The invitation had a map sketched in one corner, locating Jillian’s just south of Market Street. When Viv showed up, she found it was housed in the bottom floor of a gleaming black-glass shopping center, identified by a large neon sign as “the Metreon.” The Metreon seemed to hold an awful lot of empty storefronts. Jillian’s, anchoring one end of the first floor hallway, turned out to be a bar and restaurant. Surf music and club lighting flashed out from the darkened interior into the reception area, where a low table had been set up and covered with name cards. The table was flanked by two potted palms, and behind it a young woman who Viv recognized from the Nextwave office—though she’d never caught her name—was sporting a pink plastic lei.
Viv flashed her invitation and smiled. “Oh hey,” her co-worker said: “You’re the new account assistant, right? You won’t be on my list, but just fill out a nametag—here’s a pen—oh, and here, you should wear one of these.” She proffered another of the leis, this one pale blue. Viv obediently draped it around her neck. “And here’s your drink tickets.” She handed Viv two red paper tickets, and waved her inside.
The front room of the restaurant held a bar and a few scattered tables, which had been done up with more island-themed decor: large palm fronds had been left on the tables, and a line of whole pineapples were propped up across the bar. A fair number of people were already clustered inside. Viv, who had not changed her clothes after work, was glad to see that office attire was the general rule: eight out of every ten of the men were wearing blue button-up shirts and khaki pants, while the women (who were much fewer in number) generally wore dressy-but-not-too-dressy ensembles in black. A small percentage of the men were in t-shirts and jeans. Restaurant employees circulated through the crowd, bearing hors d’oeuvre trays: it looked like hot food, so Viv guessed that she’d lucked out. She followed the movements of the trays with a shark-like eye, calculating the shortest path to the bar that would bring her within range of the maximum number of appetizers.
Her avaricious pursuit yielded two coconut shrimp and a peanut satay by the time she bellied up to the bar, where she found two sets of frozen drinks in plastic cups—one pink, the other yellow, and both adorned with fruit garnishes—set out and waiting, with a bartender to guard them. She traded him a drink ticket for one of the yellow cups, and was at that point confronted with a flaw in her strategy: namely, that with one hand holding two shrimps on toothpicks and the other holding a skewer of meat, she had no hand free with which to carry her drink. She attempted to solve the matter by wolfing down the satay, only to find herself left with a dirty skewer and no obvious place to dispose of it. So she simply grabbed her drink in the same hand, which meant she had to be careful with every swallow not to stab herself in the eye. Sipping with care, she tentatively identified the iced drink in the plastic cup as a banana daiquiri.
Her top priorities thus satisfied, Viv decided to try and start making a good impression. Mingling, that was her job. She scanned the crowd for any groups that looked particularly approachable, and noticed one middle-aged woman sitting by herself at a small table, finishing off one of the pink cocktails. Another empty cup sat on the table beside her.
Viv made her way over and smiled. “Hi, do you mind if I sit here?”
“Oh!” the other woman said, pulling the dregs of her drink closer in an almost protective gesture. “No, go ahead.”
“Thanks,” Viv said, pulling out a chair, “I think I was about to put my eye out with this thing.” She set down her cup and the skewer and settled into the chair. “I’m Viveka, I’m with Nextwave. I’m sorry, I can’t read your nametag, it’s too dark in here...”
“Janet Reilly,” she said, “I write for the Industry Standard.” A journalist in the wild! Janet had curly gray hair and glasses, and a mousey, pinched face: unlike most of the younger women, she was wearing bright colors, including a drapey patterned shawl that Viv thought very pretty.
“Wow,” Viv said, sincerely impressed, “That makes you totally A-list, you know.”
Janet laughed. “Does it? I was just thinking that I didn’t want to cook tonight, so I might as well come and eat here. Honestly, I don’t even know what this company does.”
“You know what?” Viv said. “I’m a new hire, and I wouldn’t want to give you bad information. Let me see if I can find someone from E-Coconut-dot-com to give you the skinny.”
“If you must,” Janet said, crinkling her nose in a ferrety way.
“I can get you another drink too, if you like,” Viv offered, noticing the way the other woman cradled what remained of her cocktail. She waved her spare ticket, and at that Janet relaxed enough to smile.
“That would be very nice.”
Munching on her shrimps, Viv returned the bar, wondering exactly how she would go about identifying someone from the company. She could wander around scanning nametags, but she’d have to put her face about four inches from people’s lapels in order to read in the dim lighting. So instead, she kept her ears open as she made her way through the crowd for any talk that sounded particularly authoritative. Now that she had a free hand, she laid it on the hilt of her sword, still belted about her waist, and was careful to keep it close to her body. She didn’t think Excalibur’s invisibility magic would cover her if she accidentally sliced somebody’s thigh open with the blade.
Most of the conversations she could overhear seemed to be about other companies, or about how this launch party compared to others the speaker had been to: “...no live entertainment,” she heard, “but at least they’ve got hot food.” Another voice responded: “Were you there for the Salesforce launch? They had these dudes in cages, it was hilarious.” Nobody seemed particularly interested in explicating the E-Coconut.com business model.
As she scanned the faces about her, Viv caught a glimpse of something that made her stop in her tracks: there was a large tawny cat—a mountain lion?—winding its way through the throng of people. It had no leash or any apparent handler, and the partygoers paid it no attention as it moved sinuously through the crowd. It lifted its heavy head, meeting Viv’s gaze directly, and its luminous amber eyes narrowed in a slow wink. Then in a few graceful, deliberate steps, it padded behind a knot of people, and disappeared from her view.
Viv shouldered past the next group of people, craning her neck to keep the big cat in sight: but now she couldn’t find it again. The tropical theme, she thought in confusion, had been carried entirely too far. Hadn’t she seen in the paper that some jogger had been fatally mauled in a cougar attack just a few days ago? It was absurd, impossible that a big cat would be loosed in a room full of drunk people.
The thought settled like a stone in her mind, achieving weight and solidity: impossible. This was nothing within the realm of the ordinary, it was not some over-the-top marketing stunt. It was magic, it was something fey. Her heart began to race. “Okay,” she whispered, fighting back the fear that threatened to become panic. “I’m on the clock twice. Except the second job I don’t get paid for.”
“Pardon?”
Viv looked over, and then up, as she found herself at the shoulder of a very tall man, looking down at her with amused black eyes. He had a lean, angular face, olive-complexioned, and a floppy shock of dark hair that fell across his forehead, nearly veiling one of his eyes. He was, Viv became immediately and acutely aware, incredibly cute—in a human way, crooked and rumpled and boyish, not like the impossibly beautiful Piper.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she stammered, “I was just talking to myself.”
“A pretty girl at a party,” he said gravely, “should not have to talk to herself.” He had the faintest hint of a European accent.
Viv laughed. “Why don’t you introduce me to your friends, then?” He was half-turned away from a small circle of other men, all of whom were talking animatedly.
“All right,” he said, “as soon as we can get a word in edgewise. And I will introduce you as...?”
“Viveka,” she said, “I’m with Nextwave, the PR company”
He transferred his drink to his left hand, holding out his right. “Auterre Martin,” he said. “I write for the Bay Guardian. I know your company.”
“Oh!” Viv said, recognizing the name, as she took his hand. It was warm, and a little moist from the drink he’d been holding, but the touch still made something primal in her hindbrain spark and take notice. “I sent you a press release this morning.”
“It won’t do you any good,” he said bluntly. “I am working on a big story, and I will not be able to cover anything else for at least the next month.”
“But you’re here,” she pointed out.
The corners of his mouth crooked upwards. “Of course I am. I’m a journalist, and journalists are a pack of feral pigs, led from place to place by buckets of slops. Tonight the slops are coconut-flavored. —Speaking of, you have not got a drink, and mine is running out, and these people are boring. May I walk you to the bar?”
“Oh yeah—I was supposed to bring a drink back to Janet, over there.” Viv looked over her shoulder, and saw that Janet Reilly had been joined by a man in a suit, who seemed to be successfully engaging her in conversation.
“We’ll need three, then.” Auterre laid an easy hand on the small of her back, casually guiding her through the crowd. He dropped the contact when they reached the bar, though Viv’s back tingled at the spot where it had been. He flashed the bartender an easy smile, and greeted him by name as he set his empty cup down on the bar. When he gathered up three more of the drinks, holding them together in his long-fingered Gallic hands, Viv noticed that he was not asked for any tickets.
Viv put her own remaining drink ticket down on the bar, and leaned in close to ask Auterre: “Do you know who here is actually from E-Coconut?”
He gave her a bemused look. “You do not?”
“No,” she confessed, “I’m brand-new at Nextwave and this is my first time at one of these things. I’m supposed to try and get you journalists talking to the execs.”
Auterre dropped his voice, so she had to lean even closer to hear him. She could smell him: not aftershave, just the faint scent of male sweat, but it wasn’t at all unpleasant. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said confidentially. “I can probably pick out the company people just by process of elimination—they’ll be the only ones I don’t already know. I will find you one if you promise to sic him on Janet and not on me.”
She grinned. “Okay, I guess I’ll take your deal, if it’s the best I can get.”
He scanned the crowd. “Try over there, the one in the blazer following the shrimp tray. You can catch him if you’re quick. I’ll bring Janet her drink.”
Viv nodded her agreement, and set off, shimmying with determination through the crowd until she’d managed to bring herself to the shoulder of the man in the jacket. She looked, also, for the big cat: but the crowd was only human.
“Excuse me,” she said brightly, “are you with E-Coconut-dot-com?”
The man turned, smiling, and gestured to his name card—which had been typed up and laminated, in contrast to Viv’s own pen-scrawled tag, and identified him as the company’s CFO. Viv introduced herself quickly, adding: “There’s an Industry Standard reporter over there, I thought you might like give her a quick briefing?”
The CFO’s eyes lit up, and he set off towards Janet, although not without snagging one last shrimp. Viv followed his lead on both fronts.
Auterre was waiting at the little table along with Janet and the other man who had joined her. He handed Viv her drink, and introductions were made all around. The man in the suit identified himself as a venture capitalist. His nametag read, simply, “Mr. Irusan.” He had silky dark hair, and a striking face: his features were flat and graceful, and his eyes had Asiatic folds, but in color they were a warm honey-brown. As she gazed into those eyes Viv, on a sudden impulse, touched the hilt of her sword. And then she saw him, not as a man, but as the great tawny cat, perched lightly on the table with his whiskers quivering. The mountain lion yawned hugely, exposing long and curving fangs, and lifted a heavy paw, reaching it towards her. She could see the tips of its claws just extending from the velvet pads.
She loosed her touch on the sword and saw again the man, holding out his hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Mr. Irusan said.
The whole group was watching her. Viv steeled her spine, smiled thinly, and shook his hand. His palms felt tough and calloused. “Call me Viv,” she told him. “It’s my job to watch over the party tonight, Mr. Irusan. I hope you like the satay?”
He smiled, showing her all his white teeth. “I see many good things here to eat.”
“So I guess you all want to hear about the company that’s paying for the drinks!” the CFO said heartily. “Well, the elevator pitch is...”
Auterre bent his head next to Viv’s. “Extricate me,” he whispered. “You promised.”
Viv reluctantly tore her eyes away from Mr. Irusan’s unblinking gaze. Whatever dangerous magic might be in play, she couldn’t do much about it in the middle of the party. “Oh, Auterre,” she cried, grasping his elbow, “There’s Fred, he wanted to meet you. —Excuse us, I’ll be right back.” She guided Auterre out of the circle, fixing her eyes on one of the pineapples on the bar and striding purposefully in its direction.
“Well done,” Auterre laughed when they’d made it back to the bar.
“This is Fred,” Viv said solemnly, gesturing to the pineapple. “He wanted to meet you.”
Auterre addressed the pineapple warmly. “A pleasure, m’sieur!”
Viv glanced back, again, at Mr. Irusan and the group they’d just left. Still talking. And there was still nothing she could do. “So,” she said, turning back to Auterre with a bright smile. “What’s the big story you’re working on? Or if you told me, would you have to kill me?”
“Well,” he said, running a graceful hand through his shock of hair, “I am not sure how deep it goes. But I think it is a scandal. It has to do with Hetch Hetchy—that is the reservoir where the city’s water comes from—” He sighed. “It will take some background to fully understand. Do you want the long version or the short version?”
“The long version,” Viv said firmly. As Auterre began to speak, she sneaked another look at the table where Mr. Irusan remained. He was apparently ignoring the CFO’s ongoing oration, his gaze fixed instead on Janet, who for her part looked unhappy to be the subject of both men’s attention—her shoulders were hunched around her drink, and her gray head bent down, only peeking up now and again to nod without enthusiasm at whatever the CFO was saying. Mousey, Viv had thought her. She was afraid the cat might think the same.
Meanwhile, Auterre was weaving for her a tale of greed, betrayal, and water rights—something that, in the dry West, could be more precious than gold. San Francisco, he told her, enjoyed a Mediterranean climate: mild in the winter, cool and dry in the summer. The fog came in most nights, but actual precipitation was very light, and what rainfall they got was concentrated into only a few months. There were lands near the city, he said, that were technically considered desert climes. To provide the city with water, the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite Park had been dammed and flooded in the early twentieth century—a plan that had been fought tooth and claw by John Muir and other conservationists. The environmentalists had at least won the concession, established by act of Congress, that because the reservoir was built on public land no private company would be allowed to profit from it. The dam provided San Francisco with both water and electricity, but in recent years the city had elected to sell its rights to the power to OP&F, the Oceanic Power and Fuel company, which in turn sold electricity back to San Franciscans—at a profit.
“And that’s not illegal?” Viv asked.
“I think it is, the Greens and the progressives think it is, but the city attorney thinks it is not,” Auterre told her. “But that is only part of the scandal. The other is that this summer we are going to have a drought. In fact, we have been having a drought for three years. But this year we had a very dry winter—the reservoir is so low, it is hitting historic levels. And we are at the end of our rainy season, so there is no chance we will make up the difference. There is a real crisis coming, and the scandal is what the power company is doing about it.” He’d become animated, punctuating his story with sweeping motions of his hands, pausing every now and then to push his hair back from his eyes.
But before he could tell her the nature of the scandal, he was interrupted by the whine of a microphone. One of the khaki-clad men had taken the center of the room and was tapping on a portable mike. The surf music stopped, and one wall of the lounge lit up with an image cast from a digital projector: “E-Coconut.com: A Disruptive Technology,” it read.
On the other side of the room, Janet put down her daiquiri and pushed herself up from the table, nodding at both the CFO and Mr. Irusan. She picked up her purse and made her way to the door. As the second slide flashed onto the wall Viv saw Mr. Irusan gliding after her.
Viv tugged on Auterre’s sleeve, pulling his ear down to her level. “I should check in with the other Nextwave rep,” she told him quietly. “See if they need for me anything. Enjoy the presentation!” He made a face, and might have said something. But she didn’t stop to hear what it would have been, just set her drink down on the bar and made a quick retreat. As she passed in front of the digital projector, words slid over her skin: she mouthed an apology and hurried on.
By the time she’d elbowed her way through the crowd, both Janet and Mr. Irusan had left. She emerged into the brightly-lit mall hallway, where the reception table had been abandoned. A set of doors across from the table led out into the sidewalk. Viv pushed through them, and the cool night air hit her face. There were plenty of people on the sidewalk. She craned her neck, looking both left and right for a glimpse of Janet’s bright shawl. She thought she saw her at the very end of the block, and set off at a jog, weaving through the other pedestrians.
It was Janet, but she was crossing the street, and the light had changed when Viv reached the corner. The next block held a parking garage. Viv stood on the corner as cars rushed past, and between them she glimpsed Janet turning into the recesses of the garage. She grasped Excalibur’s hilt and saw, as she had feared, a low four-footed shadow disappearing after her.
Catching a break in the traffic, she dashed into the street, ignoring the blast of horns as she raced for the other side. She gained the safety of the next sidewalk and didn’t slow, running pell-mell past a panhandler and a woman pulling a stack of luggage. One or the other yelled something angry and unintelligible after her.
Viv flung herself into the garage entrance, just in time to see the tip of a long tail vanishing up the bend of a concrete staircase. She took the stairs two at a time, made it to the landing, and saw Janet on the next landing: “Run!” she screamed, and the hunting cat, which had been crouched to spring, whirled instead on her.
She fumbled for her sword, but it was belted firmly around her waist. She had just enough time to realize that, to understand her mistake, before the mountain lion crashed into her and she went tumbling down the stairs. Her head knocked hard against the concrete wall. Bloodied and dizzied, she found herself staring up into the bared jaws of the beast, its breath hot on her face. She heard Mr. Irusan’s voice as a roaring in her ears: “Know your place, little mouse, you are only a Lady and I am the King of Cats.”
“Even mice have teeth,” Viv gritted out, pulling at her sword with a strength borne of desperate fear. It came loose with a tearing sound, and the cat hissed and recoiled as the metal touched its fur. It scrambled back, and Viv pushed herself up with one arm, holding the point of the sword out with the other. The weight of it suddenly seemed much lighter: adrenalin, or magic, she didn’t know or care. The cat, coiled and tensed, hissed again. Then it leapt: Viv involuntarily flinched back, screwing her eyes closed and ducking her head, though she tried to keep the sword level; but the impact did not come. When she opened her eyes she saw the lion had gone over her, down the stairs, and as she watched it was gone.
Viv pulled herself to her feet, panting. When she touched a hand to her head the pain made her flinch, and her fingers came away bloodied. She staggered up the flight of stairs, calling: “Janet?” Rounding the corner, she found the older woman slumped just past the landing. “Oh God,” she breathed, but as soon as she knelt beside her, Janet began to blink awake. She fixed her eyes on Viv and let out a little scream.
“It’s okay, I’m fine, it looks worse than it is,” Viv said, though she was not at all sure that was true. “What happened, are you hurt?”
“There was a—a cougar!” Janet said. “I think I—I passed out.” She patted herself tentatively. “I think I’m all right, but you’re bleeding a lot.”
“I know,” Viv said. “I saw the cougar too, but it ran away. And I fell down.”
“I’ll give you a ride to the hospital,” Janet offered. “You should have that looked at.”
“Are you okay to drive? Those daiquiris were pretty strong,” Viv said. “You had three? Four?”
“Oh yes,” Janet said vaguely, “I can drive. I do it all the time.”
“Well, maybe tonight, you shouldn’t. Because of—the shock, and, lingering effects. You know. Let’s find the garage attendant, and have him call an ambulance. We should both get checked out.”
Janet seemed doubtful, but Viv pressed the point, helping Janet to her feet. Then Viv tucked the sword under one arm and Janet under the other, and guided her firmly back down the stairs. She fervently hoped that fighting off man-eating beasts would count as professional party behavior under the Nextwave guidelines.