Shards and Ashes

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,