“I just want him to stay away.”
“And you don’t want an army of angry trolls coming after you later. You heard the chanting out there, right?” It was clear from her expression that Shae hadn’t considered that as a possibility. “Do you like living here? In the city, I mean.”
“Not particularly.”
“We’ll set you up with something. Wherever you want.” To Tilley, Zoey said, “You, on the other hand, deserve nothing. And right now, my associate, Will Blackwater, is telling the news cameras that we do not negotiate with terrorists, that I’m going to offer you the same less-than-nothing he offered, that your options are to give up or die. I know this, because we planned it in advance. Just as we planned to give you that cool-looking drone to smash in front of everybody, to show off how big and strong you are. But then you’re going to walk out that front door and announce that you’re getting everything you wanted. You’re going to say that you demanded we give you a job. Fortunately, I have an associate named Rico Hierra, he owns a very successful materials recovery company, they go into buildings that need to come down and rip out all of the valuable stuff.”
“You’re … offering me a construction job? I don’t—”
“Not construction. Deconstruction. You’ll be smashing bricks, breaking glass, knocking down walls and listening to the wonderful sound they make when they fall. It’s hard work, but the good kind. Rico is big on second chances, hires a lot of ex-cons and other shady types, and the job pays accordingly. But get on Rico’s good side and you’ll have your pick of jobs; his name means a lot around here. You can get your own place, have a reason to get up every morning. A new start. And you’ll be surprised how fast you put on muscle doing it.”
Zoey paused to give him a moment to take it in, to visualize it. Then,
“But Shae won’t be there. That’s not an option. We find you anywhere nearby, if you show up in the same city as her, you’ll die and I’ll feel nothing. All I have to do is push a button and overload your implants, turn you into a pile of charcoal on the floor. If I ever hear you’ve pulled anything like this with anyone else, you die. If you tell anyone we have control over the implants, you die. That’s information we’re keeping under our hats, for now. Instead, you will say to the crowd that this was all your idea, that you’ve decided you want to work on yourself first, that women are all ungrateful harpies anyway. It’ll be super convincing.”
“Why? I mean, why offer me any of this?”
“Because I believe that giving people second chances pays off in the long run, regardless of whether or not they deserve them.”
“Bullshit. There’s something else here. You fear me. You fear my people. Otherwise you wouldn’t be giving in.”
“I can command your right hand to rip out your tongue and flap it against your scrotum for the rest of the week. Within fifteen minutes I could have your mother, brother, and nephews killed in their homes and I would not be inconvenienced by so much as a visit from the police. I am giving you a chance, and it tastes like poison in my mouth to be giving you anything. But the private prisons in this city will just spit you out as twice the monster you are now, so there’s this big, gross gap between what you deserve and what would actually make the world better. And even then, I’m giving Shae the right to take back this offer if at any moment she decides she’s not cool with you going unpunished.”
Dexter stared daggers into Zoey. Then he worked his jaw, and suddenly burst into tears.
Zoey sat quietly as he did so. Her face was stone.
After a while, she said, “A year ago, I was living with my mom. We had nothing, because she had hitched her wagon to a rich psychopath who bailed before I was born, and I had hitched mine to a high achiever who eventually decided high achievers can’t be seen in vacation photos with girls whose thighs look like this. My entire idea of the future was blown to pieces in a single late-night conversation conducted on my mom’s back porch in a pair of lawn chairs. I didn’t leave the trailer for three weeks. Caleb, his new girl, and all of our old friends all went on vacation in Cuba, streamed the whole thing on Blink, these quarterbacks of life and their giggling trophies. I sat there in my room and watched it all, every minute. I watched them sleep. I was too sick to eat but still somehow gained six pounds.”
She shrugged.
“Skip forward a bit, and here I am. This life, Dexter, it crashes in on you. You get your heart broken and you get humiliated but the sun rises the next day. The difference is I never tried to hurt any of them, never tried to take what they have. You won’t ever do anything like that again. You’re free to move your limbs now.”
Tilley tested his right arm. He wiped his eyes.
“Oh,” she said, “also, don’t activate your implants. Not even to knock over walls for Rico. None of the devices you can buy on the black market are safe, they either overload and explode, or else they’re calibrated wrong and you’ll accidentally twist your own ligaments off.”
Tilley clearly wasn’t listening. “What if Shae changes her mind? What if she wants to see me?”
“You’ll never see her or speak to her again.”
Zoey stood, her legs feeling unsteady beneath her. She was relieved, but only because she was, of course, unable to see the future, to know exactly what chain of events she’d just set in motion. She had no idea, for instance, that at least one person in that room wasn’t going to live to see Halloween.
“Let’s go,” she said, “I have to get back home, my cat is going to be furious.”
4
Zoey made it back to the gigantic ballroom of the enormous mansion she’d inherited from her ginormously corrupt father, only to find it empty of party guests. She heard a faint ripping sound and found her cat, named Stench Machine, under one of the circular white tables. He was casually shredding a cat-sized paper party hat with his claws. She reached down to stroke him and he allowed it.
In the center of the room was a giant cake shaped vaguely like him: a grumpy white cat with a dark splotch like a coffee stain on his face and chest and a studded collar around its neck. Only a few tiny pieces had been taken. Nobody eats at parties in Tabula Ra$a, they just drink and nibble and then talk about how full they are. Even so, Zoey had hired a master sushi chef who’d rolled in with a whole setup that had to be unloaded from a truck, including cartons of fresh mackerel on ice. All of that was now gone, too. At one end of the room was a pink, ten-foot-tall octopus wearing sunglasses, frozen in place behind a turntable setup—the animatronic DJ they’d rented that someone had mercifully turned off before Zoey arrived. Champagne flutes sat abandoned on tables, some with delicate lipstick kisses on the rim. Nearby was a pair of ruby-red high heels someone had left behind. These people just go places and forget their shoes?
Zoey sighed.
She hadn’t actually known any of those people, she’d turned her cat’s birthday party into a fundraiser for an extremely important cause that Zoey couldn’t remember at the moment. The ballroom had filled with rich locals wearing practiced smiles and elaborate wigs who either wanted on her good side or who just liked to be seen at these things—there was a reason Zoey had downed a fairly large antianxiety cookie before anyone had arrived. A monitor on the wall was still showing a Blink feed of the hostage crisis aftermath. Zoey imagined her guests huddled around it, watching to see if Zoey would get killed so they’d have an excuse to leave early. Then they’d left early anyway. Eh, she’d have done the same.