“She says to go on up to her office.”
“Thought she might.”
I had already begun walking when Mabella called out the floor number. I waved her off. Knew the damn thing already.
I had a plan. A loony plan, yeah, but a plan that felt right in my heart. I had learned something important these past months: Those design plans weren’t making me happy. Why hold onto something that wasn’t making me happy? Especially when it was worth a gold mine?
Adela Glezos’s office was the top floor. The whole thing. Her office. Ridiculous. As the elevator reached the top, it paused for the identity scan before the doors opened. The security was strict, and there was probably an insta-death programmed for any unauthorized visitors.
Glezos’ office was as bizarre as I remembered. Holographic wildlife roamed the open space, and an expanse of shifting green and blue tiles pulsed across the landscape. Solid gray tiles formed a path straight to her desk at the floor-to-ceiling window. Instead of the city, the window played a vid of female weightlifter straining to raise an osmium door. A long-necked creature lazily swayed its head to my right, competing for attention with a white, furry bear on my left. The gray road took me through a suite of furniture appropriate for an apartment—sofa, chairs, end tables. There was even a little kitchen—standalone counters, a range, an oven, and a sink.
That’s where Myka was—in the kitchen surrounded by jumbo bottles of cooking oil. She didn’t look up, all her focus on pouring oil from a jumbo bottle to a mere large bottle without a funnel. A series of empty large bottles suggested her goal was to fill them all.
My heart skipped, but my pace was steady as I walked to meet Glezos, herself, at the big desk. Glezos was a power woman. It was her brand, even if it was a few decades out of fashion. Shoulder pads, big hair, loud voice, the biggest fucking cigar I’d even seen. She’d be a parody except she was real and she was real serious.
“You’ve fucked my rabbit in front of me, Henderson. Give me the run-around, then come here like some big Peace Day Fairy. What the fuck are you tooting at?”
Fucked her rabbit? Where did she get this stuff?
Myka didn’t register any awareness of me. Didn’t look at me. Didn’t change her expression. Just kept moving oil from a huge bottle to a less-huge bottle. Never wavered. How could she? She was in her owner’s lair here. Wavering would…fuck her rabbit?
“Glezos.” I sat, willing myself not to get sidetracked by how comfortable the chairs were. “I don’t like talking to you so I’m gonna cut to the chase. I want to sell you full ownership of the plans for the solar engine. All yours. The plans, the designs, the credit. My name doesn’t need to be anywhere on it. What do you think?”
Glezos bit her cigar in half, then spit it on the floor. A small robot overlaid with a raccoon hologram zoomed to clean it up. “I think it’s a fucking trap, is what. What’s your fucking game, Henderson?”
“I don’t play games.” I held up my handset to prove my point. “Got everything you need here. I can send it over on your word. Once I do, I wipe everything from my systems, and it’s out of my hands.”
“The price?”
“My price is whatever Myka Benton’s debt is.”
Myka spilled the oil. Or at least, I assumed she did from the noise. I couldn’t spare a look because I was busy doing that macho woman stare-down thing. Glezos crossed her eyes at me.
“You’re fucking with me.”
“Too high? Too low? What’s the problem here, Glezos? I thought you were a businesswoman.”
Glezos threw the other half of the cigar on the desk. It skipped off the surface to land in my lap. I brushed it to the floor. The raccoon scurried back out.
“You’re buying my personal assistant?”
“No, I’m paying her debt.”
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
Maybe I could kill Glezos with a brain aneurysm here in the smoothest corporate assassination on record. I’d be a legend. “Listen, Glezos, I don’t ask why you surround yourself with zoo animals and stock your office with fifty-liter buckets of lube. How ‘bout you not pry into my business?”
She laughed. Glezos laughs were guttural and obscene. I’d need a shower after sitting through it.
But it was good she had a sense of humor about herself.
“That’s a fuck in the peehole. Fine.” She tapped her desk and pulled over a display. “Push those buttons, and I’ll have someone do the paperwork.”
“Nope. I had a lawyer draw up a contract.” I swiped it over to her public receptacle. “Sign it. Then I push buttons.”
Glezos’s eyes glazed over as the contract popped up on her screen. She quickly swiped it over to her legal department. “I like a woman who prepares before dumping a load.”
“Well, I love to dump a load on you, Glezos.” I looked over at Myka, finally, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were wide, oil covering her hands as she stared at the counter. She’d stopped moving entirely. Like a robot waiting for a command.
It Ends with an Engine
The Solar Forward Model 280 still wasn’t working.
Not that staring at it would do anything.
I’d spent hours at Glezos’s headquarters, and then I walked away with nothing. No money. No revolutionary design. Nothing. And somehow, I didn’t feel bad about it.
There’d be new designs. New ways to earn money. I’d held to my principles, and I’d helped Myka. That filled a little well of satisfaction in my gut that I usually filled with alcohol. This
