“What? What do you…”
“Marti, no,” said Will, “put the phone down. Zoey, this place is owned by a company called Legacy Services, which owns a chain of two dozen funeral homes, which is in turn owned by a holding company called Bold Frontier. Of which Arthur was the sole investor. And now you are.”
The creepy man was now wearing a smug expression that made him look like he could be one of Satan’s lieutenants. For the third time in two days, Zoey found herself unable to stand. She shakily reached back for something to hold herself up, then sat/fell hard onto the tile floor of the surgical suite. It smelled of disinfectant.
Will said, “Zoey … even if you’d given the order to immediately divest yourself from any businesses you find morally questionable, I don’t even think this would qualif—”
“You knew. You knew this whole time.”
“I didn’t realize you owned it until I looked it up on the way here. It’s all managed by someone else, by design. Arthur built firewalls between himself and the businesses he ran and selling organs is still very much illegal under federal law. And, while I appreciate that you take a different side in the whole assisted suicide debate, I think we can at least—”
“Shut up. You don’t even get it, do you? They were right. The Blowback. This whole time. They were right about everything but the eating and the orgy. But I absolutely had Tilley killed, I absolutely took his guts, I absolutely allowed his hollowed-out body to be kicked around by strangers like a beer bottle on a sidewalk.”
Marti said, “And if you hadn’t, I’d be dead by spring. Plus who knows how many other people, from the other organs—”
“It’s seven,” said the mortician. “Seven other lives, eight total, were saved due to Tilley’s donations.”
“Rich people’s lives,” said Zoey. “Those organs were sold, not given.”
Will said, “And the proceeds from those sales were used to buy more organs, so more lives could be saved. Plus Shae and her mother have a new home—”
“Sure, sure,” interrupted Zoey. “One question. What’s the profit margin on this, for me? Like if they make four million dollars in profit from this deal, what’s my cut, how much actually goes into my pocket? Ten percent? Four hundred thousand dollars?”
“No, it wouldn’t be anything close to that. Margins are much—”
“One percent?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it twenty-six thousand, four hundred and twenty-three dollars?”
“What?”
“What I’m asking you, Will, is did a poor, distraught man die, and give up his organs, so I could get rid of an annoying noise in my air conditioner?”
Will looked genuinely exasperated. “You can’t look at it that way.”
“Why not?”
Echo said, “The Midnight Feast feed is going live.”
Will glanced at his phone, then walked out and brought the feed up on one of the big monitors in the comfy room. A room where, Zoey now realized, people came to party, knowing that they would never see the sun again. The last walls they’d ever set their eyes on.
Zoey jumped to her feet and was moving toward the monitor when Echo moved quickly to get in the way. “No. Turn around. Will, shut it off.”
Zoey said, “No, I have to watch. I’ve changed my—”
“No. There’s nothing to be gained. Will?”
Will studied the monitor, narrowing his eyes like he was looking for clues, trying to see the truth behind what was on the screen. Thinking. If he’d heard Echo, he showed no sign.
Echo spun Zoey around and hustled her farther back into the surgical suite. A voice on the feed welcomed everyone, announced that the slaughter was about to begin. Zoey squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in Echo’s shoulder. She smelled like sweat and fruity skin cream.
She would fix the memory of her cat in her mind, and that’s what she would cling to. Curling up with him, pushing her face into his fur. Not these kids doing … whatever they were about to do. Holding him down, breaking his neck, skinning him, cooking him …
“I’m so sorry,” said Marti, from somewhere behind her. “I’m so sorry.”
Echo said, “Will! Turn it off.”
She yelled it this time. Zoey had never heard that tone from her before.
Will said, “All right, all right,” but before he could cut the feed, Zoey heard a scream.
A human scream.
Zoey’s scream. Her own voice, coming from the monitor, begging them to stop.
She said, “Wait,” and pushed away from Echo. She moved into the lounge and saw on the monitor a video feed that was clear and crisp. Too much so, a sheen of artificiality. It was a feed from within the digitally-generated world of the Hub.
A bunch of The Blowback dickholes in their elaborate armor stood around a banquet table. Lying on the table was the cow-spider monstrosity that was the Hub version of Zoey Ashe. One of The Blowback kids was gleefully stabbing into her body with an elaborate dagger.
Zoey, the real one, said, “What the hell is this?”
Marti seemed confused by the question. “They’ve got you. There’s nothing you can do. They’ve severed control.”
“I’m several layers of confusion behind even that. Is this the feast?”
“Well … yeah.”
On-screen, one of Spider Cow Zoey’s hooves were being sawed off by another guy with a butcher knife, while the digital Zoey shrieked. He took a cartoonish bite out of it. A three-digit number appeared in midair and floated away, like a ghost.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at. They’re eating my Hub avatar? Why?”
“They won the Battle of the Molten Sea. They overran your estate. Over a thousand users, each commanding a division of a thousand NPC warriors, a million ground troops versus nearly half a million in the garrison. Took it with a flanking maneuver that locked up the AI on most of your bots until the wyverns could burn their supply caches. Fought all the way through them, breached the walls, took down the elite throne room guardians. Captured you, paraded you through the city. Did you not stay logged on for any of that?”
“I don’t even know what any of that means. What are those numbers?”
Marti looked at her like she had just asked which end of the human the pizza goes into.
“Spoils. The currency, in the Hub?”
“Okay?”
“You were worth over ten million of them. You lose it all, forever, there’s no way to get it back. You have to start all over with a new character. You’ll start as a naked peasant.”
“I don’t care. Like I said, I don’t ever go in there.”
“Then who was controlling your side?”
“I don’t know.” Zoey watched as an entire leg was removed and cut into smaller pieces for other diners.
“Okay, then what did you think this was?” asked Marti. “The feast and all that?”
“I thought they were going to eat my cat.”
“What? No. Ew. Who eats cats? What is it with the cat?”
“They sent people to my house. They had a drone, it flashed a big hologram meme at me.”
“Well … yeah. To rub it in your face, that you were getting owned in the Hub. Wasn’t that obvious?”
Zoey turned to Will. “So this whole thing was happening in the Hub. You know, the place I kept asking you to infiltrate, and you kept blowing me off because you thought it was dumb and pointless?”
Echo said, “Hey, the VOP just figured out the fake helicopter is fake. A, uh, stray dog came along and dragged the tarp off. With a little work they’ll be able to reverse engineer the path the real helicopter took. They’re coming.”
“Recall ours,” said Will. “Have it pick us up as close to this building as possible.”
Marti asked, “Am I free to go?”
“You can go when I get my cat back,” said Zoey, sharply.
Echo said, “Zoey, we can’t keep him.”
“No, she’s right,” said Will. “There’s no reason to give him up without getting something in return, especially if Chobb has Budd and Andre. One way or the other, we need to force Chobb to the table. Work out a deal, get him to call this off.”
“And by call this off,” said Zoey, “you mean call off not giving my cat back.”
That reminded Zoey—Knockoff Stench Machine needed water. There was a sink in the surgery room. She filled a shallow metal tray from the sink (it was probably used to weigh organs or something, but he wouldn’t mind) and let him out to get a drink.
Watching her, Marti said, “I really don’t think my dad has your cat.”
“Then he’d better find him, if he wants his son back.”
Marti paused for a beat and said, “I don’t think that’s as scary a threat as you think it is.”
“What does that mean? That your daddy doesn’t love you? Well guess what, Marti, he’s mobilized an entire army to come wipe us out because we have you.”
“My dad is coming for you because he can’t be seen as weak. He hates weakness. He hates me. This whole thing he’s had to do with the liver … he acts like it’s my fault. Like I didn’t try hard enough.”
“That’s very sad for you. My father abandoned me and my mom to a life of poverty, then when he died he bequeathed me a city full of powerful enemies. People like your father, in fact. And while your father may not care about you, I do care about my cat and I care very much about psychopaths taking my loved ones because they think it’s some kind of game. Well, if your dad wants to play, I’ll play.”
Echo said, “I’m getting a call from the estate.”
Zoey grunted. “Oh, what fresh hell is this?”
Zoey, Will, and Echo crowded around Echo’s phone. On the screen appeared Carlton the butler.
He was holding Stench Machine.