“That’s it?” He looked offended.
“I… don’t want to know, do I.”
“Where I’m from, if you want something that management doesn’t want you to want, they don’t ask you to leave, they just…”
“Eat you,” she finished automatically. And then she thought it through. “And they can all tell.”
“Yes, they can all tell all the time. So it’s very important to train yourself not to want things.”
She thought of what corporate America would be like ifthey could tell whenever a desire beyond “make the company money” crossed your mind. No wonder he couldn’t even decide what kind of ice cream he wanted.
“Do you have any idea how much freedom you have in your own skull? Or outside it. You could do the spandex torture and no one would even bite you a little. You’re tying yourself up in knots trying not to let people know you want things when you could just want them,” he said, sighing. “It’s not just that you mostly want to not do things, you also want not to want the things youdowant.”
“Thanks for that.” She had always wished someone—her parents, her professors, her bosses—would see the real her. Now someone did. Turned out she didn’t like the her that he saw.
“What do youwantto want?”
“You can’t tell?”
“I can only get surface impressions, remember? Unless you want a Deal.”
“I don’t want a Deal,” she said, feeling weirdly disappointed. Some part of her had been hoping he’d tell her that she had some deep passion she’d been missing. Her parents had deep passions. Kelly’s eyes gleamed with the thrill of the hunt. Brad the CEO was brimming with passion, although she sometimes wondered if he was passionate about being passionate about tech rather than tech itself. Gisele, as much as she bitched about her clients, loved graphic design. Morgan had taken an aptitude test in high school with the rest of the mundane kids and it had suggested that she might want to grow up to be either a greeting card store owner or a geographer, which seemed like the aptitude test equivalent of a Magic 8 Ball’sReply hazy, try again. She supposed theyweren’t really calibrated for people who by destiny should have been wielding fireballs and were instead struggling to catch up on Algebra II.
He was frowning at her. “You’re currently really interested in something called marketing attribution?That’sthe deep desire of your heart?”
“Well, it would certainly make my day better,” she said. She could feel a tension headache coming on, and tried rubbing the sore spot right under her eyebrows.
“What’s stopping you? We can skip the part where I point out that I could make that happen.”
“You’re not offering to help, you’re offering to eat my soul.”
“Buy your soul. I’m not going to eat it.”
She rolled her eyes. “As far as I can tell, I can’t do what Ronaldo wants me to do without three different marketing tech platforms.”
“Go get the marketing tech platforms.”
“Yeah, well, one’s a freemium model and those features are only available for enterprise, and the other two are straight-up enterprise grade,” she said. He looked blank. “They’re, like, forty thousand dollars and up. Each. Per year.”
“So, a soul.”
“Not a soul. All right, maybe a death benefit.” She sighed and waved at her screen. “Even if I had that kind of budget—and I don’t, according to the people complaining on this forum—the fancy platforms still only work for a limited percentage of users anyway. Ronaldo’s been sending me articles all day on how to make ‘data-driven decisions,’ but every time I look closely, it’s nothing but a byline of the CEO of some tech company that sells the thing the article says you should use.”
“So they’re lying?” Luke seemed confused, which seemed odd for a demon, a master of lies.
“I don’t think they’re straight-up lying, but maybe they’re stretching the truth? Giving the absolute best-case scenario and acting as if it’s always applicable?”
“Huh.” He looked admiring. “I need a byline.”
“Why do you need a byline? You can just lie.”
He blinked at her. “No, I can’t.”
“Of course you can.” Couldn’t he? “Everyone knows that demons are creatures of deceit who will tangle people in their webs.”
“Wow.” He crossed his arms. “Rude. And no.”
“No?”
