Shards and Ashes

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