
A good player controls the board. A great player controls his opponent.
Well, shit.
HER
The sunset outside 211 Cholla was a witchy purple streak behindthe massive cottonwood trees that lined the avenue. I crouched, only breathing, outside the basement stairs behind a sprawling mid-century rambler in one of the city’s oldest, most expensive neighborhoods, wearing my favorite jeans and black hoodie, but my mind hadn’t moved on with me. It was still dwelling in the adobe house near the university a week earlier.
But I didn’t pause before punching in each number Maeve had given me. Because if I paused for even a second to think about how girls like me didn’t do things like this, then I would no longer be a girl whocoulddo something like this. And right now, that was the only thing in the world I wanted to be.
The box beeped, bright blue light flashing rapidly, and like an idiot, I jumped back about three inches, my heart racing.Stupid, scared baby.
Girls like me didn’t do things like this for areason.
But I didn’t run.
Instead, I closed my eyes and thought of Irish poetry.
One second, two seconds, three seconds passed. I waited for something to happen. Nothing did. So I pushed open the door.
I was in. So why was Istillstanding here paralyzed?
Maybe because, when the door swung open and I started creeping down the dim corridor, I realized this didn’t look anything like how Maeve had described it.
Especially not the second door on the left, which was supposed to be my escape route.
I’d volunteered to buy them twenty minutes.Them, meaning Maeve and the girls. We’d all been horrified at the idea of letting Maeve go back, but with Erica and Milagros and their network shut down, there was no one else to do it. And Maeve, despite only being familiar with one area of the house, had assured us, thanks to her friend Lemaya, that twenty minutes was all she would need to slip the trapped girls out through a different doorwhile I created a distraction for the security guards and escaped viathisdoor. We’d diagrammed it all out. We’dplannedit.
