21
January 10, 2027
As Alainn ascended the stairway, she peeked to the side. There was the sound again, a soft little pitter-patter. She pretended to climb the stairway normally, even whistling for good measure.
It came again. Pitter-patter, pitter-patter.
She rounded the landing, and then, really quickly, jumped back, spinning around. “Caught you!” she yelled.
Two little monkeys looked up in shock. They were two of her four usual, cute little stalkers. One wore a distinctive blue dress and the other wore a yellow dress. Little lips made big O shapes before they turned and scurried away, making a chattering sound that sounded suspiciously like giggling.
She turned again, climbing another few steps before again hearing the telltale pitter-patter.
By the time she made it up to Lorccan’s office, she was late again.
This was confirmed when Lorccan greeted her with, “You’re late.” He didn’t even look up from his desk.
“I . . . was catching monkeys. It’s a very important job. You’ve got a real infestation here.” She settled into her own desk. Alainn didn’t know if it had always been there, but when she’d entered his office four days ago, the desk had been waiting for her. With the way they were seated, it was hard to ignore that only Lorccan’s left side was visible to her, but she would take what she could get. When she’d asked for a job, she’d expected to be pushed off to some separate space.
“You beg me for a job and then you’re late every single day,” he mumbled, though his gaze was moving over his paperwork.
“I told you to get over it.” Her words made him shake his head, as she knew they would.
Sitting on the desk was yet another thick pile of paperwork. Lorccan had her reviewing robotic technical proposals, which was a lot less exciting than it sounded. She suspected he was trying to bore her out of the job. She put the current one in the cool-but-unrealistic pile. She had three piles: cool, cool but unrealistic, and dumb as shit.
Looking down, Alainn saw the next paper in her pile. “Professor Aysha Schomburg, number two this morning.”
“Just put it in the rejection pile,” Lorccan mumbled, his attention on his computer screen.
Alainn glanced over the proposal that she had seen show up in her inbox every day since starting work. It was a proposal for a vaccination that could alter human fear and emotion-based reactions by reprogramming areas of the brain. The creeptastic part of it, though, was that it was contagious, so it would vaccinate people involuntarily as well. Scooting back her rolling chair, Alainn tossed the proposal into the trash can under her desk.
“I really hope that professor never finds funding. Though with the budget she’s asking for, it’s unlikely she will.”
They spent most of the day working in silence, interrupted only by Lorccan’s phone and video calls. Every time a video call came in, Alainn held her breath until the voice came on. When it wasn’t her father’s, she let the breath seep from her lips and returned to her paperwork.
“Whoa!” she said.
Lorccan’s gaze snapped to hers. “What?”
She held up a paper, grinning almost manically. “Sky train!”
He laughed.
“Just think of it! An actual, real train zooming through the sky!” Her butt bounced a little in the seat.
“Budget?”
She looked down to the paper. “Three trillion dollars.”
Grinning, he shook his head and returned to his paperwork.
“Sky train.” She held up the paper. “Just think, a train flying in the sky . . .”
He didn’t look up.
“Fine,” she said with a sigh, putting that one in the now awesome-but-three-trillion-dollars pile.
Almost every one of the proposals went into the dumb-as-shit pile. Having lived with her father for most of her life, she at least had some idea about whether or not they would work—and most of them wouldn’t.
When a drawer opened with their lunches, Alainn dragged her chair over to Lorccan’s desk. She set the much-reduced pile of proposals in front of him. Lorccan ignored his sandwich and glanced at the papers. He nodded and then said, “This one might work.”
“I put them in order of most interesting,” she lied, biting into her sandwich. It was an amazing grilled vegetable, chicken, and cheese masterpiece.
He flipped through a couple more pages before he got very still.
Alainn concentrated very hard on her sandwich.
“Jade, this is for a pulse that would destroy all robotics. This could kill you. Why would you put this in here?”
Because she wanted him to fund it, but she couldn’t say that.
When she didn’t answer, he looked up, a frown deeply etched into his features. “Jade, just the fact that a fanatic inventor like this exists terrifies me.”
“Is that what that was?” she asked, attempting to look shocked. “I just thought that it would work and was budget effective; I didn’t really understand what it did.”
He shook his head. “I would never make something like this.” He glanced down at the paper, examining it closely before crumpling it in his hand and putting it somewhere beneath his desk. “And I’m going to make sure nothing like that is ever made,” he whispered to himself.
Well, so much for that.
“I was a little surprised that I haven’t come across anything new from Connor Murphy.”
She concentrated on her sandwich.
“Oh, that’s because those are set aside. I review all of them myself. But of course you’d want to review them; he’s your creator.”
“There are some?” She met his gaze.
He nodded. “I’ll get them for you after lunch.”
She was barely able to finish her sandwich with the nervous excitement writhing in her stomach. After Lorccan set their plates in the drawer that opened to take them away, he opened another drawer in the seemingly unbroken wall to reveal a long filing cabinet. He pulled out several papers and brought them over.
“I’d love your opinion,” he said as he placed them on her desk.
Five proposals sat before her. She flipped through the top corners, finding all of them were dated within the last two and a half weeks. Her heart sank when she saw that they’d all been typed rather than handwritten.
She examined them closely but only found that, for her father, the projects were not ambitious. The budgets were relatively low, and the compensation was something Alainn doubted would get him through more than a few weeks at the casino. The only one she thought was at all up to his standards was an AI memory device that could be surgically connected into someone’s brain, which was just all kinds of wrong.
As she scanned the page and was about to set it aside, her own name popped out at her.
Blinking, she read over the proposal again, but her name wasn’t there. She squinted, letting her gaze go slightly unfocused. Alainn. There it was, written in the second line down on the page.
Her gaze tripped down the line and read the whole message: Alainn, drink the T9640.
The fuck?
She read it over and over, but the message didn’t change.
When she combed through the other papers, she saw that the message was hidden there, too. It was woven throughout the message in one of the proposals, every fifth letter. In another, it was mixed in with a computer code. Alainn, drink the T9640.
It had to be Rose. It had to be. No way in hell would her father ever tell Alainn to drink something that would kill her.
But . . . would it?
“You look concerned,” Lorccan said.
She looked up to see that Lorccan was concerned as well, his gaze on her face.
She cleared her throat and held up the brain surgery proposal. “I don’t think you should do this one, or any of them, really.”
“Not the memory center one?”
“No,” she whispered, looking at the paper.
“Okay,” he said, turning back, as if it was as simple as that.
She felt a moment of guilt for convincing Lorccan to not give her father work, but she was convinced that the projects weren’t at all the reason for the proposals to have been submitted.
Setting the papers aside, her head crowded with a thousand warring thoughts buzzing around like a swarm of gnats. The room slowly spun.
Her father couldn’t have written the proposals. It was more likely that Rose actually wanted her dead. But, what if she didn’t? She did try to get Alainn out. Why would Rose speak to her that once and never again? Was it possible that Alainn’s father had sent those proposals?
She considered that perhaps the T9640 solution wasn’t deadly. But if it was safe to drink, Alainn couldn’t figure out why Rose would lie and say that it was poisonous.
She could barely concentrate on the remaining robotics proposals. She had only scanned a few more before Lorccan said, “Are you ready to head to dinner?”
She nodded, though she already felt too full for food, as if the questions had overflowed from her mind and filled her stomach. She now spent most of her day with Lorccan, every day. As most of the day was spent sitting together in silence, it didn’t feel overwhelming. The only awkward times were when she had to run to the restroom; she gave him excuses like that she was coating her teeth with that plastic or sanitizing her hands. He was big on sanitizing hands, so it usually worked.
“You don’t like pasta?” Lorccan asked Alainn over their dinner.
“Pasta is great,” she said before stuffing another bite into her mouth.
He was studying her, concern heavy on his features.
She cleared her throat. “Did you want to do something after dinner?”
“We could definitely play a game. I have to go talk to—”
“Shelly.” Alainn nodded. “Okay, sounds good.” She forked another bite into her mouth and looked away.
When they were finished eating, she couldn’t really concentrate on backgammon and consequently, lost even more miserably than usual.
“That was fast.” Lorccan smiled over the board.
Alainn noticed, for the first time, that tonight they were playing on a single board. She couldn’t remember if they’d had separate boards last night.
Lorccan raised his eyebrows. “We have time for another game.”
“I think I’ll turn in,” she said, standing at the table.
“Okay, if you’d like,” he said.
Nodding, she walked from the room.
In her room, Alainn settled down beside her peace lily, her skirt pooling around her as she looked out at the city. Her insides had twisted into a mass and she couldn’t even begin to untangle them.
Alainn had lived in the tower for more than a month now. More than a month with the same view, endless empty hallways, and fear of discovery. Yet, part of her felt like a passenger who boarded a ship heading out to sea, and looking back, realized the distance might be too far out to swim back to shore.
Digging her fingers into the damp soil of her peace lily, she buried each up to their first knuckle.
What would she risk to escape this place?
Not death.
Even the idea of destroying Rosebud 03AF held less and less appeal, though knocking her out for a little while didn’t seem like such a bad one.
But if she stayed here for much longer, she wasn’t sure she would still want to leave.
She hoped so.
A knock came at the door. There was only really one person that it could be, unless it was the monkeys.
“Open it, Rosebud,” she called.
There was a quiet swish sound before Lorccan said, “Hi.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “Hi.”
He stood framed in her doorway, not coming in. The lights had dimmed only a little with his entrance—and she saw his full face, two sides of the same precious coin. He raised his brows at her. “Would you come over here?”
“I’ve been touching my plant.” She held up dirty fingers.
He looked to her hand, then to the plant. He seemed to consider the issue, but then nodded. “I’ll risk it.”
Wiping her hand on the skirt of her dress, Alainn crossed the room. As she walked to him, he turned his head away, closed his eyes, and moved back.
When she stood directly in front of him, she asked, “Did Shelly cancel?”
“No. I did.” He opened his eyes and reached his arms out. When Alainn moved into them, he wrapped his arms around her.
Keeping her dirty hands away, she pressed her head into his chest while he held her to him. One of his strong hands threaded around her waist while the other supported her back.
“What’s the matter, Jade?” he asked, tilting his head to peer down.
“I’m just feeling down,” she whispered. The words were so true, it took all her concentration to hold her tears back.
Tentatively, his hand came up and threaded behind her neck, his bare fingers touching the back of her neck through wisps of hair. His thumb just gently grazed her jaw line.
She closed her eyes, at once scared of what was happening and terrified that it would end. Slowly, she opened her eyes and raised her gaze to meet his pale blue eyes. She found the two clear pools she had been diving farther and farther into for some time. She wanted to move even closer to him but was almost positive that he’d push her away if she tried.
His thumb grazed her jawline once more. Leaning in, he said, “I should probably go decontaminate in case some of your plant got on me.”
Alainn closed her eyes and breathed out a laugh. “Okay, Lorccan.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
She nodded, eyes still closed. “Thank you for checking on me—and for cancelling your phone call.”
Lorccan took a step back, releasing her, creating a vacuum of space where his body and hands had just been. He nodded. “Of course. Shelly understands; she’s a really kind person.” He paused. “You’ll like her.”
Alainn opened her eyes and forced a smile. “I’m sure I will.” She swallowed. “Goodnight.” Turning away, she dropped the smile that was far from sincere.
That night, Alainn waited in the bathroom. It had been weeks since she had listened for the screaming. Part of her thought maybe, just maybe, it had stopped. But no, same as always, his cries echoed down through the vent.