Shards and Ashes

Dogsbody by Rachel Caine

WHEN I WAS thirteen, Corporate handed out free tickets to the Cup game to kids on Level K. A lottery win, they said, as they visited each narrow little apartment and listed off kids by name.

By the time they got to Gray, Xavier, I had already heard all about it. Could have ducked it, I guess; my folks were long dead, and at thirteen I was mostly on my own anyway. But I was big, strong, and maybe a little stupid, ’cause I still thought I had a bit of luck, and it had finally paid off.

So I took my ticket, and the Company man crossed my name off on his handheld and told me to have a nice time. He had a tight, empty smile.

Should have known better, about the luck.

See, we all knew better, that was the thing; Level K was a hard place, and we didn’t get much. Getting a ticket to the Cup was something that happened up on Level A, maybe B . . . not down here in the dark.

But everybody wants to believe in something, and we believed in the Cup game.

So that morning, some two thousand kids arrived painted in crude makeup. They carried makeshift signs to wave and clutched tickets like they were passes to heaven itself. Two thousand shining, excited faces. Mine among them.

The trains pulled in on time—big, shining, sleek things, all lights and glass and gleams. They were so beautiful, so unreal they might have been from another planet. Kids watched with rounded eyes, opened mouths as they realized, just as I did, how drab and broken our station looked, with its cracked tiles and rusty metal.

Maybe it was just that I was a bit older than the others, or I was naturally suspicious, but I thought it was strange there were no adults here to see us off. Not one nervous parent, not one idle gawker. Nobody had come.

All kids. All alone. Clutching tickets.

Hackles prickled at the back of my neck.

“Zay,” a girl’s voice said, and a hand caught me on the shoulder. It was Virtue, another orphan; we sometimes scrabbled together; sometimes we fought each other over a particularly good find or job. She was a little younger, maybe twelve, and turning womanly with it. Not in a bad way, though. “Zay, you going?”

“I guess I will,” I answered, and shrugged. “Got a ticket. You?”

She held up her ticket for an answer, between thin fingers with broken nails. Then she shook her head, took her ticket and tore it in half, in two jagged pieces, and let it fall to the ground.

“What are you doing?” I blurted; couldn’t help the knee-jerk appalled feeling, seeing that coveted ticket go to waste. Could’ve sold it premium.

Virtue looked tense and very, very serious. “Look around. All these mouths heading up toward the Cup. There’ll be prime pickings around here for a while, Zay. Jobs still need doing. We wouldn’t have to come to knives over it. You should stay too.”

I sent her a long, level look, and said, “You know something wrong about this, V?”

There wasn’t much to betray it, a slight widening of her eyes, but I knew I’d hit the mark. She shrugged, just a tiny shiver of muscles, and said, “Nobody here to see us off. Don’t you think that’s wrong? It’s like they weren’t allowed.”

“You think it’s a trap?” I said.

She frowned for a few seconds in silence, then shook her head. “No proof, but I’m playing it safe. You ought to do the same.”

Fine, I was thinking, but what if this is all the luck I ever get? How do I let that go? “Hard to pass up something like this. A real holiday, and all.” I knew she was right, and it made me feel hollow and cheated inside, and stubborn. I was a tough boy. I could take care of myself.

She looked wounded. I knew I’d hurt her; she’d put herself on the line to warn me, and I was throwing it back. “Fine. Go on, get coddled by Corporate. But don’t blame me when I grab the good jobs.” She started to turn away. I held her arm, just for a second.

“I reckon I’ll go,” I said. “But if this goes sideways, you take it out on somebody for me, hard. Swear.”

Virtue’s eyes widened, but she was quick to spit on her hand and hold it out. I spit on mine, and we slapped palms. Deal done.

The trains gave out a heavy, almost human sigh, and the doors opened on every car. Kids shouted and shoved forward, waving their signs and makeshift rag pom-poms. I started to queue up, and Virtue grabbed my arm.

“What?” I asked. “Deal done, right?”

“Sure,” she said, and for a second looked outright scared. “Zay, just . . . watch yourself.”

Before I could answer, Virtue faded back. I saw her Cup ticket halves blowing in the breeze of the tunnel, and then she was a flicker of movement in the sea of pressing bodies.

Then she was gone.

I joined the flow and was swept into the nearest car, throwing elbows into those who got too close. Most gave me a wide berth; I was a big, strong kid, and had a rep for a temper. Most didn’t try to cross me. Nobody did, more than once.

Inside the train, the seats were plush, clean, and a rich shade of red, like fresh blood. I sank down, a little dazed by the metal and the carpets and the softly playing music, as the last of the kids shoved on board and found seats. There was one empty next to me, as others gave me a wide margin of respect. A very small girl, maybe six, was the last one on, clutching her ticket in both hands and looking around in utter terror.

I grabbed her arm and sat her down in the seat beside me. She let out a yelp of surprise and fear and cowered. I scowled. “Name’s Zay,” I said. “Don’t bother me; I won’t bother you.”

She blinked. She was a tiny thing, skin and bones really, with masses of soft black hair twisting their way into dreadlocks, and eyes like pools of oil. “Pria,” she said, and tried for a smile. “Thanks for the seat, Mr. Zay.”

“It’s just Zay; I’m no Corporate drone,” I said, but deep down inside, I was a little pleased. It was the first time in my life anyone had ever called me Mr.

Pria’s face lit up, and I think she would have talked my damn ear off all the way to the upper levels and the stadium . . . but then the doors hissed open again as a stranger got on board. He was Corporate, there was no doubt of it; he was wearing a black jacket, with the Corporate logo on the pocket, and he had one of those neat, short haircuts and an earpiece, just like you see on the monitor commercials.

Pria’s eyes were black, but this man’s were dark. It wasn’t the color. It was what was in them. The kids fell silent, sensing a predator, and I did the same, and squeezed Pria’s hand to warn her to be quiet. She didn’t really need that, but I needed to do it.

“Welcome to your new life of service,” the man said, and took a small, sleek handheld device from his pocket. “I will need ten from this car. Hands up, those who want to volunteer.”

Nobody moved. Nobody. I don’t even think anybody breathed.

The man sighed and looked put out about it. “All right. It’s lottery, then. Seat numbers—” He punched something on his keypad and read off a string of randomly generated digits.

One of them was my seat.

The other kids were reluctantly standing, pale and shaking. Pria looked at me with horrified eyes, her hand still clutched in mine. “Zay,” she said. “Don’t go!”

The Corporate drone counted heads, frowned, and I saw him identifying seats and finding me. Our gazes locked. “You,” he said. “Your number is up.”

I stared at him and let my face go blank and stupid. It was something I was really good at; I could look barely functional when I wanted. I’d learned it from Dad, only his hadn’t really been faked. He’d gotten his from the gasses in the mines.

“Oh, for the love of— Are you defective?” He shook me. I let some drool wet my chin. “All right, then. You, girl. Get up.”

He pointed to Pria, and she sucked in a trembling breath and cowered in her seat. No, I wanted to tell her. Fear doesn’t get you anywhere. But that would make me sound way too smart, so I just stared stupidly at the drone and squeezed Pria’s hand once, to let her know I was sorry.

Then I let go.

The drone gestured at her to stand up. She did, shaking like bad machinery, and then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell on the clean floor of the train and had a fit.

It was an outstanding act. Better than mine. Only I wasn’t so sure it was an act at all, because she didn’t look good, and then she started vomiting and choking, and I was pretty sure it was for real after all.

I snapped out of it and rolled her over onto her side.

The drone’s disgusted stare snapped from Pria to me in an instant, and he pointed at me. “Not so slow after all, are you?” he said, and snapped his fingers. “Up, boy. Over here.”

I didn’t have much choice. Sure, I could probably take him in a fight—he was Corporate, not much muscle on him, and for sure he hadn’t been schooled in dirty fighting—but once I did, what then? I didn’t know how to make the train doors open again, and with a lurch, the whole thing began to move anyway.

No real choice. The man was armed; he could burn me down into a grease stain if he wanted. So I stood up, walked to the group of nine he’d already assembled, and stood there like I was part of it.

The Corporate drone nodded, touched something on his handheld, and said, “Don’t move, any of you.” Some of the kids still seated were crying; some were just staring down at the tickets clutched in their hands. Nobody really thought that we were going to a game anymore. Or if they did, they were slower than I’d pretended to be.

The train ran for about thirty long minutes, smooth and swaying, before it pulled to a stop. The doors didn’t open.

The drone cleared his throat and drew all eyes back to him. “You’re owed a notice, by law, so this is it. We’re over budget. Level K has been exceeding allowable resource levels for five years running. A downsizing order has been given. Your people on the level were notified by drop this morning. You witnessed us choosing random numbers. We try to be fair in any redundancy process.”

I heard every kid take in a deep breath, but nobody said anything. Even the kids who’d been crying were silent. Redundancy. Somebody was getting the sharp edge of the ax . . . and they’d pulled numbers.

Seat numbers.

They were going to kill us purely to save the cost of feeding and clothing us for the next couple of years until we could earn our bread in the mines or the factories. The bottom line was that the Company had too many human resources.

We were victims of accounting.

“Everyone still seated, please stay in your seats; the train will continue momentarily.” I barely heard the drone’s voice over the sudden hot rush of blood in my ears. Not that I was scared to die, not at all. . . . Death is pretty much a part of any day on Level K. But I just felt . . . angry. And I was wondering if it would hurt much. Probably not. They needed us gone; torture was just wasted man-hours.

I could hear the murmurs of the kids in the seats, and they were tinged with relief. We weren’t a sentimental bunch, we K kids. Everybody had to look out for himself. Couldn’t blame them. I’d have been just the same.

The doors opened, and beyond was a tunnel, dimly lit with long strips of glowing glass in a dirty orange. It was clean, but plain. The drone gestured us out, and after a hesitation, I led the way. Better to go first than last, almost all the time. There wasn’t anywhere to run. Nothing but a barred gate in the wall, and the trains, and walls.

The drone was the last one out. As I looked down the train, I saw that all the other cars had opened, and drones were leading or hustling out their quotas of ten as well. Ten per train car. Maybe a hundred, total.

There had been worse Company cullings. All of Level H had been made redundant, after food strikes and riots; nobody knew what had happened, exactly, but there hadn’t been contact with Level H for four years now, and Corporate had just sealed it off and left it with biohazard warnings on all the entrances. Sometimes on K we told each other gruesome ghost stories and dared each other to break in. Nobody ever had. All ten thousand people on H had just . . . vanished. As if they’d never been.

The Corporate drones in their black jackets and neat haircuts, with their handheld devices, faced the train cars and stood there waiting for something. I saw something flash on our drone’s screen, and he nodded and tapped a control.

The doors banged shut on all of the train cars at once, and then . . . then the screaming started. It was a few voices at first, then a panicked wave of sound. A freezing feeling came over me, something that numbed me right down to the core.

I took a step toward the train car. It was stupid, and I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d never looked into that window and met Pria’s dark, panicked eyes. Seen her press her small hands against the window and mouth my name.

Because I couldn’t help.

It wasn’t us being made redundant after all. It was those on the train, with their pathetic painted faces and team colors and tattered little banners.

One thousand nine hundred of them, give or take a few orphans.

It was maybe a minute before the last screaming fell away.

I don’t remember moving, but suddenly I had my back to the tunnel’s rounded wall. Around me, others sank to the floor, crying. One girl screamed and tried to run back for the train car—family in there, maybe, or someone close to it. I grabbed her and wrapped my arms around her as she flailed, until she went limp. I still held her, a warm rag-doll weight, because holding on to someone, anyone, felt good just then.

At least it had been quick. Well, they’d stopped screaming quick. Maybe not the same thing.

“Process complete,” the drone said, and tapped a command on his handheld.

The silent, dead train glided on, a smooth and beautiful monster with a stomach full of prey, and the cool breeze blew over us as it picked up speed and pulled away. When the hissing sigh of it was past, the drone turned and looked at us.

“You’re all employed at Corporate,” he said. “Congratulations. You now hold the job title of dogsbody.”

A dogsbody is the lowest form of labor available at Corporate, as opposed to the Operations. The old term for it is servant, or slave, but it’s not really either one of those. You’re an employee, and you get paid, but you can’t ever be more than a third-class dogsbody, unless you make it to the top one percent in your one-year review. If you don’t make the top cut, you get culled. Easy as that. Always new, strong dogsbodies being brought in from the levels to replace you.

I was a One Percenter at fourteen, and promoted out of third class. By sixteen, I was second-class dogsbody to Senior Management. I was an appliance. A very reliable machine. And for as long as I worked, they’d keep using me, so I kept myself working, ticking along, growing stronger and faster and deadlier every day.

I could have tried to run; there had been chances, over the years, but running back to the levels was great only if you wanted to die hard, and alone. No, I stayed. I became a good little Corporate drone, and I kept earning promotion credits until one day, just a few days before my seventeenth birthday, my handheld showed me transferred upward to the ultimate top level.

Dogsbody First Class to Tarrant Clark, Global SVP, Corporate Resources. Where I’d set out to be from that very first moment in the tunnel, listening to those screams, because according to everything I’d been able to look up, he was the man who ordered downsizings. One thousand nine hundred, give or take a few orphans. I wondered if he remembered anything about it. He was a busy man, after all. He probably ordered hundreds of massacres just like it every year.

I reported for my first day of work to Tarrant Clark’s Residence Office—the Res, in dogsbody slang. The man who opened the door to the Res was named Helman, and the insignia under the Corporate logo on his coat pocket meant that he was classified as Junior Administrative Assistant, and he was young and intense and worried.

“You’re a big one,” Helman said, looking up at me. I presented him with my handheld. “Xavier Gray. Right. You’ll be working upstairs, with Pozynski.” He pulled out his own handheld, and the two devices talked together silently, then both gave a soft cheep as information was exchanged and verified. Deal done. It was more civilized than spitting on palms.

“How’s the staff?” That was a question I was allowed to ask of a Junior Admin, and Helman looked pretty casual, in general. “The mood?”

“Tense,” he said. “Budget’s been running tight this year. Clark’s been in strategy meetings for a week. He’s due back tomorrow. We’re trying to get everything perfect before he arrives, so be prepped for short tempers and long hours.”

Nothing new to me.

Helman shut the door with a press of a button, and the lights came up in the entry hall automatically. Clark’s home was the size of an entire level where I’d come up; the hall alone was as big as a small factory, tiled in shiny, rare natural stone and with beautiful art on the walls. I’d never seen better, but then, this was my first time inside one of the Res buildings.

“He’s had a couple of assassination attempts,” Helman admitted. “That’s why we’re bringing in all new support staff. You came highly reviewed.”

I knew I had. I had years in Corporate service, wearing the black jacket, my head wired into the earpiece, taking my orders and doing whatever needed to be done, anywhere, anytime. I’d never had to fry a train full of redundant child-workers, though. Not yet, anyway.

I pointed to the staircase. “Up?”

“And to the right.” Helman nodded. “Oh, you’ll need to check in with Pozynski, desk at the top of the stairs. She’ll give you the credentials.”

I nodded and moved on, jogging lightly up the winding staircase toward the second level, and paused in front of a desk on the landing, where a beautiful, willowy blond girl in a well-tailored jacket smiled at me impersonally, our handhelds talked, and she passed me over a plastic bin of things.

Item one, a pistol, with two extra magazines. I took it out and checked it with professional speed; it was a good weapon, very clean and well machined. It wasn’t a Corporate product; I checked the insignia on the side. Different logo. “We’re buying weapons from Intaglio?” I asked. Intaglio was a direct competitor in arms and food production. Their headquarters were halfway around the world, which had made it a hell of a lot more difficult to bomb them out of existence. Location, location, location.

“We buy from the vendor with the best price and quality, same as anyone else,” Pozynski said. “Sometimes that’s one of our divisions internally. Sometimes it isn’t. The weapons contract is with Intaglio right now. Problem?”

I loaded the gun. “No problem,” I said, and slipped it into my empty shoulder rig, under the jacket. Weapons contracts with out-of-company vendors meant people got downsized. My gun had bodies on it, even before I ever fired it.

Pozynski checked the list and held out a thin metal chain. A collar.

I didn’t reach for it immediately, and looked at Pozynski, who raised her pale eyebrows. “Everybody here wears them,” she said, and tapped her own with a long, tapered fingernail. “Regulation.”

I hated it, but I smiled and said, “I just don’t look as good as you in jewelry.”

That earned me a more genuine smile. “Oh, you’ll look fine.” Pozynski stood on tiptoe to put the collar around my neck and snap it in place. It was a thin braid, and she fiddled with it to pull it down a little, make it more like a decorative object. “There,” she said, and slipped it under my shirt. Her fingers felt cool and sweet against my skin. “If you don’t like the length, just hold it for a few seconds, then pull to drag it lower. If you want it shorter, three taps on the chain to make it contract. It has a safety, you can’t strangle yourself with it accidentally. Got it?”

“Got it.” I’d worn a collar before, but when I was just starting out. The first year of dogsbody service, everybody wears one. For good behavior. That way, they can end you on a moment’s notice, just by pressing a button on a handheld.

I thought I was past all that. Guess not. The chain felt thick and heavy around my neck.

Pozynski pointed up, and up I went. The hallway overlooked the entry hall below—a perfect defensive position, if you were properly armed, because they’d reinforced the wall beneath the banister with ballistic armor. There were gunports, too, though well disguised as ornamental medallions. Position of last resort.

Well, I was the last resort, because as Clark’s personal first-class dogsbody, I was expected to put myself in front of any danger.

The second door on the right had a palm scanner, which not only read the whorls and loops of fingerprints but also tested for body temperature and pulsebeats. No cutting off some poor bastard’s hand to trick your way inside.

I put my hand on the scanner. Light flashed beneath it; there was a soft, approving beep; and the door clicked open.

I stepped inside, closed it behind me, and immediately registered a change in atmosphere. The carpet was thicker, lusher beneath my polished shoes. The lights were more subdued and elegant. The artwork on the walls was priceless, full of color and swirls and confusion.

There was another desk at the far end of the room, near a dazzling bank of windows overlooking a false, computer-generated sunrise. Behind it sat a woman of about my own age—thin, serious, dressed in a Corporate jacket like everyone else but with a small golden pin on the lapel that denoted her as Senior Administrative staff. She had brown hair, which she’d pulled up into a tidy coil on top of her head, and although she wasn’t especially pretty—not on the level of Miss Pozynski—she had a certain gravity to her that drew my steps her way. Again, she was young—younger than I was, this time.

Then she looked up and met my eyes, and I felt a shock of surprise. “Virtue?” I blurted, and immediately stopped myself. My gaze flew to the digital nameplate on her desk. V. Hardcastle, Senior Administrative Assistant. Her real name, the one she’d been born with down in the levels. What the hell was she doing here? She hadn’t been on the train.

“Zay,” she said, and gave me a smile that was tense and free of any surprise at all. “Welcome to the Res. Handheld?” I gave it to her, still struggling to accept the sight of a familiar face, here. She matched the handheld to hers, orders digitally transferred and confirmed with the audible ping, and then she relaxed a little as she gave the device back to me. I slipped it into my pocket, and felt my face sliding into a frown.

“You got me this job,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

“I felt I needed someone I could trust,” Virtue said. “Like the old days, on the level.”

I nodded, still measuring this new Virtue. I didn’t know her. A gap of a year in Corporate was more than enough time for someone to shift themselves completely—look at me. I’d gone from a tough, hardscrabble orphan to a tough, hardscrabble orphan with a gun.

And we’d been apart way more than a year.

“Relax,” Virtue said, and smiled. I recognized the smile, as I’d recognized the eyes. Warm, guarded, fragile. Her old, familiar smile. “We’re not at knives yet.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

“Yes,” she said. There was a strange flash in her eyes I didn’t understand. “I worked hard enough for it.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Difference is, I didn’t apply for the job.”

“I know.” Virtue swallowed hard, not looking away from my eyes. “I told you not to go, Zay. I told you.”

“You knew. You knew all along, didn’t you?” I’d spent a lot of time not thinking about the Cup Train, and a lot of time feeling way too much; that’s the way of things, when you push them back into dark corners and cage them up. They turn nasty. The surge of rage that swept over me was blinding, and I wanted to grab her by the throat and shake an answer out of her.

I didn’t have to. She was already talking over me. “I didn’t know, I swear! I just guessed something was wrong. If I’d known, I’d have blown the whistle, Zay. You know that. I just had a tingle, and I heeded it.”

I believed her. I might not know this present-day Virtue, but that Virtue would have screamed the house down if she’d really known what was going to happen. She wouldn’t have just saved herself. We were cold, we K kids, but not that cold.

“So why did you hire me?” I asked. “Old times’ sake?”

“In a sense,” she said, and stood up. “Come with me. I have someone I want you to meet.”

There was a sliding door concealed in the yellow wall, one that required another access keypad. This one was DNA keyed, from the looks of it, and likely only Virtue was coded to enter directly. She was the gatekeeper.

The door led into a vast warehouse of an office, carpet even plusher underfoot than in the room outside, walls polished dark wood, priceless works of art and sculpture trapped here like flies in amber, for the enjoyment of one person. The entire back wall of the office was windows stretching up twenty feet, pure glass, not monitors. The windows overlooked a real park, green grass, neatly clipped bushes, a riot of colorful flowers. Trees swaying in the wind. A fountain spraying clean water high into the air.

Outside.

I felt it hit me like a punch in the gut, and swayed as I gulped for air. Virtue turned her dark, calm gaze on me. “I know,” she said quietly. “It does that. Take a second, then follow me.”

She waited while I sucked down a couple of steadying breaths, and at my nod, led me across what seemed like an entire level’s worth of carpet, past lush furniture and a library of real, solid books, to a desk that must have destroyed the largest tree that had ever lived. It was real wood, polished and lovingly maintained, and behind it sat a tired-looking middle-aged man with graying hair.

He was wearing a Corporate jacket, but it was a much finer one, and instead of black, it was blue, in the Company color. He had on a tie, faded blue, to match his eyes. A crisp white shirt. He extended his right hand to me as he rose, and I took it automatically. Corporate manners, drilled into me with harsh discipline.

“Is this him?” the man asked Virtue, who nodded. “Mr. Gray. Very nice to meet you. Virtue’s said so much about you.”

It had happened too fast. He wasn’t supposed to be here, not until tomorrow. I had expected to be in control and ready, and instead, I was still struggling to come to grips with the sight of the world outside of those windows behind him, and the tired smile he gave me as we shook hands.

This was the man who’d killed a whole trainload of kids down in the dark, and he looked . . . kind.

“I’m Tarrant Clark,” he said. “Global SVP, Corporate Resources.”

“Good to meet you, sir,” I said.

“Oh, no doubt,” he said. “Since I’m sure you’ve come to kill me.”

Virtue took in a breath, then let it slowly out. I said nothing. Clark was still holding my hand in a firm grip.

“Am I wrong, Zay?” he asked, and let go. We faced each other without blinking, and beneath the smile, the kindness, I saw a man who’d survived Corporate life. Someone who didn’t flinch. “You’re not the first K kid to come here to even the score. Ask Virtue about her first day with me.”

I darted a look at her, and saw that he wasn’t lying; she’d worked her way here for exactly the same reason I had . . . to get revenge.

Only she hadn’t followed through.

I felt the weight of the gun under my armpit, warm and deadly. I was fast. I could draw and fire in a second, and he’d be falling, a bloody memory. I’d certainly be dead about a second later, from any of a variety of automatic countermeasures, but I would have accomplished the one thing that I’d set out to do, all those years ago. What I’d been training to do ever since that day.

“I understand why you feel as you do,” Clark was saying. “I won’t lie to you; I knew about the planned downsizing. I voted to stop it, but it didn’t matter, in the end. It happened.”

“Yes,” I said. “It happened to us.”

Clark gazed at me without blinking, still. “Don’t kid yourself that it was only you on the level who suffered. A thing like that happens to everybody who touches it, everybody who knows. It’s toxic. It changes you.”

I was one twitch away from killing him. The powerful impact of the shock of the Outside beyond those windows was wearing off, and so was my first impression of him; the anger was coming back, a red tide that was going to carry me away.

“Yeah,” I said softly. “I guess you’d think that.” It was sick thinking, to imagine that pushing a button, signing an order would be like being there, like seeing it happen. Like being one of those dead kids, riding the train to the incinerator. Or like the families who never spoke about it again.

He thought he’d suffered? Not by half. Not yet, he hadn’t.

She must have seen it in my eyes, because Virtue stepped up and put herself in front of me, between me and Tarrant Clark. “No,” she said. “It hasn’t come to knives. I told you, Zay. You need to listen to him.”

I wasn’t going to stop. Not for Virtue, not for anybody.

I made a move to draw, but she was too close, and I was too big to be that nimble. Virtue didn’t need a lot of leverage to stop me, she just had to choose the moment. She did, pinning my arm, and hung on with all the wiry strength of her body. “No,” she insisted softly, urgently. “Zay, listen. Listen to him. Please.”

“Let go of me,” I said to Virtue. “I don’t want to hurt you, but this is going to get done. We swore on it.”

“Listen!”

I did, but only because I knew I’d have to kill her first, and I was weighing whether or not I wanted that debt on my sheet.

“I’m in the middle of a hostile takeover of the Company,” Clark said, in the dead silence that followed. “I’m going to take out the CEO. Leo Pannizer is the man who designed and ordered the Cup Train operation; he forced me at gunpoint to sign the papers. It got him the big desk. Now I’m going to downsize him, tonight. If you’ll hold your anger a little longer, Zay, you can help me do that. You can get revenge on the man who pushed the button.”

Corporate. Always talking.

I stopped trying to move Virtue gently, and batted her out of the way with more violence than I probably needed. She fell heavily on her side, cracked her head against the wood of the desk, and lay still for a few stunned breaths.

I wasn’t looking at her. In the second it had taken her to fall, I had drawn my gun, and aimed it directly between Tarrant Clark’s eyes.

He didn’t flinch. At all. There was a kind of fatalistic acceptance in his face, a tense knowledge that he’d arrived at this moment under his own power, by making his own choices.

And that made me hesitate, for just a second, that Clark didn’t flinch from taking what was coming. I’d never imagined he’d be brave. Never.

Virtue kicked my legs out from under me, screaming out a raw challenge, the language of Level K, not this quiet Corporate haven. I fired as I fell.

The bullet missed Clark, hit the glass behind him, and simply . . . stopped. The glass didn’t break. It held the bullet, perfectly still, in transit. The surface vibrated.

And then I was in the fight of my life.

Virtue hadn’t gone soft, not at all, and she was armed with a knife, a little thing, deadly sharp, that flashed and hissed with her quick moves. The skirt she wore left her legs free to move, and she kicked off her severe shoes immediately to give herself better stability. That evened us as much as we could be evened, given the difference in our sizes.

Not that I had ever allowed size to come between us in a fight. Nor had she. Virtue was as dangerous as a rabid weasel when she was committed, and just now, she was fully, fatally committed.

I dodged out of the way of a stab, a feint, another stab that turned halfway and slashed through the arm of my jacket, barely scratching my flesh. The heavy black fabric and the shirt beneath parted with hardly a tug. That was a very sharp knife.

I had expected nothing less from her.

I had no knife, but I had a knuckle stunner, which I slipped my hand into in my pocket. I came out with a punch so fast it blurred, and caught Virtue on the chin as she slammed that knife in toward my chest for a crippling blow. The shock jolted my arm, but that was only bleed-through; the vast majority cascaded directly through her body, and I twisted to avoid the knife and caught her on the way down.

I eased Virtue to the carpet, checked to be sure she was still breathing, and then looked back up at Tarrant Clark.

Who had not moved. The bullet vibrated gently in the glass behind him, giving off a soft humming sound as the field bled off the murderous energy of its passage. He hadn’t gone for a weapon. He hadn’t run. He hadn’t called for backup.

“Is she alive?” he asked.

“Do you care?”

“Yes. I like her. She’s a tough little thing.”

Oddly, I believed him. I stood up, limping a little from where she’d caught me with her kick, and raised the gun. “I’m not going to miss again,” I said.

Clark smiled faintly, and said nothing. He was just as ready now as he had been before, I saw.

I said, “What did you mean about the CEO?”

“I mean that I’ve been engineering a hostile takeover for a year now,” he said. “I’ve worked hard to load the Board of Directors. Tonight, I call a proxy vote, get authorization, and then my dogsbodies can carry out the redundancy orders. You can head it up, if you want the job.” He paused a moment, then said, “I know you don’t believe me about the Cup Train. I wouldn’t, either. But Virtue will open the records for you. You can see everything you want. Anything you want. I have nothing to hide.”

I didn’t believe that. Nobody in the entire world had nothing to hide, least of all a Corporate exec. But maybe, just maybe, he was telling the truth about not being behind the Cup Train massacre.

Maybe all my work to get here had just led me to one more step, one more villain, one more link.

Or maybe I could just kill this guy and call it even.

The only thing that stopped me was Virtue, lying insensible at my feet. Virtue hadn’t forgotten a single lesson learned down on Level K. She was still fighting. Still fierce.

Still difficult to fool.

So there was a chance, a slim one, that Tarrant wasn’t the hard Corporate bastard who’d ordered the deaths of kids, just to save a quarter’s results and grab another bonus. There was a chance that if I killed him, I risked the only opportunity for revenge that we had.

I took my finger off the trigger and holstered the gun. “I’ll look at the records,” I said. “I’ll probably still kill you.”

“No hurry,” Clark said. “I’m here all night.”

Virtue was out for almost an hour, which worried me; the stunning, on top of the crack on the head, probably hadn’t done her any favors. When she woke up, she was groggy and sick for a while, and finally, shakily, put on her shoes and concealed her knife again and led me out of Clark’s office to her own, less distracting work space.

Clark had asked if I required Medical to attend her. I’d refused. I knew Virtue well enough, even at this distance, to know she’d never want to show that kind of weakness, not if she could help it.

It was the sign of a significant injury that the first thing she did, on sitting behind her desk, was open a drawer and take out a dermal hypo, which she pressed against her skin, and dialed for what was probably a combination of headache and nausea meds. They hissed into her system, and she sighed and let her head sag forward for a moment as the drugs went to work. When she looked up at me, she looked almost back to herself.

Only fiercer.

“You really are a hard one,” she said, and rubbed at the bruise forming on her jaw. “I thought you’d shoot him for sure.”

“I did,” I said. “Missed. Doesn’t mean I can’t try again.”

She made no response to that, except to tap her desktop to bring up a built-in keyboard and monitor that rose silently in virtual display from the seemingly smooth surface of the wood. I came around behind her. She smelled . . . Corporate. Clean, sweet, powdered and perfumed. Civilized, unlike the life we’d both come from, where showers were mandatory once a week and perfume was a luxury you saved for to buy your mother—if you still had one—once a year, in a tiny little stoppered bottle.

She’d come a long way. So had I. I was suddenly conscious of how neat I was, too, how perfect. Save for the place where her knife had slashed my coat and shirt and dotted the white cloth with little spots of drying blood, I was just like everybody else up here. Owned.

Virtue tapped keys, doing things I only vaguely understood. Dogsbodies weren’t cleared for technical training, and it was impossible to get it without authorization, at least at the Corporate rank. Maybe you could sneak a black-market computer class down in the lower levels, but not up here, where every keystroke was tracked.

“There,” she said, and rolled her chair back from the desk. “Sit down. You can navigate through anything you like.”

I felt a slight flush creeping up my collar, but I sat down, feeling suddenly too large, too awkward. Give me a gun, a knife, a stunner, and I’m as graceful as anyone my size, but keyboards are built for smaller, smarter people. “I don’t know how,” I said. I hated to admit it, but saw the flash of immediate understanding in Virtue’s expression. It wasn’t pity. Just acknowledgment.

“I’ll do it,” she said. “You just tell me what you want to open, I’ll open it, you read it. Okay?”

I nodded. She leaned over my shoulder, and immediately the perfume overwhelmed my senses, woke uncomfortable feelings inside me. I could smell her under the floral scent, warm and female and very, very close. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted her to get away from me, or on me. Something of both. I’d been with a few girls before; it was one of the only cheap pleasures available to dogsbodies.

But Virtue was different. She was from home. And whatever else it was, home was special.

She tapped keys, and a small folder zoomed up and open on the virtual display. It clarified immediately to a resolution that let me read it easily, probably reading my own focus range through receptive sensors.

It was an official memo from Tarrant Clark, sent through official channels, lodging a protest against Operation Overflow—or, as we survivors called it, the Cup Train. He wrote, in passionate terms, about the wrongness of the action, about Corporate responsibility to its workers, core values, all that crap.

He was ignored. Not just once, but over and over. All the evidence was there, including video of the Board meeting where Clark had presented his side and been voted down. Where Pannizer had personally held a gun to his head to make him sign the orders.

Clark had walked out after that. There were more records, detailing a countermeasure team he’d put together via handheld as he sped back to his office. It was a good team, but it arrived ten minutes too late to stop the massacre, which meant that by the time the vote had been carried out, the plan had already been in motion. Tickets delivered, kids loaded on the train.

The votes were a sham. The Board was a sham.

And the man who’d engineered the whole thing was now CEO. Leo Franklin Pannizer.

I studied the video of him in close-up. I’d seen photos of him, of course; he was in all the Corporate brochures. But video made him real, not just another set of pixels; he had graceful mannerisms and a nervous, odd laugh, and a bald spot at the top of his head that he hadn’t troubled to have fixed. He was married. He had a beautiful wife and three children, all perfect little Corporate specimens, not a single flaw among them.

I had imagined some kind of monster. Some beast with madness in his eyes. And maybe he was. Maybe it just didn’t show up on video.

Virtue finally stepped back, rubbing a hand across her forehead. The bruise on her jaw was starting to discolor and looked painful. I wondered if her pain meds were working. “Well?” she asked.

I said nothing. I closed my eyes and thought about it, focusing on all that I’d done to get here, all that I’d learned. All that I hadn’t learned.

And then I said, “We’ll do it Clark’s way. Until I find out he’s lying. Then I do it my way.”

The role of a dogsbody, at the level I’d reached, was amazingly simple. Stand around. Look tough. If someone attacks, kill them real hard.

It got a little more complicated two hours later, when Clark’s messages began to go out, and his takeover plans started rolling. For one thing, Tech Support tried to kill our connections; they sent a single operative, surrounded by three dogsbodies, to the central connection center, where three of Clark’s dogsbodies—not me—put all of them down. Next, messages began coming in to Virtue, Miss Pozynski, and Helman downstairs, warning them that imminent corrective action was scheduled to be taken by Management for breach of contract.

“That’s it, we’re locked up,” Virtue said, and shut down her console. She keyed in a rapid sequence of numbers, and a cabinet opened on the wall of her office. She tapped in another sequence. “Yanna, Aaron, get up here and get armed. We’re going to have direct incursion.”

The two Junior Admins were there in moments. Miss Pozynski wasn’t flirtatious anymore, and Helman wasn’t genial. They both had arms training, and it showed in the way that they took and checked their guns.

“You’re in charge of the dogsbodies,” Virtue told them. “All except Mr. Gray here. He’s mine. Last line of defense.”

I would be manning the balcony overlooking the entry hall until that last line was required. “Put somebody in the garden,” I said. They all looked at me. “I know the glass is ballistic. Just put somebody in the garden.”

Because that would be how I would come in. There’d be some flaw there, some hole I could exploit. If it was me, coming for the man I wanted to destroy, then the garden would be my entry point. They all imagined it was secure. It couldn’t be that good.

“I need to see the plans,” I said. “Every room. Every approach. Every defensive measure. Right now.”

Three sets of identical stares, and then Virtue said, “All right,” and dismissed her two juniors to their duties. She opened up a cabinet and took out a sheet of smart paper the size of the top of her desk. The paper contained blueprints of the complex and the grounds. I knew how to use these, at least; I’d been trained in reading and analyzing such diagrams. I double-tapped areas where I needed magnification, and the paper obligingly zoomed in for me. “Take this down,” I said to Virtue. “You’ve got a window of opportunity through the service entrance on the third floor.”

“I’ll close it,” she said, and reached for her handheld.

“No, don’t. We funnel them through that access, and we control their entry. But we have to make sure that they don’t suspect anything. Make sure it’s guarded, just not too heavily.”

She nodded and tapped the screen, issuing orders. I was probably sending dogbodies like me to their deaths out there, guarding that door. I hadn’t meant to, but I’d risen to a management rank within a caste that wasn’t even included on the Corporate organization charts. I knew how to make war, and the first tenet is that even if you have disposable people, you don’t waste them.

“V,” I said, the way I used to when we were kids. “You’re the only one with unrestricted access to Tarrant?”

“And you, now.”

I wasn’t sure that was a bright idea, given the conflicting mixture of emotions inside of me, but this wasn’t the time to debate it. “Then I need you out of the fight. You stay in here. This is Secure Level Two. He’s Secure Level One.”

In other words, Virtue and I would be the last line of defense.

She nodded, perfectly at peace with that.

An hour passed, and nothing. Virtue monitored news and events, as well as private message traffic, on her handheld as she sat perched on the edge of a couch, where I imagine she slept most of the time. There was a blanket folded neatly at the end and a pillow pushed underneath.

“Level K is in revolt,” she said. “Somebody started a rumor that the food was being cut off. The stores closed their doors against rioters. Now it’s general chaos.”

“It’s a feint,” I said. “They’ll stir up as many trouble spots as possible to pull focus away from this place.” But I felt sick, because I remembered Level H. So did she. Riots and strikes got put down hard, and permanently. We still had friends down there.

She went back to reading. About five minutes later, she said, in a very soft voice, “A train from Level B has been destroyed. Seven hundred dead. They’re talking external competitive attack, but it’s a feint. Has to be.”

Both of us instantly were transported back to that platform, that slick lovely train, the kids in their Cup game paint and colors. Neither of us spoke. She flicked through messages, faster, faster, and then stopped.

Her mouth opened, but before she could speak, I felt it through the soles of my feet. A kind of harmonic vibration.

Then the building shook violently, rocking side to side, metal bending and screaming all around. Art toppled from the walls. Furniture tipped and slid as the building swayed. I grabbed Virtue and held on as the world shuddered around us.

When it was over, I heard the high-pitched drone of alarms going off. I zoomed the smart paper out to the master view.

Red alerts pulsed in two places: the front entry hall, and on the third floor, at the service entrance.

“I need you to stay in here,” I said. “Monitor the garden. If they come that way, get to Clark.”

She nodded, face gone tight. I rolled up the paper and stuffed it into my pocket in a wad as I moved for the outer door. I glanced back.

“Watch yourself, Zay,” she said.

Same thing she’d said at the Cup Train.

Opening the door of Virtue’s office was like opening the door onto a war zone—from soundproofed to shocking in a single burst. I ducked out and to the side, and the door zoomed shut again behind me, the lock flaring red as it cycled down. I was behind the solid ballistic armor of the balcony. I grabbed my handheld and checked camera views.

View one, the door to Virtue’s office, where I was crouched.

View two, Miss Pozynski’s desk, which had grown a shield around it, and a cannon, which she was firing at will down the stairs. Miss Pozynski looked just as pretty killing people as she did handing them welcome packages.

View three, midway down the stairs. It was a carpet of bodies. Dogsbodies, of course. Shock troops sent to overwhelm Miss Pozynski, who had been in fact underwhelmed and was still mowing them down with icy precision.

I needed a bigger gun, I decided, and took out my pistol, clicked the Autofit feature, and selected something with better firepower.

Assault rifle. That would do nicely.

There were limits to what an Autofit could accomplish, and so the pistol’s basic structure only morphed a little. However, it did give me the ability to fire multiple bursts at blurring speed, although I was likely to run out of ammunition fairly quickly. . . .

“Miss Pozynski,” I said into the handheld. “Ammunition?”

“Oh, call me Yanna; we’re all friends here. Carl is bringing it to you,” she said. “He’s on ammunition rounds.”

Carl was a kind of stock boy, with a self-driving armored cart. He was a small kid, younger than me, and he pulled up his machine in a hiss of air brakes to toss out a mound of ammunition before speeding off toward Miss Pozynski.

He never made it. A small missile whipped up the stairs in a red rush, avoided Miss Pozynski’s armor, and impacted directly with Carl’s cart, which exploded in a hail of shrapnel.

Miss Pozynski had a single-use blast shield, I saw, from the red flare that vaporized the shrapnel on contact as it sliced toward her. I had one as well, built into my handheld, and nothing but ash made it through to hit me.

Not much left of Carl, though. Or the ammunition.

I made a run for the armory door. There was an emergency access panel near the bottom, under the theory that if you’re in desperate need of ammunition, you probably don’t want to stick your head above the bulletproof barrier to gain access. Good theory. I palmed the pad, and the door zoomed open, then quickly shut as I rolled over the threshold.

It was like a candy store full of bullets. I felt positively warm inside, but that didn’t last long as the whole place shuddered from another artillery hit. I saw plate steel warping at the back.

I consulted the plans. They were targeting the windows in Clark’s office, which was what I’d have done.

I loaded up and went back out, opened up a gunport, and fired like there was no tomorrow, because there wouldn’t be if this went badly. Dogsbodies in Corporate livery fell and fell and fell on the entry level, and the chic marble floor was a mass of blood, chipped stone, and bullet casings.

Then Miss Pozynski got it, in the form of another smart missile fired from below. It probably would have come for me except that some bright boy had just lit up her metal shield with heat tracers. The missile dived straight for it, sensed the obstacle, dodged, found free space, and detonated behind the shield.

Miss Pozynski’s personal force field had one use, and this was the second missile. Game over. I got pelted with shrapnel, including something sharp and deep in my side, and didn’t look over at whatever might be left of her; it wouldn’t be pretty anymore. The fire carried on. Whatever other dogsbodies Clark had around—and I was fairly sure he had a lot—gradually lost to the incoming tide of attackers. The CEO owned a whole army of them, apparently. I checked my handheld. We were down by 50 percent already, and I knew it wasn’t close to over.

I heard feet coming up the stairs in a thunder, and without Miss Pozynski there to cut them down, they’d have me in a deadly angle in seconds. As I retreated, I caught a quick glimpse of the man leading the charge. It was Helman, bloody and grinning, and he snapped off shots at me wildly as I opened Virtue’s door and slammed it shut.

Virtue, pale and steady behind the desk, clicked keys. “I’m disabling the lock,” she said. “It won’t stop them long.”

“Helman’s turned on us,” I said. “They must have offered general pardons and transfer and promotion. Could be other defections. You need to change the codes now.”

That made her pause, but only for a second before her fingers flew across the keypad. I saw a remarkable variety of emotions flow across her face and out again—anger, fear, sadness, icy determination. “I see that Pozynski is down. What else have we got?”

“Seventeen dogsbodies around the perimeter still register as active and fighting. But they’re not going to be enough.”

She paused and looked at me, nothing at all showing in her facial expression—but something, some shadow of something, in her eyes. “We’re not going to make it,” she said. “I never expected them to offer transfer and promotion. That’ll kill us, especially if they offer signing bonuses to flip.”

“Reinforcements? Alliances?” Because that was the Corporate way to do it; Clark would have strategic alliances, partnerships with other key executives who’d have to offer support. Favors for favors.

“They’re unavailable,” she said with a bitter edge. “In private meetings.” They’d been bought off. Tarrant Clark’s bid for power had been seen as going nowhere, and accordingly, his allies had bolted en masse. His carefully crafted plans were going to hell, fast.

That left the two of us, effectively. I stared at Virtue. “What do you want to do?” Being a dogsbody, I had no choice. If I tried to surrender, they’d kill me for disloyalty. Virtue, however, was a Corporate employee, a genuine careerist; she could give up Clark and join Helman on the winning side, and nobody would hold it against her, not even on her annual review. She’d probably get a promotion out of it.

“I stay with my boss,” she said. “He needs to win, Zay. He has to win, or it’s all for nothing. Everything you and I have done, been—it’s all for nothing. You made me promise to make it right. That’s why I’m here. If we don’t, we might as well have gotten on the train and ridden it straight to hell.”

I checked my guns. “Where’s Clark’s executive escape?”

She shook her head. “There isn’t one.”

“Bullshit,” I said bluntly. “This is a Corporate executive’s Res; there’s an escape. You tell me where it is now, Virtue.”

“Why? So you can run?”

I read bitter disappointment in her eyes, quickly hidden.

“I promise you, I won’t be going far. I need you to guard Clark and run some schematics and maps for me.”

When I told her what I was going to do, the disappointment disappeared, replaced by a bright, fierce hope. She opened the intercom circuit and got Clark on the line. I could picture him in his still, quiet office, watching the battle rage outside his picture windows.

It was his decision, in the end. I couldn’t act on my own, not in this.

“Yes?” he said. Perfectly calm, it sounded like. He had truly excellent soundproofing in there; I couldn’t even hear the rattle of gunfire or steady thumping of missiles on his end, although it was plain in Virtue’s office.

“Sir, we need you to play for time,” Virtue said. “With Leo Pannizer. Call for an official Board meeting. Make a deal.”

“He’ll never agree. He’ll just stonewall me until it’s over.”

“Yes, sir, I know that. But it’s a distraction, and we need a distraction right now. We need him to think you’re in a defensive position.”

“Aren’t I?” I could almost see Clark’s eyebrows rise, along with the inflection. “What are you planning?”

“Sir, it’s better if you don’t know the details. But let’s just say that if it works out, you can take credit for the brilliant tactics. We’ll need a blanket all-actions-necessary authorization from your handheld.”

As an executive, he was more than familiar with that concept. “All right,” he said. “It’s posted and on record. I’ll try to get Pannizer to talk.” If Clark made the call himself, he was more likely to be treated with respect than if Virtue made it on his behalf. Pannizer might even signal a cease-fire until he heard Clark out on a deal. It would demonstrate his fair-mindedness, for the record. I doubted he’d go so far as to call even a virtual Board meeting, but he might. Depended on how much he cared about what the other executives thought about his management style.

Virtue and I pulled maps and schematics, and she downloaded them to my handheld, along with access codes I would need along the way. She shouldn’t have had most of them. I wondered, briefly, what Virtue’s endgame had been in her own long-term plan; something to do with access, obviously. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been exactly what I was thinking now.

“Where’d you get the tunneling codes?” I asked her. She shrugged the way she used to, down on K, with just a bare shiver of muscles, and gave me a flash of a smile.

“If it came to it, I was going to go rogue,” she said. “Go after Pannizer myself.”

“What stopped you?”

“Clark was working on it, so I kept it in the planning stages. But I put in a fail-safe a couple of days ago,” she said. “Deadman switch. I wrote together a program that monitors my life signs and launches a nasty little predator e-bomb the moment they fail. If it works the way it should, it’ll wipe all base codes and connected backups across the cloud. Bring down the whole defense grid for at least forty-five minutes before they can load from off site.”

“You mean, the whole Company’s defense grid?” I was . . . appalled. And full of admiration. Without defenses, the Company itself was vulnerable to any kind of armed hostile takeover . . . just the thing our competitors were waiting for.

Virtue grinned at me, and she was exactly the girl I’d know back on the level. “We don’t have to take out Pannizer directly, if they get me,” she said. “Our competitors come in and do a complete management shakeup. He’s downsized automatically.”

“I like the way you think,” I said. “But since it’s a last resort, let’s make sure you don’t have to use it, all right?”

“I’d rather win and stay alive,” she said. “But if I don’t, I’d rather they don’t, either.”

We agreed on that much. “Where’s the escape?”

“Right over there, in the corner. There’s a pad under the carpet. It’s . . . look, you won’t like it. It’s a fax escape.”

My skin crawled, and I felt sickened, but I nodded. A fax escape meant that I’d be dead on this end, leaving behind a corpse, as the energy and engrams of my brain patterns and DNA were ripped away, transmitted, and another body on the other end was created from vat materials. It’d be a generic body, no longer my own. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be too much loss of resolution on the mental imprints. Faxing was definitely the last resort of the desperate.

I stood where she told me to stand, and nodded once to her to confirm I was ready.

I wasn’t.

Faxing hurt like—well, like dying. There was nothing visual; the sensation came from within, like being microwaved, like every cell in your body was burst and flooding out, and you were being burned alive—

And then, I was somewhere else. Someone else.

I opened my eyes in a dark, cool, silent tunnel. I sank down on my haunches, my back against the rough stone wall, and gasped for breath as I tried to get used to the new, rubbery flesh around me, the difference in weight, balance, size. Everything was wrong, and for a few seconds I teetered on the edge of screaming crazy.

But it passed.

It was icy cold down here, because the fax process had drawn a hell of a lot of energy from all the surrounding area; luckily, they’d included executive clothing on a rack right beside the vat. For the first time, I was wearing full Corporate colors and an executive lapel pin.

There were handhelds racked on the wall; I took one and entered my employee code, and data poured in from Virtue’s console, giving me everything I needed to know, including the code for the weapons locker next to me. I loaded up fast.

The bill for this fax would be outright staggering, the price of a year’s output of an entire level. The energy-conversion charge was truly enormous. Oh, and the life span of people who were faxed tended to be about twenty years shorter, but then, I didn’t expect to see another day anyway. Twenty years of future time was effectively meaningless to me, today.

I calmed myself down with slow, deep breaths, lurched to my feet, and checked position and maps. Virtue had faxed me to a spot right outside of the alarm field, less than fifty feet from where I needed to be. No access panels here, of course; this was serious security, ironclad. You didn’t get in if you weren’t supposed to get in.

Theoretically.

How Virtue had managed to hack her way into this, the most protected database on the planet, I had no way of knowing. The intricacy of it was staggering. This was her one and only chance to use the information she’d planted. She’d never have another shot.

I strode forward, waiting for the alarms to engage, the kill field to come on and reduce me to bones and ash. Like I said—serious security.

Nothing happened. I walked down the length of the dimly lit tunnel, and it changed gradually to look more finished. The floor started out concrete, then became shiny. Locked, unmarked doors appeared on either side, without handles or access panels. Once again, you had to be meant to enter, or you simply didn’t. Nobody in the halls. Nobody guarding it.

And then, up ahead, a dogsbody stepped into my path and said, “Who are you?”

I gave him my handheld. He took it, looked at the orders, checked them against the central computer, and gave the device back to me, granting me the next-level access.

For which I killed him, quickly and efficiently, with a knife to the heart. It wouldn’t bleed much at all. I left him in the hallway, because trying to find a place to hide him was a useless waste of time.

Then I set off at a jog to the next door, which had an access panel. I was cleared for this one. I stepped through it, keyed it shut, and faced the next obstacle.

It went this way for three stops. They cleared me. I killed them. By the time I reached the third stop, some bright spark had found the first guard dead, and the game was up.

Didn’t matter. I was already through the last door.

I faced the Senior Administrative Assistant for Leo Pannizer, CEO. According to the nameplate on her desk, she was Naia Wade Lymon. She was good, too; every bit as pretty as Miss Pozynski had been, even better dressed, and a hell of a great shot because she drilled me right in the chest, two taps, before I’d even gotten my own gun trained on her.

Virtue had given me a personal code for the built-in shield on the lapel pin I was wearing; it had been her own, because there was nothing executives guarded more closely than their personal shield codes. The first bullet bounced and put a hole in the expensive wooden paneling nearby. But Virtue’s shield, like Miss Pozynski’s, was single use.

The second bullet hit, tumbled, and took out part of my lung. I felt it, but I was too busy to hurt, because I was unleashing a precise, murderous stream of fire at Miss Wade Lymon, whose shield was a hell of a lot better than Virtue’s, but still not CEO quality. She took five bullets before it failed. Five more after. I ended up with another round in the shoulder, and had to change gun hands. A nuisance, but not critical.

I grabbed Miss Wade Lymon by the collar of her very expensive suit and towed her to the wall, and the access panel, which was virtually identical to the one in Tarrant Clark’s outer office. She wasn’t dead. Not quite. Which meant that I could enter the code for her, and her DNA would still work the lock, if I moved fast to do it before her pulse failed.

It took Virtue twenty long seconds to send me the final code. We couldn’t get it ahead of time; it cycled every three minutes. But I had it, punched it in, and pressed Miss Wade Lymon’s shaking, barely living hand to the keypad, then dumped her off to the side as the door slid open.

Leo Pannizer rose from behind his desk. There was a virtual display open in front of him, and I saw Tarrant Clark standing there, looking relaxed and formal and quiet. As if he wasn’t under the final act of a death sentence.

Unlike Clark, this man was not ready to die. He held up both hands. I could read the shaking terror in his face. “No,” he said. “No, please, I’ll offer you a place on my own household staff, a generous raise—you can name your own salary. . . .”

I shot Pannizer in the face until the clip was empty, then dropped the gun because it had done no good at all. The CEO’s personal shield was better than anyone else’s. There were dogsbodies coming, of course, but they’d have to navigate security to make it. I had seconds to live, but those seconds still counted.

I went with the knife. The shield wasn’t designed to guard against low-velocity attacks; that was what Miss Wade Lymon had been for, and the dogsbodies, and all the security measures.

Mr. Pannizer surprised me by producing a gun from virtually nowhere, but he never got a chance to shoot. I kicked it out of his hand; slammed him backward to the lush, beautiful carpet; and slid the knife into his chest. I watched his eyes flicker wildly, then start to dilate.

“That’s for the kids who died on the Cup Train,” I said. I twisted the knife. “That’s for the ones who got off.”

Then I sat down, knife left in Pannizer’s chest, and relaxed, because I’d done my job, and there had never been a way out of this, anyway. It only took about ten seconds for someone to trigger my choke collar. I expected them to throttle me with it, but instead they just choked me gray and left me there, gasping and helpless.

The dogsbodies arrived. So did additional Administrative Assistants. Nobody killed me, probably waiting for orders from the Board, who had to quickly convene to appoint a new CEO. Not to mention deal with the inevitable hostile takeover attempts by competitors, although that really wasn’t my problem, or ever would be. Big politics.

No, all I had to do was sit, bleed, and wait for someone to finish me off. And watch the body of Leo Pannizer, the man who’d designed the Cup Train plan, attain room temperature.

That part was kind of a pleasure.

I must have dozed off at some point, because someone touched my face to wake me up. I blinked. My eyes had trouble focusing.

Virtue. Virtue was kneeling next to me, getting her knees all bloody in the sodden carpet. Her hand felt warm and very good.

“You did well,” she said, and her voice was trembling. “Zay. You did it. You made him pay the fare.”

I wanted to nod, but instead, I found myself smiling. “You’re welcome,” I said. I felt distant, somehow. All but gone. I wondered if this was how Miss Naia Wade Lymon had felt as I was using her to get access to Mr. Pannizer. “Did it work?”

She swallowed, and tears bled down her cheeks. “Yes, it worked. Mr. Clark is the new CEO. You just stay still. Medical will be here soon. It’s not as bad as that. I’ll make sure you get fixed up just fine. He’s promised you a promotion, Zay, you won’t be a dogsbody anymore. . . .”

There was a commotion across the office, and a wave of people entered—black-coated drones, some higher-level Admins and executives, and in the center, Tarrant Clark, the new CEO. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or blood on him.

He stepped right over Pannizer’s body and said, to no one in particular, “See that his family is compensated according to the policy, and take care of the cleanup.” People scrambled to see who could do his bidding first.

Not Virtue, though. She stayed right where she was, on her knees, looking up at him. Clark nodded to her. She nodded back, smiling a real and lovely smile through her tears. “We did it, sir,” she said. “Zay did it.”

“Thank you, Virtue,” he said. He still sounded calm and kind. “You’ve performed amazingly well. You have my sincere admiration for your skill, dedication, and resourcefulness. But you realize that the same qualities that made you so valuable on my way up make you a real liability now that I’m in power. Nothing personal. It’s just business.”

He nodded, and the dogsbody standing at his elbow pulled out a gun, aimed, and shot her once, in the head. She didn’t have a shield on; she’d given me hers, and I’d spent it. The noise blotted out everything for a second, and then Virtue was down, a sprawled weight across my chest. I held on to her, the way I’d wanted to before, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. What had just happened? Virtue—Virtue was dead.

For succeeding.

“Him too,” Clark said, and the dogsbody focused his aim on me now. Oddly enough, Clark still looked kind and sad and a little regretful. “You really gave exceptional service today, Zay,” he said. “Thank you. I wish things could be different.”

“Why?” My voice sounded thin, but surprisingly normal, all things considered. “Why kill her?”

“Because she was brilliant,” he said. “And persistent. And sooner or later, she’d have realized that there were flaws in my story. I couldn’t leave someone as deadly as Virtue Hardcastle at my back.”

“So you lied,” I said. I felt distant, only partly there, but some spark kept me going despite all the blood I’d lost, all the punishment. “It was you behind the Cup Train all along. Should have shot you when I first saw you,” I said.

“Yes, you probably should have. But I cultivated Virtue, and you trusted her,” he told me. “Not your fault. You’ve served well, Zay. Both of you have. Thank you. I promise you, I’m going to do a complete ground-up reorganization in this place. You’ve made it possible for me to make things better.”

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. Blood on my lips, Virtue dead in my arms, and I was laughing.

“Mr. Clark!” one of the Admins said urgently, and showed him a handheld. “Sir, something’s—something’s wrong.”

Clark waved the handheld away impatiently. “Fix it. That’s your job.”

“Sir, I can’t. Some kind of Company-wide blackout. Critical systems are failing, one after another. . . .” The Admin was on the verge of panic. It was real damn funny. “Sir, we’ve just lost missiles. And half the defense grid!”

They forgot about me, even Clark, and for a while there was a lot of suppressed panic, people running, shouting . . . chaos.

Virtue would have been so proud.

Something hit me across the face and startled me awake. I hadn’t even realized I’d been resting until the pain came back. The world looked watery and thin, and I knew I didn’t have very long now.

Clark was glaring at me. He looked years older now, and no longer sad or resigned. He looked enraged. “What the hell did you do? The systems are down, all of them are down! Tell me what you did!”

“Not me. Virtue. She built a fail-safe. You shot her, and you triggered the program.” I had to pause for breath, and coughed out a mouthful of salty blood. “Was supposed to be her revenge on Pannizer if he killed her to get to you. She never expected you to betray her.” I watched his face and saw the shock sinking in. “So if you’d let her live, you wouldn’t be CEO of a dying Company.” I was short of breath now, bubbling blood in my ruined lung, but I laughed anyway and spit up red, right in his face. “For a first executive decision, it sucks.”

He shot me, of course. Several times, which should have hurt but really didn’t, as if my body had just given up on transmitting the messages. I felt the choke collar engage again, but distantly. And as I slipped off into a comforting, warm darkness, the last thing I heard was him shouting for people to do something. Fix things.

But they’d already been fixed, but good.

The last thing I felt was Virtue’s body warm in my arms.

The last thought was, This is the best day I’ve ever had on the job.

Retirement came fast, but it came clean.

And that last sound, faint and sweet, was the sound of a CEO, screaming in pain, as the dogsbodies won.