Halfway down the M1 Mary parked up in a motorway service area, turned off the engine, and tried very hard not to scream.
It had taken more than two hours to get this far and the children were raising hell. Her arm was weirdly numb and tingly inside its silver sheath, the kind of tingling that bespoke nerve damage. She opened the flap of her messenger bag and hissed, “Gloves now, or it’s the municipal dump for you.” Then she nerved herself and thrust her bionic hand inside the side-pocket. There was a disturbing moment of dissociation, during which she felt light-headed and woozy, as if she was about to faint: then she felt a wadded-up pair of gloves with her fingertips, really felt them, every pore and stitch and wrinkle in the kidskin surface, as prominently tactile as the buttons on the van’s console.
As she pulled her posh new gloves on, Devilbaby-Ethan piped up: “Why’ve we stopped, Nan?” Mary’s jaw clenched.
“Needa go number two,” Emily chimed.
Mary forced herself to open the fists she was making before she split the leather. “Let’s all get our things and stretch our legs, shall we?” she said in a singsong voice that the children were, fortunately for them, too inexperienced to realize was the frozen saccharine crust over a bottomless well of molten fury. The traffic on the M1 south of Leeds had not put Mary in a receptive frame of mind, and every time she spotted the Battenburg pattern of a Highways Agency patrol car, an invisible steel band tightened around her scalp. “Robert, you get the door. Lyssa, stop trying to feed the mime to your unicorn, he’ll be sick—Emily?”
“Need to go now,” wailed the yellowest Terrortot.
“Fucksticks and fiddlestains.” Mary leapt out of the driver’s seat and yanked the side-door open with a screech of protesting metal, momentarily forgetting her strength. (Now the cyborg arm upgrade was bedded in, its power was leaking out of her other limbs: she fizzed with energy even though her eyeballs felt as if they’d been replaced with pickled onions and she wanted to sleep for a year.) She picked up Emily in an underarm carry, tugged Ethan after her by one hand, and double-timed it towards the mall toilets. Robert and Lyssa were old enough to follow along under their own steam. “Toilet break!” she sang, her voice steely and bright and bleeding barely suppressed violence. “Robert, Lyssa, you will be sure to wash your hands after you’ve been, otherwise there will be no ice cream!”
“Is Nan having a funny turn?” Flytrap asked Twinkster.
“My unicorn says—”
The next words were cut off as Mary charged through the lobby doors and hauled Emily and Ethan into the disabled toilet, that being closest. She deposited the shell-shocked little girl atop the loo and yanked down the bottom half of her suit, rotated Ethan to face the wall while she dealt with his sister (whose entire gut contents were coming through, judging by the sounds), and held her breath.
“That stinks!” Devilbaby complained while Laserwasp let rip.
“Yes, it really does,” Mary agreed. A telltale vibration in her jacket pocket distracted her just as she hauled a fistful of wet wipes out of her bag and attended to the little girl. It was her personal phone, which meant it was either the Thief-taker General or the nursing home to tell her about some new crisis involving her father. (He’d probably unleashed another giant robot on Walthamstow.) “Are we clean yet? Yes we are! Right, Ethan, it’s your turn to ride the poopstain express while I just nip outside and answer this call…”
Back in the mall she leaned against the door—keeping it firmly closed, lest the terrible twosome escape—and answered her phone. “Yes?” she snapped. Across the atrium she spotted Robert heading into the local WH Smith’s. Of Lyssa—or rather, Flytrap—there was no sign.
“Are we having fun today?” the Boss asked her. It was a rhetorical question.
Mary swallowed her instinctive rejoinder. “Not so much, no,” she said sharply. “Do you have a drop-off for me? I’m two hours out from the M25.”
“Yes, I’ve made arrangements. There’s a bunch of human traffickers operating out of a church in north London who are willing to play ball. My contact wants you to drop the kids off in the stockroom of a supermarket in east Chickentown—I’ll message you directions and details—and by Tuesday evening they’ll be offshore and out of your hair. Once you make the handoff we’ll arrange for you to be found unconscious and clearly a victim of the kidnappers yourself, while someone else places the ransom demand: it’ll give you a partial alibi, all you have to do is say you remember nothing.”
“Uh-huh.” A bright spike of rage stabbed at her left temple, harbinger of one of her attacks. Oh hell no, not right now, she thought. “And my fee?”
“I’ll send you the link to the bitcoin exchange along with the drop-off directions,” the Thief-taker General said smoothly. “The coins are already in an escrow account. You have nothing to worry about. You can check online—I’m sure you can borrow a computer terminal when you get to the supermarket.”
“Right,” Mary heard herself saying through the roaring in her ears. “A terminal. That’s good.” The Boss was being disturbingly over-precise. She hadn’t had any need to know about the church or the offshore destination. The hint that she should use a computer at the supermarket told her that it’d be rigged to show her whatever the Thief-taker General wanted her to see. And … found unconscious and clearly a victim of the kidnappers: well, a corpse was unconscious, right? “I’ll do that,” she agreed, lying through her teeth.
The Boss ended the call and Mary ducked into the toilet again, to make sure the kids hadn’t finger-painted the walls with sewage or begun farming giant hogweed in the drains. The toddlers were, for a miracle, clean. Mary flushed the reeking residue away, made them wash their hands, then led them to the food court. It was midafternoon but they’d been on the road a couple of hours so of course it was feeding time again. It was always feeding time. Meal discipline could get to fuck: just another three hours and Mary could say goodbye to the Banks children forever.
But Mary was weary and hungry and needed a break from the steering wheel. Nobody was going to get paid if she fell asleep and crashed into a bridge abutment. So when she saw Twinkster coming out of the newsagent she stretched her shoulders and marched over to him. “Robert.” She smiled toothily. “Nan needs a coffee and a croissant before we carry on. I’ll be in Costa’s, over there. You, young man, are in charge of your brother and sisters for the next twenty minutes.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Twenty quid.” She poked his skullcap-mounted minigun, making him wobble alarmingly. “Come with me while I get the rug rats.” She stomped over to the disabled loo, only to find the door swinging open and the room empty. “Oh f—fudge—fiddle—nuggets!” She smiled brightly, trying to conceal her anger. It wasn’t the kids’ fault. “All right, Robert, I’ll be over there—” she pointed at a table—“and I’ll pay you a tenner for each of them when you bring them to me. Clear?”
Twinkster nodded and scampered away, clearly focussed on his junior child snatcher duties. Mary sighed, then went to queue for a giant mocha and several portions of cake. Today totally sucked, and days that sucked demanded cake. Worst case, if Robert failed to round up the wee ones she could ask her bag for a child-seeking killer robot. It was the kind of thing Dad’s talent lent itself to. The trick would be disarming it before it actually killed them, but over the past couple of years Mary had become particularly adept at neutering murderbots. Anyway, something told her that the Banks children were not as easy to kill as an aspiring supervillain nemesis might wish. She ordered her beverage, did a double-take, and hastily added half a dozen child-friendly muffins and some bottles of Coke Zero. Then she collected her novelty coffee-flavored chocolate energy drink and tray full of empty calories, and marched over to the designated table.
Coffee and cake convinced the iron band of her stress-headache to relax slightly. But her enjoyment of her coffee was impaired by the blatting of a TV set above the counter. It was running rolling news coverage, with the volume just high enough to irritate. There was some kind of geas on the news crawl, and it kept sucking her eyeballs endlessly back towards it until she paid attention despite her best intentions. A human interest feature about downhill cheese-rolling in Salop gave way to the latest ullamaliztli league7 tryouts, and something about Ryanair introducing flights to a new winter sports destination on the icy plateau of Leng. Then Mary blinked and nearly spat out her coffee as the news feed cycled back to current affairs, and a TV interviewer milking a familiar looking married couple for tears.
“—have no idea where they are, please, if you can hear us, we just want our babies back!”
It was Mrs. Banks, standing on a sandy beach in a sundress. She looked distraught and not at all like her steely-jawed, high-tension alter ego, the Blue Queen. Mr. Banks stood behind her, his face ashen, as the TV presenter continued, “—been three days since the four Banks children and their nanny were reported missing from their home in Central London, in the most mysterious disappearance since Lord Lucan in 1974. Police are mystified, although some have suggested a link with the terrorist attack on Hamleys toy shop on Regent Street, where the children were seen on store cameras. Mr. and Mrs. Banks left their four children, Robert, Elyssa, Ethan, and Emily, in the care of their nanny while they attended an international conference on superpowered crime as representatives of the New Management. A reward is offered for information leading to—”
Mary rummaged in her bag, then pointed the TV-B-Gone at the screen.
“Fuck,” she muttered as the TV died.
Mary had a conscience, although she didn’t like to admit it. It usually gave her nothing but grief so she kept it gagged and hog-tied in the back of her mental murder van. When it got loose it kicked up a fuss and got her into trouble, and she couldn’t afford to get into trouble if she was going to protect her father. It wasn’t easy, being the notorious Professor Skullface’s sole living relative: sometimes the responsibility felt crushing.
And really, she had no reason to feel guilty, did she? It wasn’t as if she’d harmed the kids in any way, other than by spoiling them with toys and junk food and possibly by teaching them useful life skills such as lock picking, car theft, armed robbery, and the best way to slaughter a Tyrannosaur. It was all the fault of the Thief-taker General, for making sure Captain Colossal and the Blue Queen found out their children had been taken in the worst possible way. Not that there was much point kidnapping someone’s children then giving them back if the target didn’t know they’d been abducted, so maybe the Thief-taker General was in the clear—
Mary’s eyes crossed. A moment later, several small, sticky hands reached across the table and grabbed the chocolate muffins right off her plate. Some of the hands held multiple muffins, and an outbreak of bickering seemed inevitable. “Oy!” Mary announced.
Four cartoon heads turned to her. “Please, Nan, make him give me my cake?” Flytrap whined.
“Ethan. Give your big sister her cake or I’ll let her unicorn eat you.” It was an empty threat, Ethan being the animator in the family, but unicorns were frightening enough that the threat got his attention. “Ah, Robert, mission accomplished!” She smiled as she grabbed a couple of counterfeit banknotes from her messenger bag and thrust them at him. “We’re going to hit the road in ten minutes, just as soon as I find us a better ride. You have until I finish my coffee to buy sweeties. Come and find me in the car park if I’m not here.” Robert disappeared from the table so fast he almost trailed a sonic boom.
“Nan!” Lyssa complained stickily. Mary grabbed another handful of notes and thrust them at her.
“Here, take this. It’s for you and the youngers, use it wisely, okay?”
“Nan!” Flytrap chided as Laserwasp and Devilbaby, costume heads flung back over shoulders, methodically reduced the last of their muffins to a glutinous mess. Then she, too, was gone, leaving Mary in charge of the table.
“Right,” she grumbled, standing. Time to carjack another nanny tank, dump the kids in the supermarket staff room, confirm that she’d been paid, then go and politely remind the Boss why it was a really bad idea to try and double-cross his best enforcer. Steel fingers flexed inside her glove.
She’d been keeping a lid on her temper for days, and not sticking her hand through some idiot’s brainpan—won’t someone think of the children?—felt like the world’s worst case of constipation. But it’d be over soon enough, and she was really looking forward to letting it all hang out.
Eve rose at four o’clock on Monday morning, spent an hour exercising in the basement gym while listening to the morning briefing the Tokyo office prepared for her, then broke her fast with a joyless but nutritionally balanced glass of Soylent™. She showered and dressed, then ascended to her office, steeled herself, and dialed an extension.
It was barely seven o’clock, but the phone answered on the first ring. “Ready room, ma’am, how may I be of service?”
“Sergeant Gunderson, I need you and your best team to prepare for a special operation. It’ll be a helicopter insertion at short notice, zero time is tomorrow at 2100 hours. Who do we have with experience?”
Rupert’s globe-spanning empire conducted both legal and less-than-legal operations: to ensure the latter ran smoothly he employed a variety of thugs. At the top of the hierarchy had been Mister Bond, an actual full-time assassin. At the bottom of the heap were the Gammons—knuckle-dragging bodyguards who were mostly good at looking menacing and stopping bullets. For the in-between cases, Rupert retained a small team of former special forces soldiers and territorial support cops who could be trusted with more sophisticated assignments. Officially they were private military contractors: their division even hired out as bodyguards and couriers to maintain a respectable cover. While Rupert had been around, Eve had avoided using them—it would have instantly attracted his attention—but now the gloves were off.
Sergeant Sally Gunderson, the head of the specialist team, was on the ball. “Depends how big the target is, and whether it’s defended. The company chopper only seats seven plus the pilot, but if you can give me an idea of the budget I can organize additional transport.”
Eve took a deep breath. “The target is a castle on a rock in the middle of the English Channel. Defenses are limited to small arms, but very likely with unconventional backup—” a euphemism understood these days to signify magical defenses—“it’s a nest of cultists. I’ll be coming along for the ride, accompanied by five metahumans: we’ll handle the hinky stuff.”
“Five?” Gunderson sounded slightly appalled. “I’ll need to take the full rack. And we’re going to need a bigger chopper for starters. What’s the jurisdiction?” Am I going up against a government?
“I am the government. It’s an offshore tax haven, one of the smaller Channel Islands, and on paper I’m their feudal overlord. The problem is going to be getting them to listen. As long as things don’t go sideways you’re legally covered. Start making phone calls, let me know what it’s going to cost, and I’ll release funds. Choose your team—volunteers only—I’ll be briefing at ten in the main conference room.”
“Yes ma’am. Is there anything else?”
“Not right now. See you later.” Eve hung up. “And now,” she murmured quietly to herself, “let’s see how many ringers Rupert left in the ready room.”
It was a fair bet there’d be at least one. Even though Rupert was gone, his tentacles were proving difficult to excise: the last thing Eve needed was to go into Castle Skaro to kick cultist ass with a cultist right behind her, pointing an assault rifle at her head.
She picked up the phone again. It rang for almost a minute before cutting out, so she redialed. Then she redialed again, until finally a bleary voice slurred, “Whhhhhuupp.”
“And good morning to you, too, Jeremy!” she chirped. “I need you here within the hour. If you’re not on the doorstep by”—she checked her watch—“nine fifteen I’ll send a car for you.”
“Whhhhuuu—at?” he expectorated horribly. “I mean, what the fuck, sis?”
“At ten o’clock precisely I’m briefing the raid team for Project Skaro. I expect one or more of them to try and kill me. If they succeed they’ll go after you next, so you have a strong personal interest in being there to cover my six. Are we clear?”
“Wait.” Imp was nobody’s idea of an early riser, but she could hear his brain straining to come up to speed. “I, uh, I can bring Game Boy and Doc?”
Eve smirked. “Much better. What about your other playmates?”
“They, uh, they have day jobs. Doc and GeeBee is all I’ve got: you’re buying them breakfast.”
“Be here on time and there will be food,” she told him, then hung up. She smiled to herself. Going into the briefing with three metahumans—one of whom had started out as a promising apprentice dreamwalker—was better than she’d hoped for.
Eve unlocked the top drawer of her desk and withdrew a flat leather jewelry case. Opening it, she removed a flesh-toned choker studded with pearls of curiously uniform size. She fastened it around her neck, making sure that her open shirt collar and jacket didn’t obstruct it. Then she tensed an imaginary muscle and tugged.
A pearl detached itself from the necklace and floated in front of her eyes, barely trembling. The pearls were fakes, a thin film of cultured nacre accreted around magnetized BB shot. The ribbon was lined with small magnets to hold them in place: her telekinetic power enabled her to throw them like pistol bullets. Small, low energy, pistol bullets she could carry openly without attracting adverse attention. Eve set another two pearls dangling in front of her face, juggled them briefly, then returned them to her necklace, where they clicked back into place. Then she repaired her makeup: exerting fine control required intense concentration that tended to make her sweat.
Eve focussed on her laptop, setting up a OneNote workbook for Operation Skaro, then tackling the morning’s email. Her inbox was dominated by the weekend’s developments on the buy-in at FlavrsMart. The lawyers had been pulling overtime at an eye-watering hourly rate. Admittedly, when buying into an enterprise with annual turnover in the billions even a day’s delay might cost tens of millions: but jumping the gun could be even more expensive. So Eve ploughed through the contract doggedly until her eyes felt as if they were bleeding, then switched tasks for a while. Then she went back to chewing on the hubcaps of the financial vehicle the lawyers were helping her run to ground.
Just why Rupert wanted to own a substantial share in a small-to-middling regional supermarket chain eluded her. Supermarkets weren’t the sort of investment that floated Rupert’s boat, although Wendy’s identification of a possible cult preacher in their HR department was suggestive. But the wheels had been set in motion months ago, and calling off the buy-in at this point would flush a huge amount of work down the drain. Presumably he’d done his homework, even if it merely consisted of a nudge and a wink over G&Ts on some creepy billionaire’s yacht—or maybe he’d pulled the answers bleeding and screaming from the intestines of a sacrifice on the altar in Castle Skaro’s basement. She spent a frustrating half hour searching his email inbox—Rupert’s organization skills consisted of “delegate it to Eve,” so anything he dealt with personally was a frustrating mess of bcc’d memos with blank subject headers—before shelving the wild goose chase. I need an administrative assistant of my own, she told herself, with just enough self-awareness to be horrified at the realization that she’d be an even worse boss than Rupert.
Her phone rang, breaking her out of deep focus in the middle of a particularly opaque contract clause about force majeure and money laundering. “Yes?” she barked.
It was the front desk. “Your brother and … friends … are here, ma’am?” The receptionist sounded slightly stunned.
“I’ll be right up,” Eve said, then shut her laptop, cleared her desk, and took the lift to the lobby.
She found Imp, Doc, and Game Boy in a gloomy huddle in the middle of the black-and-white-tiled floor. Game Boy was gurning and twitching over a handheld console, Doc was staring into the middle distance with slack-jawed disinterest, and Imp was doing his best Artful Dodger cameo for the security guard, who looked as if he was one twitch away from counting the doorknobs in case Imp had stolen them while he wasn’t looking.
“Jeremy!” she called, smiling widely as she approached her brother: “Doc, Game Boy, this way.” She waved them towards the staircase up to the first floor. To the receptionist: “I want access badges for three class Q visitors, send them to the conference room, please.”
Eve swept up the staircase. Imp had visited before but it was a new experience for Game Boy and Doc, both of whom were twitching nearly constantly as they ascended. “Is that a genuine Mondrian?” Doc whispered loudly.
“I could show you the certificate of authenticity but Rupe only bought it to help out an old school friend in the arms trade: it’s not worth a fraction what Wikipedia claims.” At the top of the stairs she turned left, onto a narrower, steeper flight. “Up here.”
The second floor featured a lower ceiling and less ornate cornice work than the lower floors, and the wooden wainscoting gave way to hand-printed wallpaper and thick wall-to-wall carpet. Eve led her visitors to a large room overlooking the garden at the back of the town house. It was furnished in blandly modern corporate style, from the conference seats and bleached pine boardroom table to the array of A/V equipment behind the speaker’s stand.
This was no Bond villain lair: there were no hidden electrodes or manacles in the chairs, no shark tanks in the room below. (Rupert had rated discretion higher than flamboyance in the disposal of underperforming minions.) But if Imp or his friends had inspected the sash windows they might have realized that the view of the garden outside was actually provided by a row of high-definition TV screens behind the panes. And if they’d been paying attention they might have noticed their cellphone signal dropping to zero as they passed through the copper fingers lining the door frame, or noticed the discreet sigils woven into the meeting room carpet to dismay and disorient unwelcome visitors.
“Take a seat. Front row if you please, Game Boy. Jeremy, Doc, you should sit at the back. I have a special job for the three of you…”
Wendy led Del through the loading bays and stockroom, then up the stairs to the cramped company offices and the HR nook. Del’s head swiveled as she took everything in, but whatever questions she had she kept to herself while Wendy knocked on the door. “Amy? It’s Ms. Deere from HiveCo Security, I have a visitor for you.”
A sigh, then the sound of papers shuffling filtered through the flimsy door before Amy called out, “Come in!”
Wendy shoved the door open.
“You promised me dragons,” Del said accusingly.
Amy stared at her. “Who’s this?”
Wendy got out in front before Del could react to Amy’s defensive belligerence: “Amy, meet Rebecca from HiveCo Security. She’s my understudy for the week—she’s new on the job and she’s been assigned to shadow me. I was hoping you could sort her out with a visitor’s pass? Ideally for five days?”
“A what now—” Amy sighed noisily, then backed down. “Right, you’ve got a trainee.” She raised an eyebrow at Del: “Is that right?” Dragons, she mouthed at Wendy reproachfully.
“Yes!” Del visibly came off the boil, her posture relaxing. “I’m new at this security gig,” she added, “there’s a lot to learn.”
“I see.” Amy typed rapidly on her laptop, then turned it to face Del: “Fill out this form, I need it before I can print you a pass. Please.” Dragons, she mouthed again, and Wendy shrugged.
Del sat down and pecked at the keyboard while Wendy hunted for a section of wall to lean against that wasn’t covered in health and safety notices or ingrained grime. “Dragons,” Amy said firmly, “do not exist,” as she circled her finger in the direction of one of the cameras, then nodded at a loose ceiling tile. “We do however have a problem with pigeons roosting on top of the spotlights. They make odd noises and occasionally fly down and sh—bleep on the carpet. I’ve been trying to get Facilities to deal with it before the pigeons short something out and start a fire. Luckily the tiles are heatproof…”
“I can see why that might be a problem,” Wendy agreed. She conjured up a telescoping pole and poked at a corner of the offending tile, provoking a peevish hiss and the rustling of scales rasping across a rough surface. Something rattled against the recessed fluorescent lighting enclosure next to the tile: Wendy hastily dispelled her dragon-annoyer. “Yep, definitely a job for pest control.”
“If you ignore them they go away eventually.” Amy cringed at the noises from the false ceiling.
Del spun the laptop round to face across the desk. “All done,” she announced.
“Great.” Amy quickly scanned the web form, then poked at her trackpad. “I need a photo—ah, you found the webcam? Great. I’ll just print this off and laminate it for you.” She stood: “The printer’s in the Branch Manager’s office, back in two ticks…”
As Amy nipped out of the cramped office, Del glanced up at the ceiling. “Was that what I thought it was?”
“FlavrsMart have cameras everywhere, even in HR.” Wendy didn’t bother to hide her irritation as she pointed to them. “And microphones, they dock your pay if you swear. They treat their staff like criminals, so good luck getting Amy to say anything against company policy: she wants to keep her job.”
“But her hair…”
“She can get away with it because she can quote the exact paragraph in the staff handbook that permits staff to color their roots. It’s probably all she can get away with.” A muted hiss from above the ceiling prompted her to amend her opinion: “Nearly all, anyway.”
Amy returned, bearing a freshly printed badge, still warm from the laminator. “And here we are!” she said brightly. A slight edge entered her voice. “I take it you’re going to be sticking close to Ms. Deere, so Wendy can be responsible for you? If you need anything else, my door is open—”
“Yes, as a matter of fact there is,” Wendy said agreeably.
“Oh?” Del looked at her.
“I was wondering if you’ve got a portrait gallery of branch managers here that Rebecca and I can take a look at? Just for familiarization, in case we run into anyone while we’re walking the store?”
“Oh, sure—it’s on the wall in the break room! Follow me.”
The management break room had white-painted breeze block walls, a rickety table, and a pair of sofas that had clearly been used as chew toys by land sharks. It could hardly have been less cozy if the table held a loaded revolver and a printed invitation to participate in a pension lottery by Russian roulette.
“There.” Amy pointed.
“Great.” Wendy peered at the magnetic whiteboard dotted with mugshots and lengths of multicolored thread like a murder investigation in progress. “Okay.” She pointed for Del’s benefit: “That’s Jenn.”
Amy looked ashen. “Jennifer always, please.”
“Really?” Del smirked. Wendy elbowed her.
“What do you think?”
“Needs a better nose job.” Del dodged Wendy’s attempt to kick her. “Okay, uh, I’ll recognize her next time I see her,” she extemporized. Jenn was definitely the priestess from the church—or her identical twin. “Who’s the branch manager?”
While Amy filled Del in, Wendy backtracked up the tangle of threads until she came to Jennifer’s boss. “Well, that’s unexpected.” A middle-aged white man with a receding hairline and a mustache that had crawled onto his upper lip to die smiled glassily at the camera. “Mr. Patrice Jefferson, Director of Human Resources?” She glanced sharply at Amy. “Jennifer reports direct to board level?”
“What?” Amy was flustered for a moment: “No she…” She trailed off. “I don’t see Mrs. Harper on here,” she mumbled.
“Mrs. Harper?”
“Senior HR Manager, London region. No, this is wrong, Jennifer reports to her, not direct to…”
“Looks like there’s been some rightsizing in officer country,” drawled Del.
“This is wrong.” Amy sounded shocked. “Sorry, I have to check this. Maybe someone’s pranking us?” She disappeared back towards her dragon-infested office.
“It’s definitely her,” Wendy stated, voice neutral as her gaze tracked towards Amy’s boss.
“Yeah. What do you make of it?”
Del gave her a spooked side-eye: “Do you think we ought to warn whatsisname, Mr. Jefferson?”
“What, that a priestess in the Cult of the Mute Poet is backstabbing her way up the ladder just as a private equity outfit founded by their Bishop is closing on a takeover/refi deal?” Wendy gazed into the middle distance for a moment: “It’s probably too late to save him; besides, it’s not what we’re here for. Officially noticing it would be the quickest way to lose the contract, in fact.” Wendy rolled her shoulders inside her suit jacket. “No, I think what we do is, first, find out whatever Amy can dig up on the missing managers, then see if there’s a link with the missing de-emphasized persons. Track down the elusive Phantom of the Deli Counter. And then”—she cracked her knuckles—“we’ll see how it all fits together.”
Five minutes after Eve led Imp and his crew into the conference room, the door opened again to admit eight men and two women dressed like extras for the next Men in Black movie.8 They all moved like soldiers. “Ah, excellent. Sergeant Gunderson, introductions please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sally Gunderson, the leader of the men and woman in black, introduced her people as she directed them to their seats. “Sergeant Lopez is my number two: former Parachute Regiment, platoon first NCO and specialist in urban warfare. Warrant Officer Jennings is qualified for demolitions.” She continued with the introductions. “Everyone has some degree of close-quarters combat expertise. I’ve got a line on transport, although I won’t be able to confirm it for a couple of hours.” Gunderson looked squarely at Eve: “Are these people the backup you mentioned?” She looked skeptical.
“Yes. Despite appearances, these individuals—” Eve gestured at each in turn as she introduced them—“are all level three or higher metahumans. Imp has a background in ritual magecraft and has also visited the target site with me. I’ve worked with them before. Which reminds me, Imp—any chance your other friends will be joining us?”
“Uh, nope?” Imp shrugged. “Wendy’s still working the FlavrsMart job and Del’s shadowing her. Unless you want to hire them both out from under their current customer? But Wendy said her boss was really grumpy last time you did that.”
“I see.” It was just one of the risks of putting a team together at short notice. Then again, leaving Wendy alone might be in Eve’s best interests. “Any idea when she’ll be free?”
“She said something about a food contamination problem. Could be any time.”
“Well then.” Eve narrowed her eyes at him, then turned back to Gunderson, who was standing at ease with her hands behind her back. “This is what you’re getting.” She listed the trio’s various abilities: Imp’s glamour, Game Boy’s unusual evasive talent, Doc’s ability to emotionally batter his opponents. “They’re all glass-jaw metas, one punch and they’re out. So your job is to get between them and any bullets. The flip side is that bullets don’t shoot themselves, and Imp and Doc can suppress the shooters’ will to live while Game Boy ties their shoelaces together and steals their ammo. But I’m not bringing them along to force a takeover, I’m bringing them to help me separate the sheep from the goats once we’ve got ownership of the farm.”
“And the location of the farm?” Gunderson asked politely.
“Let’s get started.” Eve stuck a USB stick in the socket of the laptop on the presenter’s station, then started up PowerPoint. “Here.” A map of the English Channel came up on the big TV screen behind her, sandwiched at top and bottom by the English and French coastlines. “Let’s take a look at the Channel Islands.” She zoomed to a close-up of a cluster of dots off the Normandy coast. “Jersey and Guernsey, the largest, are part of the Duchy of Normandy. Here’s Sark, in third place. Alderney, Herm … and this little flyspeck is Skaro. Skaro is technically mine. Rupert bought the vacant title of Baron Skaro several years ago, and under the existing, barely reconstructed system of pre-1354 Norman Law, I, as his widow—” Warrant Officer Jennings’s eyes widened—“am its feudal liege’s chatelaine. Your objective tomorrow is to provide close protection and policy enforcement for me in my capacity as acting head of state when I return to take control of my demesne. This will start with an authorized landing on the Castle Skaro helipad, following which I will dismiss the island council, then round up all identified members of the Church of Saint Ppilimtec, the Mute Poet—”
“Feudal—” Sally Gunderson began to say, just as Jennings shouted something and pulled out a pistol. Then everything happened very fast.
The lectern was less than three meters from the front row and Jennings couldn’t possibly miss—except he did. Game Boy abruptly shoved Eve away from the presenter’s station. Gunshots cracked, somehow missing Game Boy even though he stood squarely where Eve had been a moment before. And now there was more chaos, and more shots at the back of the room, and a spray of blood as a soldier in the back row shot his left-hand neighbor in the head.
Eve stumbled, chest heaving for breath, then clenched her necklace in her mind’s fist. She flung three pearls straight at the swine who’d tried to murder her. They thudded into his right eye with a splatter of blood and fluids that sent his next shot wild. He tried to aim at Eve with his offside eye, but Game Boy moved in a blur that ended with him facedown on the carpet and Game Boy pressing the pistol to the back of his head.
“Naughty!” Game Boy squeaked, his voice cracking.
The back row shooter was dogpiled by his neighbors. A constellation of glittering pearls orbited Eve’s head as she ducked and ran to one side of the podium. Two ringers was fewer than she’d expected, but if they were individually acting on standing orders—“Imp, now!” she shouted, and dropped to the floor.
The fine hair on the nape of her neck lifted as she felt her brother’s eerie mojo tickle her senses. He wasn’t using the ritual spellcraft they’d both learned from their father: his peculiar aptitude for nullifying disbelief was stronger but more idiosyncratic. “She’s dead,” Imp declared to the room full of adrenaline-shocked guards, “the Bishop will reward his followers for killing the usurper. If you would identify yourselves? Everyone else should sit down now. There is nothing to fear, we are all loyal to our Dread Lord—”
A wave of palpable relief rippled through the room as Doc went flat out, damping emotional reactions and tamping down fight-or-flight reflexes. Most of the soldiers dropped back into their chairs as if poleaxed: two remained standing.
Reality came into sharp focus around Eve as she sat up and slammed a pearl bullet into each forehead. They dropped like sacks of potatoes, either stunned or dying. Eve wasn’t trying to kill but neither did she hold back, and she didn’t have a good feel for her own lethality.
“We’re done here,” she announced as she rose to her feet. “Imp, Doc, Boy, to me.” Taking stock, she realized to her displeasure that her right shoulder and ribs ached, her left hip felt like she’d been kicked by a donkey, her hair was coming loose from its tight chignon, and her remaining pearlshot were scattered halfway across the floor. “Sergeant, clear the bodies and transfer the surviving traitors to the holding tank. See that they don’t have any means of suicide: I’ll question them later.”
Gunderson seemed half-stunned, but maintained enough control to salute, then send her surviving troops for restraints and body bags. “Morgan? Really?” she asked once she was alone in the room with Eve and Imp’s homies.
“Not unexpected.” Eve felt distinctly shaky now the immediate danger was past. “Rupert had some very creepy coreligionists and tomorrow’s raid is about cleaning out their offshore headquarters. I was expecting one or two of your team to have orders to kill me if I went off-reservation. This”—she surveyed the room—“exceeded my worst case.” One of the head-shot bodies made an odd gurgling sound, almost a snore. Not dead yet. Good, she thought.
“Crap.” Gunderson’s professionalism cracked for a moment. “I’m going to have to draft in my B team.”
“Take Jeremy with you. Imp? I want you to make sure that none of the replacements are churched. Sergeant Gunderson, you know what to do…”
Jennifer Henderson stalked around the conference table, carefully inspecting the duct tape on the board of directors. One or two of them still struggled but most simply watched her in terrified silence, intimidated by the headsets and shock collars. A spandex-suited meat puppet stood guard behind each chair.
“I think I can safely say that this will hurt you more than it hurts me,” Jennifer told Raymond Berry, the Chief Financial Officer. She gave him a simpering smile. Berry responded by kicking off again, jerking back and forth in the seat he was taped to. Her smile vanished instantly. “Stop that at once!” She pronounced a word in a language not intended for human discourse: his shock collar discharged and he slumped, a wet patch spreading below his chair. “Are we sitting comfortably?” she asked her audience rhetorically: “Then I’ll begin.”
She walked to the podium and cued up her presentation on the projection screen at the end of the room. “Ladies and gentlemen of the board, thank you for lending me your ears! I realize that you are all terribly busy with the ongoing buy-in by de Montfort Bigge Holdings International. A new strategy for Human Resources isn’t obviously at the top of your to-do list, but I want you to be clear that the two issues—the refi, and the pilot program in Chickentown that I’m here to introduce—are inextricably linked. We are leveraging technologies provided by subsidiaries of de Montfort Bigge Holdings to enhance our operational capabilities. In fact, the buy-in wouldn’t be happening at all without my department’s rollout of our Lord and Master’s Minimum Viable Produce Human Residue Reanimation technique. The fruits of which stand before—or behind—you, wearing their body stockings and Company Faces.”
She tapped her tablet. The meat puppets’ Faces smiled as one, and announced, “Greetings from de Montfort Bigge Holdings: we are here to serve you.”
“De Montfort Bigge Holdings is an offshore private equity vehicle founded by Rupert de Montfort Bigge, Baron Skaro, to further his commercial and other interests. You may be interested to learn that Baron Skaro is also the Bishop of the Church of Saint Ppilimtec the Mute Poet, Prince of Poetry and Song, our Tongueless Lord.” Her gaze settled fondly on the CEO, Larry Brewster, whose expression bespoke bafflement and fury. “His Grace’s primary goals are spiritual rather than temporal—although temporal wealth always makes spiritual success easier—and he acquires new devotees not only by evangelism and good works but through corporate takeovers.”
Private equity funds were by definition privately held: investment vehicles not answerable to institutional or public shareholders, existing solely to fulfill the objectives of their owners. Most people assumed that the objective was to accumulate wealth, and it usually was. But if the owners had other priorities, there was nothing to stop them spending their money on those goals instead.
“As a retail chain operating in the United Kingdom, FlavrsMart is subject to UK employment law. This includes the Equality Act (2010), which bars discrimination on grounds of religion or belief, sexual orientation, or age. To prepare the way for dMBH’s hostile reverse takeover of FlavrsMart—” a number of board members twitched violently at this characterization of their predicament—“several of us, that is, of Baron Skaro’s faith, sought employment within this company. Our roadmap—the Church’s roadmap—has been deliberating on your future for a number of years. And as acting head of Human Resources the Bishop has tasked me with taking charge of Conversion Operations.”
Several members of the board attempted to express their opinions. They were unsuccessful. Jennifer politely waited for them to recover from their electric shocks before she continued.
“To introduce myself: during my time as supervisor of Human Resources for FlavrsMart in Chickentown district, I have introduced, championed, and led the Company Face Compliance Scheme and ancillary business support MVPR agents. The meat puppets surrounding you are one of the by-products of this successful program. My objectives are to improve FlavrsMart’s business efficiency and reduce human resource turnover, while simultaneously enhancing FlavrsMart’s branch MQIs—Misery Quotient Indicators. MQIs track the existential despair and depression we inflict on our employees. We can harvest these emotions by occult means, and they are used as the basis for a devotional sacrament consumed by our Tongueless Lord.”
Mr. Berry, who had reawakened at some point during Jennifer’s explanation, fainted again.
“FlavrsMart employs nearly sixty thousand staff in nine hundred branches, including the Quick-Freeze and Fashion Beast subsidiaries. As you can imagine, imposing the Company Face Compliance Scheme (or CFCS for short) on that many staff will generate a considerable amount of mana—that is, transferrable magical potential energy—for our Tongueless Lord. But that head count only includes permanent and contract workers.
“We have been cooperating with the Department for Work and Pensions on a compulsory remedial work placement scheme for persistently non-entrepreneurial dependents—‘useless eaters’ as the Prime Minister calls them. CFCS renders them obedient and tractable for the duration of their twelve-week placement. They’re housed in an on-site barracks converted from the old staff break room, and we provide subsistence rations and somewhere to sleep. This gives us an ever-rotating pool of additional MQI donors. Then, when they reach the end of their workfare placement, we reject them as unfit for further employment, at which point the DWP de-emphasizes them. The de-emphasized are then collected and reprocessed by means of the disassembly and mechanical reclamation lines now being piloted in Chickentown Branch 322.”
More slides flashed up on the projection screen: a life-cycle diagram of the unemployed, a logistics life cycle for the carcasses received from the slaughterhouse on the loading bay, a promotional video for the HAMDAS-XQ robot jointing and deboning machine, a flow chart of the production line feeding the meat printers and the pie-making machine behind the shop floor.
Jennifer examined her audience for signs of denial and rejection. With the buy-in so close to completion, the compliance of individual members of the board didn’t particularly matter. It still needed to be signed off by Legal at de Montfort Bigge, then voted through by the FlavrsMart board—but she had them collared and duct-taped before her like so many festive turkeys. Once the papers were completed FlavrsMart would be hers. It would be convenient if a couple of the old men in expensive suits could be persuaded to stand in front of a TV camera for the inevitable press conference tomorrow, but Jennifer would shed no tears for the noncompliant.
“As we have discovered this past year, human sacrifice generates considerable MQI and a useful necromantic mana charge. Once we roll out the program to all branches we may be able to process as many as five hundred bodies per day without attracting official notice. Indeed, DWP are eager to reduce the number of benefit claimants, and our assistance will be welcomed! By using Minimum Viable Produce Reanimation, each benefit scrounger’s body can be used to animate up to four golems composed mainly of time-expired mechanically recovered meat products, like these units.” She gestured at the puppets guarding the board members. They had made short work of subduing the executives when she led them into the room.
“Labor units remain viable for up to a month after reanimation, and in the meantime they make excellent remote manipulators for our Class Four computer-entrained apparitional summonings. (Which are minor demons bound to an in-branch server, constrained to obey orders received via the Cortana speech recognition plug-in.) After extracting three months’ labor on workfare turnaround, each body thus donates four more months’ labor on an entirely unpaid basis. Which reduces our staffing costs by nearly eighty percent and will enable us to achieve an unassailable lead over Tesco and Morrisons! (At least until they copy us.)”
She smiled brightly and struck a pose. “Are there any questions?” she chirped. Curiously, nobody had any questions. “Excellent.” A side-door opened and two meat puppets entered bearing boxes of shrink-wrapped muppet suits, complete with bridles, masks, and discipline belts. “Now let’s get you kitted out in your CFCS uniforms and give you your first assignments! Remember, work sets you free!”
The HR office was hot and crowded, and the way Ms. Deere loomed over the back of her chair put Amy’s back up. However, she had to concede that Ms. Deere made a good point: the sooner Amy tracked down Sam from the meat processing line—whether or not he really was the sacked but unforgotten Mr. Hewitt—the better.
But the store security computers weren’t playing ball. “Listen, can you give me some space?” Amy asked. “I’m going to have to call the IT support help-line: this may take some time.”
“Why, what’s wrong?” Ms. McKee—who Ms. Deere called “Del”—asked.
“I know this is going to sound silly, but for some reason I’m locked out of the badge track and trace program. I mean, it says I’m not authorized or something. Which is ridiculous.”
“Track and trace?” Ms. Deere sounded intrigued.
“Yes, it’s supposed to give me a full time-sequenced activity breakdown on all personnel on the shop floor. Heat maps, task histograms, step count, video log, you name it: it’s really useful! But it’s not letting me in this afternoon.”
“You’re trying to—” Ms. Deere paused. “Wait. Is it possible that someone has locked you out?”
“What do you mean?”
Del began to speak: “What if your boss doesn’t want you to—”
Ms. Deere elbowed her—“What my colleague is trying to say is, could our elusive muppet have an accomplice who’s covering for them?”
“I can’t see—” Amy stopped, her head spinning. “Um,” she said uncertainly. A handful of people at branch level could lock her out: Mr. Holmes the branch manager, his relief manager, Jennifer, and the IT nerds at HQ. After that it went up a level into regional management territory. There was no reason for anyone outside the supermarket to be interested in the comings and goings of a single muppet, was there? Unless Jennifer had rehired Mr. Hewitt via the workfare placement scheme, to make an end run around the difficult vacancy—“Wait,” she said. She flipped browser tabs until she could refresh the Vacancies table that got pushed out to Jobcenters and recruitment agencies. It took her barely ten seconds to confirm her suspicion, then another ten seconds to double-check it. “The vacancy for a rendering line maintenance technician is missing. Someone marked it as cancelled.”
She looked at Wendy. “I think you’re right,” she said, very carefully trying not to think too hard about the implications.
“What do you think I’m right about?”
“Someone senior—bleep it, I need a, a smoke break, would you like one, too?” She mimed smoking a cigarette at her two visitors, then turned her back to the cameras and stood, beckoning them to follow.
“What do you smoke?” Del asked as she and her boss followed Amy into the corridor.
Amy waited until they were past the next fire door before she sniffed: “I don’t.” She led them downstairs and along a short corridor walled in white-painted cinder blocks. There was a fire door at the end, propped open with a brick, and it stank of cheap cigarettes and regret. There was a camera covering the door outside, and another camera covering the passage, but the exit itself was unmonitored.
“Okay, spill it.” Wendy crossed her arms.
Amy glanced between Wendy and Del. “You think it’s my boss, Ms. Henderson, right?” Wendy said nothing, but her eyes narrowed. “Jennifer could do that, I mean, she could take down the job listing, she can hire and fire, she can draft in DWP workfare placements, she could, huh, she could lock me out of the track and trace app, too. But why would she do that?” she asked.
“Amy.” Ms. Deere looked at Amy as if she’d failed a test she didn’t know she was taking: “About the product adulteration Mr. Hewitt was implicated in. How many workfare placements do you get through per month? What happens when their time’s up?”
“Well, they go back to—to whatever they were doing before—” Amy juddered to a nervous halt. “What?”
“Do you provide feedback to the DWP?” Del leaned towards her intently: “What if the feedback is negative?” she hissed.
“I—I don’t—but—I suppose—” Amy tried hard not to understand the question—“oh bleep.” She unconsciously channeled Jennifer’s internal censor, even where there were no microphones.
“Suppose something really bad is going on here, out of sight in Chickentown where no one willingly goes, and suppose one of the workfare muppets sees something they’re not supposed to see. Jennifer could get them de-emphasized, couldn’t she—” what Wendy was calmly describing was unimaginable, horrible—“and when they’re starving—”
“—The expired produce,” Del chipped in. “It goes in the dumpsters out back, doesn’t it?”
Amy nodded, speechless.
“The de-emphasized would know that, and they’d be hungry and desperate, and they’d know how to get in.” Wendy nodded. “Have you ever seen a documentary about carnivorous plants, Amy? I’m thinking about pitcher plants, the way they lure insects into a tasty-looking trap, where all the hairs point inwards and the surface of the leaf is slippery. I’d like you to imagine the supermarket is a giant pitcher plant that eats the de-emphasized and turns them into mouth-wateringly tasty pies.”
She gestured at the wall behind her, index finger stabbing accusingly in the direction of the loading bays and the robot jointing and carving line. “That is the bottom of the pitcher.”
London’s miasma tightened around Mary’s head like tomorrow morning’s hangover as she drove through increasingly dense, fast-moving traffic beneath motorway gantries where the speed monitoring cameras had been supplemented with skulls on spikes. Her phone steered her onto the M25 for a couple of junctions before directing her onto an A-road leading into the desolate hinterlands of London suburbia. The houses grew taller and meaner, the intermittent strips of vegetation rarer, and tube station signs became as common as local shopping malls. Then she came to the gray-tinged fringes of Chickentown, where the buildings sang a song of misery and even the rats were depressed. The winter solstice was closing in, the sky was dark and murky as the sun sagged tiredly towards the rooftops: and it was barely four o’clock.
The Terrortots had spent the last hundred kilometers dozing. They’d given up on the are-we-there-yet chorus as a bad strategy after Mary called their bluff and threatened to keep on driving until sunrise tomorrow. This, in Mary’s view, was a good thing: the less interest they took in their surroundings, the smoother the handoff would be. She reached into her bag at the first set of red lights in Chickentown center to crack the seal on a ward the Boss had given her for this part of the job. It was a mild soporific, and would put them down for the count without serious side effects if nothing untoward happened. She drove slowly and unusually gently, following the directions on her screen to a bleak industrial yard. It backed onto a building that looked like a cow shed with cancer.
She parked in front of an empty loading dock and left the engine idling as she climbed out of the driver’s seat, stretched, and dialed the Boss’s number. “I’m at the delivery drop-off point,” she told him. “I don’t have a handover contact so you’d better fix this quick.”
“Sit tight, I’ll send someone.” He hung up on her.
Five minutes later, a corporate Barbie in a powder-blue power suit swayed out of a door on the loading dock. Barbie smiled with polished condescension. “Why, hello!” she singsonged. “You must be Mary! I’m Jennifer! How has your day been?”
Mary sent Jennifer something that she kidded herself was a smile. “I’ve had worse.” Something about Jennifer’s infinitely plastic presentation put her on alert: maybe the plastic was C4? “I have some visitors for you.”
“Excellent! I have the guest accommodation ready—are they tired, the poor sleepyheads?”
“Yeah, but keep your voice down. They’re out for the time being.”
Jennifer descended the steps to the parking area as a new figure emerged. It looked a little like one of the mummies from the Chariots of the Gods Experience, if mummy couture had undergone a radical overhaul involving space-age fabrics and digital death masks. It moved like a cheap horror movie prop, with a herky-jerky shuffle as if its hip joints were fused. The badge on its chest said, HELLO, MY NAME IS NIGEL, but Mary didn’t believe a word of it: she recognized a zombie in drag when she saw one.
“Unit Nigel, unload incoming feedstock for transfer to freezer room four,” Jennifer enunciated slowly and clearly. Mary realized the woman was wearing some kind of headset. The meat robot slow-marched to the side of the loading dock and descended the steps, moonwalking out of the uncanny valley of the animated corpses.
An attack of conscience belatedly squeezed through all of Mary’s internal filters and tapped her on the shoulder. “Wait,” said Mary, “the kids are all metahumans. If you wake them while they’re being moved, that would be very bad.”
If the wee ones found HELLO, MY NAME IS NIGEL one-tenth as creepy as she did, they’d cack themselves then kick off—possibly simultaneously. And Mary really didn’t want to be around four Terrortots waking up to the realization that they were the luncheon meat filling in a horror movie sandwich. That was how traumatic origin events started: runaway activation of hitherto untapped abilities, spontaneous amplification of existing talents.
“Well then!” Jennifer tapped her throat mike: “Unit Nigel, safety halt. Computer, priority request: pharmacy to despatch four pediatric flunitrazepam shots to Loading Dock Two.” She simpered at Mary. “Thank you for the update! You can go now,” she added, the saccharine mask parting to briefly reveal the obsidian glint of a sacrificial axe. “I’ve got this.”
Really there was no reason for Mary to stay, but she felt compelled to ask: “Is freezer room four, like, a freezer?” You’re not going to lock them in and freeze them, are you?
“Only when it’s switched on. Otherwise it’s just a windowless room with great sound insulation and a door that locks on the outside. They’ll be fine,” Jennifer emphasized. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Another horror-show dummy walked out of the side-door and stood at ease. This one’s movements were more natural, but still stiff-legged: it held a paper prescription bag from the pharmacy counter, and its badge read ADRIAN.
“I—” Mary glanced over her shoulder. A third meat robot had appeared beside the entrance to the loading bay. Outnumbered. She had a bad feeling about leaving the kids here, but it was too late to do anything. She opened her messenger bag, reached inside, and pulled out the children’s brightly colored Trunki suitcases. “You’ll be needing these,” she explained as she manhandled Lyssa’s pink and spangly unicorn case into line beside Emily’s plastic triffid. “Toothbrushes, pajamas, dolls, etcetera.” She felt unaccountably guilty, as if she was betraying something precious rather than handing over the deliverables at the end of a gig. “I’ll be on my way now.”
Jennifer nodded. “Unit Diana, escort Ms. Drop from the premises, then lock down the loading bay gate and stand guard.” Then she looked at the second meat puppet, almost as if it was a real person rather than a robot: “Ade, sedate the subjects. You’re in charge of Unit Nigel for the transfer to freezer room four.”
Mary turned and walked towards the open yard gate. As she reached the corner she looked back once. The cut-price Autons had opened the car doors and were leaning inside. One of them stepped backwards, a small body dangling in its arms. She shuddered, but then the meat puppet on the gate turned towards her expectantly. “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” Mary reminded herself and backed away.
The motorized gate buzzed slowly shut, concealing the faceless silver-suited body standing guard behind it. Mary took a deep breath, then walked towards the main road and the nearest tube station.
All Mary’s alarm bells were ringing. She had supposed she was taking the kids to a safe house where they’d be comfortable, not handing them over to meat robots wielding syringes full of date-rape drugs. It’s not right, she thought indecisively. But what could she do? She had to get Dad’s nursing home bill settled. Otherwise he’d be out on the street and de-emphasized. I’ll go see the Boss, she resolved. I’ll make him sign off on the gig, then tell him I don’t trust that woman. He’ll know what to do. But she had a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach that the Boss already knew. The real question wasn’t when or whether it would blow up in her face but how wide the blast radius would be.